Modern Physics In Brazilian Secondary Schools.

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

The current work reports a research that aimed to update the curriculum for the teaching of Physics. Topics from modern and contemporaneous theories are generally put aside in secondary school classes, for both course programs and formal university background designed to teachers of Physics focus on classic topics. We present the results of some researches that have been carried out on the introduction of modern topics in Physics classes that involved Brazilian secondary public schools and the University. 1 INTRODUCTION There has been a lot of talk about the need of innovation on the teaching of Physics at the secondary level, although little material presents clear, objective and practical proposals for teachers. Teachers usually have scarce (or no) time to dedicate study/research on teaching strategies that can prove to be effective in changing their traditional practices. Moreover, they face great difficulties to apply proposals that had been engendered within universities and research centers for the latter ones are distant from real classroom conditions. Consequently, educational innovations often remain away from schools and find no opportunity to be evaluated in practical situations. The present article presents a teaching experience held by a research/intervention group that involved both University and secondary schools in Brazil. The group has professors and ongoing post-graduate students at the Education College in the University of Sao Paulo, and teachers from secondary public schools in Sao Paulo State, Brazil. Secondary teachers seemed to be dissatisfied with the teaching practices carried out during their courses: students with difficulties, students who could not understand the theoretical syllabi and who could not relate these with their routine lives, but only tried to go for a certain formula to solve proposed problems. Everyone seemed to search a way of reaching better results concerning student’s acquisition. On the other hand, University researchers realized it was difficult to convert results of educational researching into effective innovations for the teaching of Physics in secondary schools. 1 This article will be published in the Proceedings of the International Conference on Physics Education, New Delhi, 2005. 2 Brazilian school system comprises two cycles: elementary (1st to 8th grades, in two distinct cycles) and secondary (1st to 3rd grades). The latter would resemble the American standard High School system. As a rule, research teams that investigate classroom facts tend to restrict secondary school teachers as mere appliers of proposals that have been carried out within universities. Secondary school teachers are generally “reproducers” of alien proposals to which little or no efficiency is credited and from which little understanding is reached. The current research team has university professors and secondary school teachers, and both sides share responsibilities in elaborating, applying and assessing the teaching proposal. “Fundacao de Amparo a Pesquisa do Estado de Sao Paulo” (FAPESP) provided financial support and necessary resources/conditions to the Physics teachers in the team. Such support was crucial for the successful teaching experience reported below. The current research team had to face a challenge: to convey the updating of part of the Physics curriculum in secondary public schools in Sao Paulo State by introducing some of the topics of the Quantum Theory.