ENERGY EDUCATION FROM A MEANINGFUL LEARNING PERSPECTIVE USING INQUIRY-BASED TEACHING
This dissertation is the result of work that began before the pandemic caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, COVID-19, and was completed in 2022. Its constitution was based on the elaboration and application of an educational product focused on teaching and in the learning of Physics in high school. As a result, a didactic sequence was developed based on Teaching by Investigation and structured following the eight steps of the Potentially Significant Teaching Units, proposed by Moreira (2012), with the topic of Energy and its transformations in Physics. Teaching by investigation is configured as a teaching methodology in which the students actively participate in their learning, stimulating and enhancing autonomy and scientific literacy. Therefore, in each step of the didactic sequence, basic foundations of this methodology were inserted, which are: the problem, the systematization and the contextualization of knowledge. The steps and activities of the didactic sequence were thought and elaborated in a way to favor the dialogue and the reflection of the students, stimulating their protagonism in front of their learning through the raising of hypotheses, the elaboration of questions about a problem and the joint search of solutions. The dynamics covered in the activities strengthened the construction of knowledge of the students in a solidary and competent way. The educational product, which was the general objective of this work, presented as a challenge the understanding, on the part of the students, of concepts of Physics that allow us to explain natural phenomena around them, to recognize the transformations of energy in everyday life and the importance of energy for humanity. The didactic sequence was applied in a public school. The target audience of this work were the students of the first year of high school at night. During the application of the educational product, it was observed that students were able to relate their previous knowledge with the new concepts presented to them, forming new ideas that could be discussed among peers, moving from spontaneous knowledge to scientific knowledge in an active and engaged way.