Eréndira Alvarez Pérez

Proposal for Teaching Evolutionary Biology: A Bridge between Research and Educational Practice.

We present quantitative results for the doctoral thesis of the first-named author of this article. The objective was to recommend and test a teaching proposal for core knowledge of evolutionary biology in secondary education. The focus of the study is ‘Problem cores in teaching’. The ‘Weaving evolutionary thinking’ teaching unit, designed for and tested in this study, entailed: selecting basic evolutionary knowledge from the model of evolution through variation and natural selection; designing a coordinated set of activities, teaching resources and evaluation tools; leading a process of teacher training; and building bridges between: the teaching model, research into the teaching of evolutionary biology, our own teaching experience and that of the secondary school teacher who participated in the project. The data collected through questionnaires show significant differences in favour of the experimental group, which means that the proposal may be favourably assessed in the context of Mexican education, in...We present quantitative results for the doctoral thesis of the first-named author of this article. The objective was to recommend and test a teaching proposal for core knowledge of evolutionary biology in secondary education. The focus of the study is ‘Problem cores in teaching’. The ‘Weaving evolutionary thinking’ teaching unit, designed for and tested in this study, entailed: selecting basic evolutionary knowledge from the model of evolution through variation and natural selection; designing a coordinated set of activities, teaching resources and evaluation tools; leading a process of teacher training; and building bridges between: the teaching model, research into the teaching of evolutionary biology, our own teaching experience and that of the secondary school teacher who participated in the project. The data collected through questionnaires show significant differences in favour of the experimental group, which means that the proposal may be favourably assessed in the context of Mexican education, in terms of feasibility, relevance and the pedagogical transformation of knowledge.

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.