Coexistencia de conocimientos científicos escolares y conocimientos tradicionales: el caso de la fermentación en la clase de química

Abstract

This paper enrolls in the investigation line: “Teaching of sciences, context and cultural diversity” from the investigation group INTERCITEC -Interculturality, Science y Technology- from the District University Francisco José de Caldas and arises from the needing of improve the reflection spaces about the presence of traditional knowledges of the Colombian society in a culturally diverse science classroom. In that sense, we present the obtained results, when analyzing a classroom experience with tenth grade students of the middle education in the afternoon session from the district college Agustin Fernandez in the city of Bogota, which incorporates the traditional knowledges when tackles the fermentation phenomenon. From a sociocultural perspective, we analize the encounters of the expressed knowledges both by professor and students in a Colombian science class, for which we tackle the semiotic notion of culture from Geertz, the investigative developments of Molina y Mojica (2013), the ethnographic studies and the importance of the discursive interaction between the teachers and students in the classrooms from Candela (2013) and Rey and Candela (2013), and the hybridization process of the school cultures proposed by Garcia Canclini (1997), to understand how young people socially and culturally construct knowledge in the science classroom. The investigative approach of this paper is ethnographic (Rockwell, 1980), characterized by observe the cultural practices of the social groups and to participate in them to contrast what the people says and does, assuming that people’s behavior only can be understood in their specific context; it’s like this, how we look to interpret the reality of the pedagogical practice of the chemistry class of the district college Agustin Fernandez in the city of Bogota. It concludes that the classrooms of this college are culturally diverse because of the existence of vaious types of knowledges that are staged during the development of the chemistry classes, and that impose a special characteristic to the process of knowledge construction since both students and teachers, frequently relates the traditional knowledges proper of their environment and their experiences with thedisciplinary knowledges of the chemistry area. The previous allows to suggest that becomes of great importance to analyze how the teachers and students relate this two types of knowledge during their daily work in the classroom, to interpret how is the co-existence of this knowledge’s and what kind of relationships happen in the classroom that enable to potentiate the process of knowledge construction.