Preventing Plant Blindness

The teaching of Botany in Basic Education has been characterized as discouraging for students in Brazil, mainly due to the traditional teaching methodologies practiced by the teachers. It discusses the role of pre-class approaches, involving the relationships between the object of study and the daily life of the student, as a strategy to attract student's attention to specific content. In this way, this work had as objective to evaluate the process of "initial sensitization of the student", through the use of methods that aim to stimulate students' interest in Botany, before a class in this area. The first step was to list strategies already described along with the development of new strategies related to the concepts addressed in secondary education in the context of regular education, according to the competences and skills required by the National High School Examination (ENEM) and (Encceja), both offered by the Ministry of Education (MEC). In the second stage, some Sensitivity Strategies were evaluated in a high school class, obtaining qualitative and quantitative data from the comparison with controlled groups. The results showed an increase in students' interest in botanical subjects in the groups that passed through the strategies. From these experiences, the work presents a guide of simple strategies to be used by botany teachers at the beginning of each lesson related to the Botany concepts of the curriculum required by ENEM and Encceja.