This paper aims to analyse the concepts of scientific literacy and agency in two official documents of the Chilean science curriculum. We used Fairclough's three dimensional model as critical lenses, based on critical discourse analysis, where every discursive event can be analysed: (i) as a text, (ii) as a discursive practice and (iii) as a social practice. The research questions were: ‘How are the different visions of scientific literacy operating and being promoted within the Chilean science curriculum?’ and ‘How is student and teacher agency declared in those documents?’ By understanding the curriculum as a dialectical process, as a social event between planning, executing, and evaluating education, we evidence tensions among different visions and paradigms for both concepts (scientific literacy and agency), specifically, in the transition from one cycle to another in secondary education. The first document has a predominantly neoliberal approach to scientific literacy and the second one presents a focus on citizenship, democracy, and social justice. As a social practice, in both documents, teachers appear under the idea of curriculum implementers, to a certain extent, based on a banking model where teachers are containers to receive someone else's curriculum expertise. The preceding imbalance raises potential tensions based on teacher performance and on student agency. Specifically, students must transition from a passive role and then consider themselves as active subjects who question how to produce knowledge, understanding their role within environmental conflicts within current socio‐political structures for instance.
Climate change is considered one of the greatest threats to human and natural ecosystems. In the search of options for action from science education, this paper aims to analyze the Chilean science curriculum to understand and act upon the socio-environmental climate change emergency. We developed a content analysis of curriculum documents, focusing on climate change, curriculum integration, and climate action. We explored 15 Chilean science and general curriculum documents for nine different school subjects. By understanding curriculum documents as a critical aspect to promote an educational response to climate change, we evidence that, even though only 5% of all learning goals are explicitly connected to climate change, there are opportunities to promote an integrated curriculum on climate change. Activities in the Chilean curriculum regarding climate change are mainly linked to concepts such as sustainability and biodiversity, and climate action from a critical approach of scientific literacy is primarily promoted in the last two years of schooling. This unbalanced science curriculum throughout all levels might be producing potential tensions in pedagogical practices about climate change education.
and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. The former Director of Education at the Royal Society, he has written extensively about curricula, pedagogy and assessment in science education.
Teachers have tended to be underestimated as experts of their own practice and relegated to a technical role. In this context, action research appears as a form to legitimate teachers as active agents and producers of educational knowledge. This article aims to examine how a collaborative research–practice partnership between schools and universities in Chile fosters teachers’ role as researchers. It adopts a qualitative methodology based on thematic analysis of data collected from questionnaires and focus groups. In particular, it reports perceptions of in-service teacher researchers who conducted research projects between 2016 and 2017 as a part of a researcher–practitioner partnership strategy implemented by a university in Chile. The findings suggest that the partnerships were highly valued among teachers because the partnerships allowed them to develop pedagogical reflection towards the improvement of their practices and required particular awareness and recognition of roles and the relationships between practical and theoretical knowledge. Finally, possibilities for strengthening teachers’ role as researchers and collaborative research are presented at the end of the article.
El objetivo de este estudio fue determinar la relación entre el nivel de razonamiento científico (NRC) y variables académicas de pre-ingreso de 158 estudiantes de primer año en cinco carreras de pedagogía en una universidad pública chilena. Este estudio forma parte de los instrumentos que contribuyen a la evaluación inicial nacional diagnóstica considerando los nuevos requerimientos de la ley de carrera docente. La metodología se enmarcó en un estudio transeccional correlacional-causal. Para diagnosticar el NRC, se aplicó el Test de Lawson adaptado al contexto chileno y se diseñaron modelos de regresión multi-variable. Los resultados muestran la incidencia en el NRC de la variable sexo y variables académicas de pre-ingreso como puntajes en Prueba de Selección Universitaria (PSU) en Ciencias y Lenguaje; como también vías de acceso alternativas e inclusivas a las carreras de pedagogía. Se concluye que los niveles de razonamiento científico de los estudiantes que ingresan a carreras de pedagogía de primer año se ubican principalmente en niveles transicionales.
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