Environmental didactics and educational knowledge of content in Chemistry

• Autor(a) principal: Parga Lozano, Diana Lineth
• Data de Publicação: 2016
• Outros Autores: Mora Penagos, William Manuel
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: spa
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: https://doi.org/10.34624/id.v8i1.3487

In the context of tensions in the relations between environmental education and environmental didactics, this paper starts by addressing elements justifying the need to create an Environmental Didactics focused on environmental content. This should follow the ‘didactic knowledge of content’ perspective, using social aspects from Science, Technology and Society (STS), which come from Science didactics, and articulating them to new cultural perspectives and environmental epistemologies. After that, some background concerning reflectional postures will exemplify potential achievements of the environmental didactics. These are based on the need to plan and to make environmental teaching models more explicit, as well as their relation to current issues in environmental education, in order to promote an education more oriented towards action. The third section presents international curricular proposals that support the STS approach. These attribute great importance to environmental issues for the teaching of Chemistry. Such issues do not simply ‘graft’ this inclusion, instead they focus on student participation, which in some cases involves the natural sciences’ content being less focused on than the social and environmental ones. Finally, the paper defends that the typology of conceptual, procedural and attitudinal content, started within science teaching, can, in several researches, trace the focus on environmental content to science teaching textbooks. However, these often do not take into account the standards of national curriculum or training skills, neglecting the social dimension of environmental sustainability.