The Production of Meanings through Images in Chemistry textbooks

Abstract: In this article we aim to present an interpretation of the possible meanings in chemical science that are promoted by the images of experiments in the textbooks published in the period between the second decade of the twentieth century and the 1960s. Textbooks are discursive devices that promote stabilized, but precarious subjectivations, and, although they do not represent fixed senses or crystallized knowledge, they allow for the investigation of inscriptions both of the provisional senses in a given space / time and of the processes of production of meanings over time. The illustrations seem to indicate disputes in the process of producing meanings for chemical operations and, in this sense, we argue that, even when an experiment is presented through images as a way for the chemical science to be rediscovered by the student in the school, such discourse is inevitably translated for school purposes, turning science into a production with pedagogical purposes.