Plastic Polymers Applied to Civil Construction: a project of Teaching of Chemistry focused on the training for Citizenship

Abstract

This work is composed of the Report of an Experiment of Teaching Chemistry and contains the development of the intervention project "Plastic Polymers Applied to Civil Construction", which integrated the practices of Supervised Internship of Chemistry  Degree course of the Instituto Federal de Santa Catarina – Campus São José, whose first author is academic and the other, teachers. The other objective of this article, besides describing the activities developed, is to reflect on the extent to which the project may have provided a teaching focused on training for citizenship, as Santos and Schnetzler (1996) point out. In order to do so, we discuss the extent to which the project met the following attributes: [i] aim at generating knowledge that supports critical decision making; [ii] approach to social chemical issues; [iii] use of simplified chemical language and chemical calculations without excessive algebraic treatment; [iv] discussion of the social role of science; [v] understand the investigative role of experimentation in the generation of knowledge; [vi] articulation between the macroscopic and submicroscopic levels of chemical knowledge; vii] extension of content in proportion to its social significance; [viii] selection of the main chemical topics associated with the study of substances and materials, their properties, constitution and chemical transformations; and [ix] the adoption of methodological strategies that enable active student participation (Santos and Schnetzler, 1996). Based on this reflection, it can be concluded that most of the requirements have been fulfilled, so that the reported project can be understood as a proposal of the Teaching of Chemistry for Citizenship.