Format: ORAL

Glaucia Silva1, Vitria Souza2, Aline Mattos3, Leonardo Versieux4

1 Department of Botany and Zoology, Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte, RN, Brazil 2 Department of Physiology and Behavior, Federal University of Grande do Norte, RN, Brazil 3 Department of Educational Practices and Curriculum, Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte, RN, Brazil 4 Department of Botany and Zoology, Herbarium UFRN, Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte, RN, Brazil

The COVID-19 pandemic changed the structure of classes in Brazil, teachers had the task of creating new strategies to make remote learning fluid. In Botany, this challenge was intensified, because, even though plants are essential for life, their study is considered unnecessary and uninteresting. Students complaints are related to the nomenclatural complexity, traditional classes, lack of attractive teaching resources, also, teachers with a lack of enthusiasm, and they see no connection with plants in their lives. This negative image of Botany that society, students, and a few teachers of sciences carry, is called Plant awareness disparity: the general public largely does not notice plants in nature and is not able to recognize how important they are to the biosphere and society. Therefore, the aim of this study was to use four music videos of the singer Taylor Swift, one per week, as advance organizers to introduce four different lessons to a second-year class (high school) in Natal, Brazil: 1. Plant awareness disparity and its consequences (week one: Blank Space 1989); 2. Bryophytes and pteridophytes (week two: Cardigan - Folklore); 3. Gymnosperms (week three: Out of The Woods – 1989); 4. Angiosperms (week four: Willow – Evermore). One week before each remote lesson, they received the YouTube link to the video in their school system and watched it. In the first 20 minutes of the remote lesson, we discussed what kind of botanical elements they saw in Taylor Swift’s music videos, this dynamic led them to identify vegetables, plants, moss, fruits, flowers, trees, roots, and even ecological traits, increasing their optical perception of plants. Our results showed that art can be an ally for meaningful learning in botany: classes were fun, students spoke botanical terms naturally, and, consequently, began to pay more attention to plants in the environment.