Concepciones de ciencia desde la perspectiva de diversidad cultural en profesores de programas de Licenciatura en Ciencias Naturales y Educación Ambiental en Colombia

Abstract

The development of contemporary education is immersed under various political, economic, social and cultural currents that affect humanity, such as modernity or even globalization, which are presented under different tendencies of thought that lead to the colonization of knowledge or universalization of it. Western science seems to be seen as the sole purpose of scientific education, understanding this aspect as one of the main difficulties in its teaching and the training of its teachers in countries like Colombia, considering that it is constitutionally classified as a multiethnic and multicultural nation. Taking into account that the classroom is conceived as a heterogeneous space and that the educational act is consolidated through its diversity, it leads to rethinking its image through the different conceptions linked to it, such as beliefs, worldviews, cosmogony or epistemes of school knowledge. These reflections led to consider what are the conceptions of science seen from the cultural diversity in teachers of initial training programs for teachers of natural sciences and environmental education in our nation? In order to solve this question, it was decided to analyze three programs of Initial Training of Teachers of Natural Sciences and Environmental Education (PFILCNYEA) distributed in three culturally differentiated regions of the country (Pacific Region, Central Region and Caribbean Region). The universities under study were Universidad del Valle (Cali and Buenaventura Headquarters), Córdoba University (Montería Headquarters) and Pedagogical and Technological University of Colombia (Tunja Headquarters). The sample consisted of a teacher from each of the schools addressed and the master documents corresponding to each of the programs described. A methodological staging was designed based on qualitative research - hermeneutics. The research method was approached from a systematic design that starts from an open coding which defined the research categories. For the case of this research, a focused method was designed through the study of multiple cases, trying to cover the national territory. Two intervention instruments were designed and validated with experts in order to gather information from interviews with teachers and PFILCNYEA master documents through situations in context and a questionnaire on content representations (CoRe). Five dimensions were established which were defined as systematic categories (Educational Dimension, Political-School Dimension, Historical Dimension, Epistemic Diversity Dimension and Intercultural Dimension), which were crossed with Progression Trends of the different teaching epistemologies found from scientific education around to cultural diversity, product of the tracking of information in specialized circulation (universalists, epistemic pluralists, multiculturalists, interculturalists and cultural contextualists). From the narrative discourse of the teachers and the documents interviewed, the transcripts were obtained that were treated through the content analysis strategy, where the sample units were triangulated from the proposed categories (systematic design) and Trends of Progression, making use of semantic networks and co-occurrence tables from the ATLAS.ti v8 program. For our nation, a teaching conception was found that, from the broad cultural diversity, appreciates science in a universal way as the fundamental axis of the training process of future PFILCNYEA graduates. The results achieved and analyzed in this research show that the teachers of our nation have immersed conceptions in the face of a unique and globalized positioning of knowledge, that is, science is consolidated as the preponderant teaching epistemological center. This research promotes reflection on the empowerment of teachers of epistemological perspectives such as that of the south in our educational act, which allow us to claim the knowledge of our country, against those universal knowledge agents of progress and modernity, which since the westernization of the world does not they are nothing less than instruments of homogenization of society. In relation to the above, the thesis proposes considerations for the formulation of a study plan that considers cultural diversity as its transversal axis, where from educational, social and political principles we achieve the decolonization of knowledge within training teaching, allowing the recognition of cultural diversity as a wealth that enhances the teaching and learning processes of natural sciences.