Natural History and General Biology textbooks in the Complementary Course of Secondary Education in Pernambuco

Abstract

Textbooks are materials that may be utilised as documentary sources due to their importance on establishing school subjects. The aim of this study was to analyse the textbooks of Valdemar de Oliveira, namely Natural History and General Biology, published in 1938. Documentary research was carried out in order to examine the materiality as well as the morphological and stylistic features in two textbooks based on the following categories of analysis: a) discourse marks b) techniques for organising and condensing the text, c) concretisation of the content and d) exercises. The results indicated that the knowledge of the reference science was didacticised in the books by means of highlighted texts, which were marked bold, excessively erudite, with analogies that made it easier to understand forms and functions, synopses that condensed and selected what was most important to memorise, images that helped with the understanding of concepts and experiments that did not allow students to extract qualities from objects as an abstraction exercise.

Keywords: Textbook. Secondary Education. Natural History. Biology.