Epidemias no ensino de ciências: contribuições a partir de uma compreensão crítica

Abstract

In late 2019, an outbreak of a new disease called COVID-19 occurred in China. In a few weeks, the virus had spread to several continents and set off a pandemic. Faced with this new obstacle, with a growing number of deaths, critical sociocultural education presents itself as an instrument not only to fight against this pandemic, but other epidemics prevalent in Brazil.For that, in this work a qualitative analysis was carried out with documental research of two books for teaching biology in high school, Amabis and Martho and Vivian L. Mendonça.Several researchers agree that the predominant health education follows a sanitary, content, biomedical, technicist trend, often out of context with reality and neglecting the socioeconomic implications on the subject. In this way, some authors propose a health education that prioritizes problems arising from the daily lives of students and that establishes a direct connexon between socioeconomic problems and recurrent sanitary problems, in addition to encouraging the perception of students as social subjects, that is, capable of making changes in society and charge governments whenever necessary. Therefore, it was concluded that both books have relevant biomolecular descriptions of viruses and bacteria, however, there is a lack of sociocultural problematization and its impact on sanitary challenges, there is also the absence of some information on public policies such as free medicines by the SUS, several vaccines and distribution of condoms. Finally, it is up to the teacher to emphasize and work with students on the most common epidemiological problems in their social circles, since these books are distributed nationwide, but some epidemics are endemic to a particular location.