Sensação térmica e conforto térmico: temáticas promissoras para uma contextualização do ensino de física térmica

Abstract

Physics is generally not very popular among high school students, and the reasons for this unpopularity are easily perceived when listening to the students. The excessive and unnecessary use of mathematical tools, as well as the way it is taught, often focusing on highly abstract problems that are far removed from the reality of most students, are highlighted. The core objective of this research is to promote the contextualization of Thermal Physics teaching through a sequence of lessons on thermal sensation and comfort in various environments, and to encourage greater student participation. The research was conducted with five high school students who are not associated with classes where the teacher-researcher works. The sequence of six lessons was delivered in a set of ten meetings, with a greater number of meetings required to accommodate the participants' needs. All ten meetings were recorded, and the speeches were transcribed for analysis by the teacher-researcher. Throughout the entire sequence of lessons, it was possible to perceive that the students had high levels of participation. Many of the proposed activities placed them at the center of the learning process. The evident involvement of the students was enhanced by activities in which they needed to be active, such as analyzing the problematic texts sentence by sentence, collectively constructing problematic texts, creating and improving checklists, and the constant requests of the teacher-researcher to assess the quality of the lessons. During the lessons, there was frequent introduction of study elements that the teacher-researcher had not prepared, which were incorporated based on the demand of the students. In reflecting on the topics, students often opted for a way of analyzing the situation that is not 'bookish'; they thought about phenomena happening simultaneously and not compartmentalized as sometimes happens during the teaching of concepts. The complexity of the problematic texts situations also stimulated students to deepen their understanding of some concepts. To conclude, we can affirm that the use of the topics of thermal sensation and thermal comfort fulfilled the purposes of this research. We aimed for the students to perceive another side of the Physics discipline: the one that can dialogue with real situations and not only with idealized situations from books, the one that communicates with other areas of knowledge, and the one that does not depend exclusively on the use and manipulation of mathematical formulas to be understood. We hope that this research and its materials on thermal comfort will inspire other Physics, Biology, Science, and related areas teachers to contextualize their teachings with the same theme as this research. We also hope that the experiences reported here will be improved by other professionals, leading to more participative and motivated students, and thus, even a slight improvement in the quality of Physics teaching.