Abstract
Objective: Report the experience of use of analogies by undergraduate teaching assistants as an active methodology for teaching and learning of morphophysiological curricular components of the medical course. Experience report: Five analogies were developed by comparing everyday objects with the following human body structures: myocardium, sinusoidal capillaries, ciliary cells of the respiratory epithelium, epidermal melanocytes, and retinal ganglion cells. The activity consisted in comparing the structural and functional similarities of several human body regions and its everyday counterpart, as well as highlighting its differences, with the help of images without description which were shown to the students. The work was performed in the laboratory classes by teaching undergraduate assistants of histology with sixty first- and second-term medical students. Final considerations: The analogies were successfully developed and applied, the discussions were beyond the initial objective in some situations, being discussed, in all cases, the limitation of the analogy, avoiding the development of misconceptions. Analogies are helpful tools for teaching and learning morphological sciences, which requires further studies to test their use and efficacy.