Physics in the early years of basic education: an analysis of the curricular documents adopted by Curitiba/PR school system

This paper presents a study about physics contents present in curricular documents of the early years of Elementary School. The goal is to address the issue of the insertion of Physics within the scope of the subject related to the Natural Sciences for this education level, considering the implications for the teaching organization and for the pre-service teacher training. This is a documentary research, in which the documents to be analyzed correspond to the curricular texts adopted by the Curitiba / PR municipal school system in the last three decades: the Basic Curriculum for the Public School of the State of Paraná (1990), the National Curriculum Parameters - from first to fourth grade (1997) and the Curitiba Elementary School Curriculum (2016). For the data constitution, the Discursive Textual Analysis methodology was used and, from the process of information fragmentation, the following analysis categories were constructed: 1) Physics contents indicated for the initial years; 2) knowledge of the Natural Sciences that refer to Physics indicated for the initial years and 3) broad themes that can be linked to knowledge of Physics in the initial years. As a result, it was noticed that Physics knowledge is explicitly present in all documents analyzed, but over time the curriculum guidelines come to incorporate methodological aspects in which the contents of physics are articulated with science teaching themes, as well as current scientific and technological topics and their relationships in the social context. These results show that Physics is an important dimension for the introduction to the Natural Sciences in the early grades, and needs to be approached together with the knowledge of the other areas of the Natural Sciences. This implies that initial education in pedagogy undergraduate courses must ensure that the future teacher, who will work in the early years of elementary school, has access to appropriate scientific training during undergraduate education, which will allow the articulation of Physics, Chemistry and Biology, without favoring one area of knowledge over others, something that researches have been pointing to be a recurring reality in school contexts.

Abstract licence: CC BY

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