Sex Education Representations in Spanish Combined Biology and Geology Textbooks

Sex education is principally dealt with as part of the combined subject of Biology and Geology in the Spanish school curriculum. Teachers of this subject are not specifically trained to teach sex education, and thus the contents of their assigned textbooks are the main source of information available to them in this field. The main goal of this study was to determine what information Biology and Geology textbooks provide with regard to sex education and the vision of sexuality they give, but above all to reveal which perspectives of sex education they legitimise and which they silence. We analysed the textbooks in question by interpreting both visual and text representations, as a means of enabling us to investigate the nature of the discourse on sex education. With this aim, we have used a qualitative methodology, based on the content analysis. The main analytical tool was an in-house grid constructed to allow us to analyse the visual and textual representations. Our analysis of the combined Biology and Geology textbooks for Secondary Year 3 revealed that there is a tendency to reproduce models of sex education that take place within a framework of the more traditional discourses. Besides, the results suggested that the most of the sample chosen for this study makes a superficial, incomplete, incorrect or biased approach to sex education.     

Promoting Science Outdoor Activities for Elementary School Children: Contributions from a research laboratory

The purposes of the study were to analyse the promotion of scientific literacy through practical research activities and to identify children's conceptions about scientists and how they do science. Elementary school children were engaged in two scientific experiments in a marine biology research laboratory. A total of 136 students answered a questionnaire about their previous habits towards science and carried out the following actions: (1) a guided visit to the laboratory, (2) a brief presentation of the research theme, (3) the development of two experiments, and (4) a questionnaire about the experiments and science conceptions. The research methods included observation, document analysis, and content analysis of the answers to the questionnaires. Additionally, each visit was video recorded in order to design learning materials. The results revealed that most of the pupils were able to follow every stage of experimentation. However, some of them misinterpreted results and conclusions. One implication of the study is that this type of outdoor activity is extremely important to promote meaningful science learning in children, but more care should be taken in practical science activities so that children can overcome some common difficulties when performing scientific inquiry.     

Introduction to Semiconductor Physics in Secondary Education: Evaluation of a teaching sequence

The present article presents a didactic proposal oriented to teaching notions of semiconductor physics in secondary education. The methods and the results of a pilot study designed to analyse the effectiveness of a teaching sequence on the topic are also described. The subjects were 60 students, aged 14–15 years, of a secondary school in Seville, Spain. The levels of knowledge acquired by the students were evaluated by means of a test and personal interviews, which we also used to detect the most frequent obstacles they encountered against learning. Also, we employed personal interviews and analysis of the students’ notebooks to evaluate their attitudes towards semiconductor physics and its learning, and to evaluate the degree to which the teaching sequence fosters cooperative learning and the self‐regulation of learning. The results indicated that the students in general acquired ideas and reasoning in the appropriate line, although with some mistakes or inaccuracies with respect to scientific conceptions, and acquired positive attitudes towards the learning of semiconductor physics, with a high degree of motivation during the teaching–learning process. The conclusion is that it is possible to initiate teaching the basic notions of semiconductor physics in secondary education, although it is necessary to continue going deeper into the topic with new research. As a proposal for improvement in future actions, we formulate new objectives oriented at overcoming the students’ commonest obstacles against learning with respect to the topic.     

Contextualising Learning through the Participatory Construction of an Environmental Education Programme

Strengthening links between school and community is critical for improving people’s participation in environmental issues. However, Mexican education programmes are generally unrelated to rural students’ life experience and are planned without considering either teachers’ or students’ opinions. This article describes the participatory construction of a preparatory school environmental education (EE) programme in Ixtlan de Juarez, a Mexican indigenous community internationally recognised for sustainable forest management. The qualitative research methods used are based on the action research methodology. Results from interviews conducted with the preparatory school’s headmaster, the coordinator, and nine teachers provided the needed documentation of the school site for contextualising learning activities. Feedback during focus groups with six students, three teachers, five local communal authorities, and two researchers highlighted that all participants perceived the need for creating an educational programme focused on local forest management. The contents and activities of the programme were designed by the focus group’s participants. The programme has been continuously taught by teachers and forest workers since 2005 and was officially integrated with the preparatory school science curriculum in 2006. This participative educational experience has thus transformed the mandatory school curriculum in Ixtlan.     

Religious Beliefs: Their dynamics in two groups of life scientists

The assumption that scientific knowledge would bring an end to religious belief has challenged many scholars, particularly since such a belief persists even among those devoted to scientific activities. In this paper the occurrence and nature of religious belief in groups of life scientists working in the UK and Brazil is discussed in the context of their degree of training. Data obtained through one‐to‐one interviews went beyond mere yes/no answers to questions on belonging to a religion or believing in God. Categories were created to assess how open these scientists were with regard to the possibility of the supernatural. The results suggest that scientific training affected their religious belief and reduced the number of believers. Nevertheless there were scientists in both groups whose beliefs persisted.     

Matching Society Values: Students’ views of biotechnology

The rapid growth of biotechnology knowledge during the past decades has made it necessary to rethink the contents of the school curriculum and has provoked a consideration of the ethical and social issues related to the use of biotechnological applications. With the financial assistance of the European Union, the European Initiative for Biotechnology Education was set up to develop units for use in the member the countries, organize the translations of these between the many languages involved, organize in‐service courses for teachers, implement the materials in schools, as well as carrying out related research.

This paper gives some findings of Spanish researchers when identifying and exploring the different cultural contexts in which biotechnology teaching and learning is embedded, being mainly concerned with the emerging attitudes and values of the students regarding such issues. After gathering information through case studies during the implementation phase, a questionnaire was developed in an interactive way by teachers and researchers in various stages, based on what students said.

The results identify four main values: the “principle of the natural”, the “principle of the welfare”, the “principle of the technological solution” and the “principle of the individual decisions”. Their interaction and dichotomy are discussed, as well as the problems teachers face when having to deal with topics beyond those immediately related to science     

Reflecting on Scientists’ Activity Based on Science Fiction Stories Written by Secondary Students

In this article the authors resort to a qualitative analysis of the plot of science fiction stories about a group of scientists, written by two 11th‐grade Earth and Life Science students (aged 17), and to semi‐structured interviews, with the double purpose of diagnosing their conceptions of the nature of science (namely, as regards scientists’ activity), and discussing the potentialities of this methodology in terms of research and education in science. The adopted methodology proved particularly effective in diagnosing the students’ conceptions of scientists’ characteristics, scientific activity, and science–technology–society interactions. The limited content of certain conceptions and a certain lack of knowledge on the part of the students concerning the processes and the epistemology of science highlight the need to pay explicit attention in science classes to the nature of scientific activity. Some of the ideas brought up by the students clearly show the influence of stereotypes and catastrophic scenarios depicted in films, television programs, and books, revealing media’s limitations when divulging scientific and technological themes to the general public and stressing the need for the school to promote a critical debate about science and technology images conveyed by the media.     

Prospective Teachers’ Difficulties in Interpreting Elementary Phenomena of Electrostatic Interactions: Indicators of the status of their intuitive ideas

Student teachers were tested before and after a teaching unit on electrostatic interactions in an attempt to consider their intuitive ideas and concept development. A study was made of students’ explanations of basic interactions: those between two charged bodies, and those between a charged body and a neutral body. Two indicators of the cognitive status of the explanations were investigated: “context dependence” and “certainty or confidence index”. This allowed cognitive comparisons to be established between the explanations of different electrostatic interactions, and between the degrees of difficulty they represent for satisfactory conceptual evolution. The greatest difficulties were found with explanations of the phenomena of electrostatic induction. The sample consisted of 52 students in primary school teacher education who participated in a teaching unit designed to overcome these obstacles.     

The transformative power of Chicana/o Studies: social justice and education

This essay responds to Professor Aguirre’s article in this issue that explores through personal narrative the trials and tribulations of being a faculty member with an expertise in Chicana/o Studies. The author joins his exploration by introducing the structural disadvantages that Chicana/o Studies suffers as a field. She then expounds on what we have gained by developing a new field with an explicitly political focus that includes putting student interests at the center of its development while fighting for economic and social justice as an integral part of its intellectual agenda. Her conclusion explores the challenges that the field of Chicana/o Studies faces as we confront changing demographic and societal conditions.     

Mexican parents’ and teachers’ literacy perspectives and practices: construction of cultural capital

This article examines the relationships among the literacy practices engaged in by first-grade children and parents at home and the ways in which these practices are communicated, shaped, and fostered by teachers and administrators in two different sociocultural environments in urban Mexico. The differences observed between the home literacy experiences of children in a working-class and a middle-class community included transgenerational communication of assumptions regarding literacy and schooling, as well as attitudes associated with the parents’ own school experiences. Class-based expectations on the part of teachers not only shaped interactions with parents, but were also reflected in the way the national curriculum was delivered, with a greater emphasis on rote skills and traditional reading instruction in the working-class community. The authors argue that the school plays a role in the co-production of cultural capital in the home through its shaping of some of the literacy practices that children and families undertake.