The epistemic and pedagogical dimensions of evolutionary thinking in educational resources for zoology designed for preservice teacher education

ABSTRACT

In this article, we present how educational resources for zoology designed by undergraduate students help to propose means of action for teaching diversity and animal evolution in basic education. We realised that activities of creation and analysis of educational resources, in the context of didactic planning, have the potential to approximate epistemic and pedagogical dimensions of evolutionary thinking. These dimensions are relevant to the design of teaching-learning sequences, since they allow pre-teachers to cross the subject-object border and to appropriate cultural tools necessary for their professional activity. We argue about the development of evolutionary thinking, meaning, among other things, tree-thinking as a mediating tool in socio-scientific decision-making and the teaching-learning problems of the coexistence of antagonistic paradigms in biological classification. Our results emphasise that phylogeny is a structuring subject in teaching and preservice teacher education, mediating the debate on the nature of science, such as evolutionary inference, hypothesis elaboration, transience in science, and the social role of science for the conservation of biodiversity.

KEYWORDS:

• Didactic planning
• educational resources
• teacher training
• tree-thinking

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. In Brazil, basic education includes early childhood education, elementary and high school, and has an ideal duration of eighteen years.

2. All the TLS produced can be consulted in the e-books collection ‘Possibilidades Didáticas para o Ensino de Zoologia na Educação Básica (Didactic Possibilities for Teaching Zoology in Basic Education)’, volumes I to V, available on the IB-USP didactic materials website: http://www2.ib.usp.br/index.php?option=com_docman&Itemid=98 Access in: 03 set. 2020.

Additional information

Funding

This study was financed in part by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior – Brasil (CAPES) – Finance Code 001 and part by Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq).