Abstract
Didactics of science (i.e. ‘science education’ understood as an academic discipline) currently recognises the urgent need to educate science teachers in the so-called metasciences (philosophy, history and sociology of science). This thesis is devoted to a critical revision of this idea and to the construction of criteria and proposals for prospective science teacher education in the philosophy of science.
As a starting point, we propose that didactics of science, as a discipline that has reached some degree of maturity and consolidation, admits theoretical foundations from an epistemological point of view. This statement is argued for in the field of science teacher education.
The thesis begins exposing a classification of the disciplinary relationships between didactics of science and the philosophy of science. These relationships are reviewed according to their possible value for science teacher education. Within this general background, three areas of interest are proposed. These areas are subsequently developed in three practical applications: a didactical transposition of the philosophy of science to introduce it into the science curriculum, an epistemological revision of didactics of science as a discipline, and a proposal of epistemological foundations for the science curriculum.
The contribution of this thesis to the philosophical education of science teachers is focused on an identification of the main schools of 20th century philosophy of science and of the fundamental epistemological ideas that these schools have addressed. Two constructs are defined: they are called the stages and strands of the philosophy of science. When combined, these constructs generate a matrix to organise the selection and implementation of contents from the philosophy of science in science teacher education.
The conceptual framework presented in this thesis is developed through practical examples organised in the three applications that are exposed in the second part. These applications respectively collect: activities to teach central epistemological topics (for instance, realism and rationality), activities to reflect on current didactics of science and on the practice of science education, and activities to perform an epistemological examination of the secondary physics curriculum.
Language: Spanish
Reference
Adúriz-Bravo, A. (2001). Integración de la epistemología en la formación del profesorado de ciencias. Bellaterra: Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.On-line full text (in Spanish): http://www.tdx.cesca.es/TDCat-1209102-142933
Advisors: Prof. Dr. Richard Duschl (King’s College London, United Kingdom), Prof. Dr. Anna Estany (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain) and Prof. Dr. Lydia Galagovsky (Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina).
Correspondence
Agustín Adúriz-Bravo
Delgado 671
(C1426BDG) Buenos Aires
Argentina
Phone: 00 54 11 45 53 44 04
E-mail: adurizbravo@yahoo.com.ar
