Alma Adrianna Gómez Galindo

The role of non-formal contexts in teacher education for STEM: the case of horno3 science and technology interactive centre

Abstract Teacher education can benefit directly from experiences in non-formal settings. This article presents a research study with elementary teachers who were teaching in public schools in the state of Nuevo León, México, and participated in a STEM Continuous Professional Development (CPD) workshop. The workshop provided a platform for teachers to interact with scientists and disseminators of science, allowing the appropriation of scientific knowledge applied to everyday activities and settings. Participants improved the quality of their teaching practices in classrooms and gained a new understanding of STEM subjects, enabling them to promote inspiring learning experiences with their students, where dialogue, experimentation and elucidation became an important part of their lessons. The study was carried out using ethnographic tools for analysing recorded videos, 15 sets of field notes, and 49 questionnaires. The sequential analysis of talk and gestures in their participation in the CPD workshop demonstrated high levels of involvement, creativity, and collaborative solution of STEM problems.

Evolution Education in Mexico, Considering Cultural Diversity

Mexico is a megadiverse country with great biological and cultural diversity. In this chapter, we address the analysis of the evolution education considering the enormous challenge related with these diversity, specially the presence of indigenous groups, which speak more than 365 varieties of 65 languages. To exemplify this challenge the comparison of two regions in Mexico are presented: Monterrey city, in the Northwestern state of Nuevo Leon, characterized by a development based on industrial growth and the Mayan Highlands in the Southeastern state of Chiapas, which is one of the most culturally diverse places in the country with over seventy percent of the population being indigenous. In our analysis, two main issues emerge that require attention to improve the evolution education in Mexico. The first one is evolution is not considered as a transversal approach to biology curriculum rather it is presented as a list of concepts that would need to be covered. The second one is the presence of a national curriculum in which cultural diversity is not explicitly addressed and the diverse contexts of the students are ignored. The dimension of this challenge to promote real evolution education in Mexico and some suggestions to consider an intercultural perspective are discussed in this chapter.

Explicaciones narrativas integradas y modelización en la enseñanza de la biología

In this paper we study, using a qualitative method, how elementary students and their teacher construct explanations of the human vision through a variety of representations (drawings and a 3D model). The results shows that the representations became increasingly abstract, integrating ideas built beforehand and entities of the theoretical model of reference. The ideas represented are influenced by the intention of the teacher, the kind of semiotic resource, the social negotiation and the context of the activity. The ensemble of representations creates a narrative that allows students to explain theoretically and modeling the phenomena studied.