The Teaching of Physics for the Deaf: the State of the Art of Research in Education

ABSTRACT:

Special Education, in Brazil and other places in the world, for decades, has gone through many transformations, and new paradigms are being created, others abandoned, but many questions still remain open. One of them refers to teaching in the area of Natural Sciences for the deaf. In order to understand how teaching is taking place in one of the important fields of Natural Sciences, Physics, this paper composed the state of the art of research on Education for the deaf in this area of knowledge. To this end, this bibliographic research used Bardin’s content analysis as methodological support, in order to identify trends in research involving this theme, and as a database, the thesis and dissertation database of the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (CAPES), and the Education Resources Information Center (ERIC), Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO), SciVerse Scopus and Google Scholar directories were used. However, a small number of researches were found in relation to the volume of consulted academic productions, pointing out that there is a large deficit to be solved. In addition, most of the research found, despite presenting relevant teaching strategies, does not satisfactorily use the different levels of representation of physical phenomena, something that can eventually cause obstacles of an epistemological nature and inadequate views for the models of these phenomena.

KEYWORDS:
Special Education; Physics teaching; Education of the Deaf; Literature review; Different levels of representation