Acercamiento al pensamiento cientifico y la docencia a partir del laboratorio de física educativa

Abstract

Access to scientific knowledge should be a right for all society, particularly in fields like physics, as it fosters a deeper understanding of the world and promotes critical, informed citizenship. However, while there are valuable educational science outreach experiences, most of them often remain limited to basic scientific literacy without achieving significant impact on developing scientific thinking within communities. For this reason, the Physics Teaching Degree Curriculum Project (PCLF) and the Research Group on Physics Teaching and Learning (GEAF) have generated valuable knowledge enabling the design of non-formal physics education initiatives. These open new possibilities for bringing the discipline closer to diverse social sectors, proposing an approach that transcends mere dissemination and consolidates a strategy capable of directly influencing the production and appropriation of scientific knowledge. This context gives rise to the study's guiding research question: How does the Educational Physics Laboratory contribute to developing scientific thinking in high school students and training future teachers? The study follows a qualitative action-research methodology, analyzing 210 research field diaries, from 31 students aged 15-18 across two full cycles of the Educational Physics Laboratory. Each cycle consisted of six in-person sessions: five in the physics laboratories of Universidad Distrital Francisco José de Caldas (Macarena A campus) and one in Bogotá's eastern hills. Data analysis used Atlas.ti software and content analysis techniques. Sessions were structured around different experimentation typologies, maintaining interactive roles for both teachers and students: discrepant experiment, illustrative experiment, home experiment, crucial experiment, virtual experiment, and recreational experiment. Findings showed, progressive improvement in idea abstraction skills, holistic development of participants' thinking, positive impact on students' perception of physics classes, correlation between experimentbased lesson design and increased student interest in science and teaching. Overall, participants perceived the laboratory as a highly innovative space capable of transforming their ideas about science and teaching