Classificação das plantas: atualizações para professores de biologia

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.22533/at.ed.641132523057

• Palavras-chave: vegetais, classificação, filogenia, reinos, ensino de biologia

• Keywords: plants, classification, phylogeny, kingdoms, biology teaching

• Abstract: Plants, which are essential to life on Earth, have been neglected in education, a fact that is evidenced by many teachers still using outdated classification systems and teaching materials. The proposed review discusses "botanical imperception", a phenomenon that describes people's difficulty in recognizing the importance of plants in the environment, presenting a history of classifications of living beings, from Aristotle to modern systems based on molecular phylogeny. The main changes include the replacement of Whittaker's five-kingdom system by the division into three domains and the introduction of supergroups of eukaryotes, reorganizing the classification of algae and plants such as archegoniates, gymnosperms and, mainly, angiosperms through the APG (Angiosperm Phylogeny Group) system, which revised the classification of angiosperms, eliminating the traditional division between monocotyledons and dicotyledons. The paper criticizes the outdated nature of teaching materials and the lack of examples of native species in teaching, suggesting that this contributes to students' lack of interest. It also emphasizes the importance of phylogenetic systematics and taxonomy for the study of biodiversity, highlighting the predictive power of these systems. Finally, the paper analyzes how algae are addressed in  elementary school and high school textbooks, pointing out the persistence of obsolete classifications and the lack of updated information. It concludes that it is essential to update teaching materials focused on the classification of plants and other groups like algae, to promote the teaching of botany based on recent research and a more precise phylogenetic approach to understand better and conserve biodiversity.