Utilização de uma horta medicinal como estratégia didática para o ensino da Química com alunos do Ensino Médio da Escola Estadual Joaquim Silvério Pimentel, Rio Formoso, PE

Abstract

The use of medicinal gardens as a teaching tool allows the contextualization of programmatic contents of different areas of knowledge, among these areas is chemistry. This allows students to have a greater critical sense of their local reality. The objective of this study was to evaluate the use of a medicinal garden as a teaching strategy for teaching chemistry to high school students at the Joaquim Silvério Pimentel State School, Rio Formoso, PE. An ethnobotanical survey was conducted with 30 families living near the Joaquim Silvério Pimentel School to identify botanical species with potential for implementation in a school garden. Then, an action was carried out with the students to practically relate some contents of organic chemistry to the living environment of a garden. The ethnobotanical survey showed that the students' parents had difficulty understanding and using medicinal plants safely. Therefore, the school can be an environment for recovering this knowledge within a pedagogical proposal. All the administrators and teachers interviewed demonstrated interest in the topic of phytotherapy within a teaching-learning perspective. After a short period in the classroom, the students were taken to a medicinal garden where they had the opportunity to interact and question aspects of organic chemistry such as fertilization, cation exchange, photosynthesis, pH, plant metabolites, soil chemical processes, among others.