Music and poetry as cognitive mediators in chemistry learning: an interdisciplinary approach in high school

This scientific-literary study, which was carried out at the Instituto Federal do Triângulo Mineiro - Campus Uberlândia Centro, located in Uberlândia, Minas Gerais (MG), Brazil, aims at investigating Chemistry in lyrics and poems. By using our sensitivity, we selected texts that we dared to classify into scientific production written by a person who has an artistic vein and artistic production written by a person who has a scientific vein. A poem is poetry but the latter does not limit to the former. Poetry may mean either composition in verses or anything that takes us to a certain aesthetic evaluation, a feeling of passion for an artwork. A poem is a composition in verse which may have a defined form with metrics and rhymes, such as a sonnet. Music may also be set to a poem if it carries defined rhythm and metrics. Lyrics do not have to follow aesthetic formality that includes metrics and rhymes. In this context, the axes “lyrics-poem” were brought to the field of chemical Education. This study aimed at exploring basic chemical concepts – taught in High School – which were inserted into both textual forms. To consolidate the educational process, Brazilian lyrics and poems were compiled. From a pedagogical perspective, High School students should be able to identify and explain Chemistry intertwined with these textual proposals. In addition, this methodology led to rich “chemically literary” discussions with the students who became protagonists of their learning processes. To sum up, this teaching practice really consolidated what students had learned in their traditional Chemistry lessons.