Modelización a través de la interacción con un mariposario: reconocimiento de relaciones ecológicas con estudiantes de secundaria

Abstract

Textbooks for natural sciences in high school usually leave out groups such as insects, so that students are unaware of the ecological importance of these organisms, as well as the relationships with their immediate environment. Therefore, this qualitative research characterizes the main modeling processes from school science achieved by high school students of the Aquileo Parra IED school, when interacting with a butterfly farm that has been built there with the aim of recognizing ecological relationships that can be extrapolated to other ecosystems for the care of biodiversity. A didactic sequence is designed that includes ten face-to-face sessions, such as visits to the butterfly farm to identify the relationships that occur there and take them to other more complex contexts such as the Torca wetland. Interacting with a living classroom such as the butterfly farm had a significant impact on the complexity of the students' models, since it provides a novel and contextualized learning environment that allows them to directly observe the diversity of living beings present in ecosystems, their morphological characteristics, their relationship with their survival and the ecological relationships they establish. Through the interaction with this non-conventional educational scenario, the students conventional educational scenario, students link the concepts presented in the classroom, such as autoecology and synecology, with the natural phenomena to which they are associated, allowing them to better understand the interdependence of living beings and the factors that can affect their development.