ON TEACHING CHEMISTRY IN BRAZILIAN AND AMERICAN HIGH SCHOOLS: A BRIEF APPROACH

This brief chapter introduces and discusses the issue of the teaching and learning process in Chemistry. Several High School Chemistry teachers have used out-of-date and traditional methodologies which do not fit new pedagogical trends while some neither correlate nor make analogies between topics and students’ everyday lives since they apply the methodology of memorization of chemical and abstract contents. Several studies in the literature have shown that Chemistry teaching must be contextualized and integrate three pillars, i. e., theory, practice and everyday life. Teachers who do not know how to stimulate and motivate students to study Chemistry have drawn the attention of researchers in the teaching area. In contrast, all Chemistry teachers should know how to identify difficulties and pedagogical limitations in order to search for new teaching practices to improve their students’ learning and stimulate knowledge construction. Even though traditional teaching has predominated, new methodological conceptions have introduced different ways to look at Chemistry teaching and raised interest in the area known as Chemistry Didactics. Thus, this text aimed at investigating difficulties in Chemistry teaching and learning by carrying out a brief bibliographical review and collecting teachers’ reports. Some attractive solutions were proposed to make the teaching and learning process easier and improve teacher-student relationships, which have been negative in many cases. In short, teachers must think, study, update themselves and search for a way to make the teaching and learning process in Chemistry useful in everyday life.