Abstract:

This article sought to explain how the concept of cell is presented in the Biology textbooks approved by the National Textbook Program (PNLD) 2015, through the analysis of the conceptual and socio-historical aspects of these books, establishing relationships between the views of Biology and of world present in them. To do that, we used historical-dialectical materialism as a theoretical-methodological basis, as well as the Structuring Statutes of Biology. The results show that most of the books do not refer to the history of the formation of the concept of cell, which characterizes a view of Science that is aproblematic, ahistorical, dogmatic, and closed. We conclude that the way the content on the cell is organized in the analyzed textbooks does not foster the understanding of biological thinking as an integral part of a socio-historical process.

Keywords:
Biology teaching; Biological thinking; Cell theory; Textbooks