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It has been shown that many people do not understand how scientific knowledge is built and accepted, even after scientific education. One way to deal with this problem is through teaching about the Nature of Science (NOS). NOS can be understood as a pedagogical construct aiming to foster the understanding of the main characteristics of scientific work. Recently, several researchers have advocated that we should consider pluralism within science when teaching about NOS. Accordingly, there have been efforts to develop ways of promoting instruction on NOS considering the specificity of distinct scientific fields. Aligned with this perspective, this paper aims to put forward a model for teaching NOS in the context of biological education. This model, named "Integrative Model for Teaching NOS in Biological Education" (IM-NOSBIO), is based on three pillars. The first is the Family Resemblance Approach to Nature of Science (FRA), developed by Erduran and Dagher. The second consists in the Conceptual Framework of Biology proposed by Scheiner. The third is the Pragmatic Conception of Models as Epistemic Artifacts put forward by Knuuttila. We propose that IM-NOSBIO has the potential to promote teaching and learning about different aspects of scientific knowledge and practice by taking advantage of how they present themselves in biological sciences teaching. To illustrate this potential, we offer an example of how this model can be used for teaching about certain aspects of NOS based on the history of the cell theory.

Despite the importance of evolution to understand living phenomena, evolution teaching confronts several tensions, especially with respect to teachers' and students' religious beliefs. These aspects have been widely investigated in the USA and Europe. However, little empirical research has been done on this issue in Latin America, despite their large religious diversity and the currently growing population of Evangelical Christians. This paper aims to fill this gap by exploring Colombian biology teachers' ideas about the relationship between scientific views and religious ideas, and their evolution teaching practice. We carried out a qualitative multiple case study involving four biology teachers. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews, classroom recordings and discussion group. To analyse teachers' discourses, we used a hermeneutic-phenomenological method. The results show that: (1) there is a close relationship between the views about the science-religion relationships and evolution teaching practices; (2) the religious teachers did not fully assume the worldviews of their specific religions, but rather built a personal version of those worldviews; and (3) the nature of each religious tradition was a key element for understanding how the teachers see the relationships between religious and scientific views.

The excess of curriculum content is a well-known problem in high school biology. Some strategies to adjust the amount of content to the available classroom time have been proposed, but none has been widely accepted and applied. Furthermore, biology is frequently presented in high school not as an integrated science, but as a collection of unrelated sub-areas, say, zoology, botany, physiology, genetics, and evolution. In this paper, we advance a proposal on how to develop non-arbitrary, clear criteria for selecting conceptual content to be taught and learnt in order to make the biology high school curriculum more integrated and less loaded with content. We argue that we should adopt the idea of structuring concepts for seizing the prominent role some ideas play in biological thinking. We discuss how a hierarchical conceptual framework of biology can help us to identify key concepts as well as connections between these concepts that can allow students understand sub-areas of biology. We also advocate for establishing a balance between the concepts from functional and evolutionary biology, on the one hand, and concepts representing (i) systemic components, (ii) processes, and (iii) descriptive elements, on the other hand. Finally we exemplify how these criteria can be applied by providing a proposal for structuring concepts of biology as a whole and the theory of evolution in particular.

Transdisciplinary research knits together knowledge from diverse epistemic communities in addressing social-environmental challenges, such as biodiversity loss, climate crises, food insecurity, and public health. This article reflects on the roles of philosophy of science in transdisciplinary research while focusing on Indigenous and other subjugated forms of knowledge. We offer a critical assessment of demarcationist approaches in philosophy of science and outline a constructive alternative of transdisciplinary philosophy of science. While a focus on demarcation obscures the complex relations between epistemic communities, transdisciplinary philosophy of science provides resources for meeting epistemic and political challenges of collaborative knowledge production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we draw upon the Conceptual Profile Theory to discuss the negotiation of meanings related to the energy concept in an 11th grade physics classroom. This theory is based on the heterogeneity of verbal thinking, that is, on the idea that any individual or society does not represent concepts in a single way. According to this perspective, the processes of conceptualization consist of the use of a repertoire of different socially stabilized signifiers, adjusted to the context in which they occur. We start by proposing zones of a conceptual profile model for energy, each zone being characterized by its own commitments and identifiable by certain modes of talking about energy. Based on classroom evidence, we claim that teachers and students negotiate meanings that interpenetrate the domains of everyday and scientific knowledge. Being inevitable and necessary, this heterogeneity of conceptual thinking needs to be considered in teaching design in order to allow its awareness on the part of the students. We argue that students' conceptual development goals should be considered in terms of general goals of science education, which points to the need of overcoming the encapsulation of scientific school knowledge. We show that the Conceptual Profile Theory provides a basis for science education that can promote the crossing of cultural boundaries, seeking relations between science and the spheres of everyday life.

Genetic determinism can be described as the attribution of the formation of traits to genes, where genes are ascribed more causal power than what scientific consensus suggests. Belief in genetic determinism is an educational problem because it contradicts scientific knowledge, and is a societal problem because it has the potential to foster intolerant attitudes such as racism and prejudice against sexual orientation. In this article, we begin by investigating the very nature of belief in genetic determinism. Then, we investigate whether knowledge of genetics and genomics is associated with beliefs in genetic determinism. Finally, we explore the extent to which social factors such as gender, education, and religiosity are associated with genetic determinism. Methodologically, we gathered and analyzed data on beliefs in genetic determinism, knowledge of genetics and genomics, and social variables using the "Public Understanding and Attitudes towards Genetics and Genomics" (PUGGS) instrument. Our analyses of PUGGS responses from a sample of Brazilian university freshmen undergraduates indicated that (1) belief in genetic determinism was best characterized as a construct built up by two dimensions or belief systems: beliefs concerning social traits and beliefs concerning biological traits; (2) levels of belief in genetic determination of social traits were low, which contradicts prior work; (3) associations between knowledge of genetics and genomics and levels of belief in genetic determinism were low; and (4) social factors such as age and religiosity had stronger associations with beliefs in genetic determinism than knowledge. Although our study design precludes causal inferences, our results raise questions about whether enhancing genetic literacy will decrease or prevent beliefs in genetic determinism.

This article discusses how to deal with the relations between different cultural perspectives in classrooms, based on a proposal for considering understanding and knowledge as goals of science education, inspired by Dewey's naturalistic humanism. It thus combines educational and philosophical interests. In educational terms, our concerns relate to how science teachers position themselves in multicultural classrooms. In philosophical terms, we are interested in discussing the relations between belief, understanding, and knowledge under the light of Dewey's philosophy. We present a synthesis of Dewey's theory of inquiry through his naturalistic humanism and discuss its implications for the concepts of belief, understanding, and knowledge, as well as for the goals of science teaching. In particular, we highlight problems arising in the context of possible conflicts between scientific and religious claims in the school environment that result from totalitarian positions. We characterize an individual's position as totalitarian if he or she takes some way of thinking as the only one capable of expressing the truth about all that exists in the world, lacks open-mindedness to understand different interpretative perspectives, and attempts to impose her or his interpretation about the facts to others by violent means or not. From this stance, any other perspective is taken to be false a priori and, accordingly, as a putative target to be suppressed or adapted to the privileged way of thinking. We argue, instead, for a more fallibilist evaluation of our own beliefs and a more respectful appraisal of the diversity of students' beliefs by both students and teachers.

This article intends to show that the defense of "understanding" as one of the major goals of science education can be grounded on an anti-reductionist perspective on testimony as a source of knowledge. To do so, we critically revisit the discussion between Harvey Siegel and Alvin Goldman about the goals of science education, especially where it involves arguments based on the epistemology of testimony. Subsequently, we come back to a discussion between Charbel N. El-Hani and Eduardo Mortimer, on the one hand, and Michael Hoffmann, on the other, striving to strengthen the claim that rather than students' belief change, understanding should have epistemic priority as a goal of science education. Based on these two lines of discussion, we conclude that the reliance on testimony as a source of knowledge is necessary to the development of a more large and comprehensive scientific understanding by science students.

School science descriptions about Mendel and his story are problematic because several statements that are controversial among historians of science are repeated over and over again as if they were established facts. Another problem is the neglect of other scientists working on inheritance in the second half of the nineteenth century, including Darwin, Spencer, Galton, Nägeli, Brooks, Weismann and de Vries, who paved the way for the reinterpretation of Mendel's work in 1900. These problems are often found in textbooks and are likely to be present in school science throughout the world. Here, we discuss the contributions that history of science and papers published in journals that target teachers may bring to improve how school science deals with Mendel and his contributions. Evidently the idea is not that school teachers could solve problems still under discussion in the historical literature. The point is, rather, that it is important to avoid treating Mendel's contributions as uncontroversial, mentioning, for instance, that there are ongoing debates on whether he proposed the laws named after him by appealing to invisible factors underlying phenotypic traits that are seen as the heritable potentials for those traits, and would in due time be known as genes. History of science can contribute to put the mythic Mendel into question in the science classroom, bringing school science closer to the controversies around the interpretation of his work.