https://doi.org/10.37955/cs.v6i1.224
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eISSN: 2600-5743
Learning to live better by
transforming the self
Aprendiendo a vivir mejor transformando el ser
Mónica Patricia Acurio Acurio
Magister en Gerencia Educativa, Universidad Técnica de Babahoyo, Babahoyo, Ecuador
macurio@utb.edu.ec, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0596-4488
Ángela Alexandra Tierra Reinoso
Lcda. en Ciencias de la Educación Mención Informática, Universidad Estatal de Guayaquil,, Guayaquil,
Ecuador lita.81@hotmail.com, https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2117-5363
John Fabián Lamilla Dicao
Ingeniero en sistemas, Universidad Técnica de Babahoyo, Babahoyo, Ecuador,
johnlamillad@gmail.com, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4750-7736
Jesús Font Landa
Doctor en Ciencias de la Cultura Física, Universidad Técnica de Babahoyo, Babahoyo, Ecuador,
jfontl@utb.edu.ec, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6226-1009
Abstract
The purpose of this study is to explore the different trends revealed in
recent times about human learning linked to life and being from the
role of science education and its mission in the 21st century. A
bibliographic review of specialized literature was carried out,
identifying and describing five trends regarding the conception of
science education: pluralistic epistemology or epistemological
anarchy, inter- and multicultural science education, science education
from its relationship with environmental education, science education
from the perspective of citizenship and science education from the
perspective of new trends in education. Each of the trends was
described, identifying its key aspects, to then contrast them according
to the following criteria: the need to review and transform science
education, the very conception of science and finally, the linkage and
effects of science education with respect to society; to finally conclude
with respect to the linkage of science education, in this case science
education, with learning to live. As a conclusion, it is assumed that
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learning to live is seen in different ways by the studied tendencies, but
they tend to coincide in the vindication of respect by the hegemonic
positivist official science towards knowledge, values, beliefs,
experiences, cosmovisions that are different, as well as the
incorporation of ethical and political judgments in scientific learning
that result in learning to live together and to live together in true
freedom.
Resumen
El presente estudio tiene el propósito de explorar las diferentes
tendencias reveladas en los últimos tiempos acerca del aprendizaje
humano vinculado con la vida y el ser desde el papel de la educación
científica y su misión en el siglo XXI. Se realizó una revisión
bibliográfica en literatura especializada, logrando identificar y
describir cinco tendencias en cuanto a la concepción de la enseñanza
científica: la epistemología pluralista o anarquía epistemológica, la
educación científica inter y multicultural, la educación científica desde
su relación con la educación ambiental, la educación científica desde
la perspectiva de la ciudadanía y la educación científica desde la
perspectiva de las nuevas tendencias de la educación. Se describió cada
una de las tendencias identificando sus aspectos clave, para luego
contrastarlas en atención a los siguientes criterios: necesidad de
revisar y transformar la educación científica, la concepción misma de
la ciencia y finalmente, la vinculación y efectos de la enseñanza de las
ciencias respecto a la sociedad; para finalmente concluir respecto a la
vinculación de la enseñanza, en este caso de las ciencias, con el
aprender a vivir. Como conclusion se asume que el aprender a vivir es
visto de manera diversa por las tendencias estudiadas pero tienden a
coincidir en la reivindicación respeto por parte de la ciencia oficial
hegemónicamente positivista hacia los saberes, valores, creencias,
experiencias, cosmovisiones que le son diferentes, así como la
incorporación juicios etico polìticos en aprendizaje científico que
redunden en aprender a convivir y a vivir juntos en la verdadera
libertad.
Palabras clave/ Keywords
Learning, Science education, Living
Aprendizaje, Educación científica, Vivir
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Introduction
More and more authors are recognizing the growing complexity of the world
that recent generations have had to live in. For those who lived through the
Middle Ages, certainty was given by the sacred scriptures that prescribed
earthly life as only a prelude to eternal life. With the advent of capitalism, the
product of the transformation processes led by the bourgeoisie, among them
the scientific revolution and the enlightenment, imposed on modern society
the hegemony of certainty based on reason, order and progress. The meaning
of life became the faith in the human capacity to dominate nature and
transcend needs and deprivations, given the infinite capacity of scientific and
technological progress to lead human beings to a life full of comfort. This was
the illusion that led to the identification of happiness with abundant
consumption and thus social happiness with economic growth. In this context,
education tended to reinforce the idea that success in life is expressed in the
capacity to consume, i.e., the more you have the happier you should be.
Since the last decades of the 20th century, in line with the discovery that
progress based on very high rates of consumption was unsustainable, given
the finite nature of non-renewable and renewable natural resources, the
ideology of progress began to be questioned.
The destruction of natural wealth, in attention to the portentous increase of
material production, entailed the irrational destruction of the natural basis of
society and compromised even the survival of the human species (Amin,
1999) . Economic growth would then increasingly occur "through plunder,
over-utilization of natural resources, unequal exchange in global markets
through price formation controlled by transnational corporations and, above
all, through the global financial system"..
In accordance with the situation described here, there is a growing need to
change the way of teaching, changing to one in which the environment that
surrounds us is considered as the main element, as that interaction that exists
between man-nature. That is to say, the human being exists in unity with the
world, he is immersed in his vital surroundings, in which he relates with
others, among others with his family, with his community; man builds his
spiritual and symbolic world, becomes familiar and empathizes with the
environment cementing knowledge that he expresses with his own language.
(Linares, 2008) .
From this perspective it is established that the being is there, acting and
learning in a pragmatic way, because he relates differently with the world,
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and discerning what is useful and what is not, because the being seeks from
the use for what is useful to know, from the experience (Linares, 2008) .
In this order of ideas Heidegger (1999), quoted by (Linares, 2008) explains
the origin and meaning of the category occupation, which would come from
the Greek "prágmata" which consists of the praxis of occupation when it uses
and manipulates the entities that are found within the world, so that the
theoretical world is not useful. He discovers in a pragmatic way when he
captures something of his interest, for some useful purpose in the world that
exists, and identifies what that something is for, to which he will give
meaning, to then give it a use that will complete his task, which will finally
be linked in a specific context of use.
From this point of view that Linares (2008) proposes, the human being in his
learning makes an image of the world, and pretends to be aware of the thing
that is in front of him, because the subject lives the experience. The problem
arises from the danger of instrumentalist reduction, because from it he is
absobated by technological development, which has caused humanity to be
submerged in technical subjectivity. Man, consequently, is exposed to the
technical essence, becoming only a human resource, given this instrumental
dominion to which humanity is exposed. (Heidegger, 1999, p. 218) . This
situation amanes man in his essence, and subjects him to the danger that, from
the technical production, the world is ordered, making him lose his freedom,
understood as letting be, because the technical impulse ends up dominating
the world and submits it to the will of power, causing a domination of nature,
culture and society, since the technique is the predominant mode of human
relationship with the modern world. (Heidegger, 1999) .
For Heidegger (1999), man is the shepherd of being and not the master of
being, because he is controlled by technique, which hinders other ways of
unveiling the real, restricting the human relationship of being. The lack of
presence of the being with the world makes man have a spatial and temporal
absence, makes it truly dangerous, because it has led the subjects not to
identify with their own places and not to feel rooted. This means that the being
must be taught to open himself to the understanding of the essence of
technique, so that he can rediscover himself and rediscover his own essence.
In this sense, the new ways of learning should be directed, as Heidegger
(1999), quoted by Linares (2008), to a conversion towards being, that is,
learning to build, to inhabit, to think; starting from the idea that humanity
must rescue the world it inhabited, because man belongs to the Earth as a
mortal and that means "inhabiting" based on the principle of protecting or
caring.
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For his part, González (2020) considers that until today, human learning
arises from the domain of social articulation in coexistence, therefore much
of the learning is given by the socialization that occurs in communities,
families or school, which can also have access to knowledge that is produced
by him, because he is able to do it by himself, building his language to explain
what he has learned; he also learns to survive or autonomously, because man
has the ability to obtain information and build it into new knowledge, which
will allow him to change or transform his environment. In this sense, learning
should consist of man assimilating and developing skills to apply what he has
learned (González, 2020).
In this context in which learning is related to one of its main expressions
which is knowledge or knowledge about being, the present study set out as a
central purpose to explore the different trends that have emerged in recent
times about human learning linked to life and being from the role of science
education and its mission in the twenty-first century. Such a linkage would
arise precisely from the identification by scholars of the advent of an epochal
change from modernity, dominated by instrumental reason, positivist
epistemology and the consequent scientism, annullers of subjectivity and
being in terms of objectivity and of the human being as an object separated
from nature.
Materials and Methods
Hence, a bibliographic review of the subject was carried out, which led to a
classification of different views on the relationship between scientific
education and the transformation of the human being in the context of the
transition from modernity to a new era that has been characterized by some
as postmodernity, others as post-industrialism, post-capitalism, and others as
liquid modernity, among other categories that intersect with those more
specific such as the era of globalization, knowledge society, among others.
This leads to the identification of at least five trends, which tend to coincide
in some of their key aspects, but differ in others.
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Figure 1 Trends in Science Education. Own elaboration
Results
Pluralist epistemology or anarchism of science. The first trend examined is
the one attributed to Paul Feyerabend, who was an Austrian epistemologist,
said to have been influenced by Wittgenstein as well as by Popper. His
starting point is a radical critique of the positivist thinking hegemonic in the
sciences for much of the 20th century, attributing to the traditional scientific
method a violent character, characterized by the imposition on the subjects of
scientific work, i.e. on the producers of knowledge, of excessively rigid
norms to which the validity of knowledge is tied. (Ruiza, Fernandez, &
Tamayo, 2004) . Under the label of epistemological anarchism, this tendency
of epistemology, which has correlates in the teaching of science and also in
the very conception of being, proposes a revision of the very category of
knowledge and knowledge, based on the procedures through which it is
validated, which in turn will have effects on the view of the relationship of
scientific knowledge with human social life itself. Thus, he emphatically
criticizes the simplification that has been constructed as an account of the
construction of scientific knowledge, which disguises it as objective and a
product of the rigorousness of preconceived rules. On the contrary, he
vindicates the fact that science and its product, scientific knowledge, are a
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human creation, definitely contextualized in a moment of life of concrete
living agents that possess values, judgments, beliefs. (Facuse, 2003) . But
with the hegemonic positivist tendency it would have become an instrument
of political domination that would express the alliances of a scientific elite
with a political elite, which in the common sense is represented as the most
reliable, valid and accurate explanation of the existing phenomena, as
opposed to the alleged falsehoods, half-truths and pseudo-explanations
coming from spaces and beliefs alien to science and disqualified by the latter.
(Camejo, 2015) . Consequently, and with its own expression in science
education, science is attributed a double authority, i.e. legitimate power, one
of a theoretical nature and the other of a social nature, the latter whose role
would be the reproduction of a logic of domination over human beings in
general, constituting a denial of the freedom of being, since it would subject
them to power relations that privilege scientific knowledge over any other
way of knowing, which directly affects daily existence. The proposal of this
perspective, also known as pluralist, is the social acceptance of plural
mixtures of perspectives and approaches to knowledge, or rather of
knowledge, consequently incorporating a multiplicity of particularities, with
their own criteria of validity, defined in the praxis of research itself, in what
was described as a proliferation of methods. (Facuse, 2003) . This position in
turn would have consequences in the ethical-political sphere as pluralism in
the relations between power and science, but also in the daily life itself of
concrete persons, since theoretically each person could decide to place
himself between extreme situations, or along a continuum between an
extreme of subjection to scientific rationality as a guide to the form or
modality of life, passing through the multiple combinations between the so-
called scientific rationality and other modalities of knowing reality, defining
in it life itself; or at the other extreme, not accepting any modality of
knowledge whatsoever. (Facuse, 2003) . This position of pluralism with
respect to the sciences would be a proposal for the democratization of
scientific knowledge, but also a door to the co-responsibility of the basic
subjects of each society, who should not leave in the exclusive hands of the
scientific elite certain decisions that technocracy tends to reserve for the
"experts or adacemics", because of the serious consequences that such
decisions have on all aspects of human life. It is here that this tendency calls
for the fact that, just as the State as an institution was separated from
ecclesiastical power, the former should be separated from science as such,
assuming that it is an ideology like any other, but that the State legitimizes it
with its privileged relations. (Camejo, 2015) . This perspective highlights the
openness to subjectivity as a possibility given the recognition that by nature
the construction of scientific knowledge is the product of conditioning and
determinations of elements of a contextual and historical nature, but also
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subject to decisions of the subjects who carry out the referred construction.
Thus, epistemological prejudices, as well as interests and inevitable errors
and inaccuracies, give scientific thought a margin of ambiguity and
contingency, while frequent contributions of extra-scientific elements are
identified, which legitimizes, according to this current of thought, subjectivity
as one of the factors present in the construction of knowledge. Finally, it is
recorded that the author strengthens his position of the close link between
epistemology and ethics, from which would derive the importance of his
critical way of assessing how science is done, how it is taught, how it is
learned and how it is understood in terms of the specific way in which an
image of the world and the specific way in which it exists is constructed as
common sense, with the realistic possibility of modifying on the one hand the
dominant conceptions about the relations between knowledge and power, and
therefore the probability of valuing socially alternative knowledge and power
from intersubjectivities, which could finally result in improvements in the
lives and existences of concrete men and women, from a more humanistic
view of science and its subjects. (Facuse, 2003) . Going into the subject of
science education, this tendency suggests that at present it has a markedly
dogmatic character, based on assumptions of verified and therefore validated,
immutable facts. In view of this, it proposes a science education that invites
the participation of the various social subjects in the decisions that affect the
field of science and technology, from a critical thinking that demystifies the
representation of the scientific world as something essentially good, universal
and socially useful. It should generate an attitude and disposition of the
subjects, who should value the impacts of science and technology in their
concrete lives, appropriating both science and scientific knowledge as tools
that may possibly be useful for the resolution of general and concrete
problems of the reality of people's lives. For this reason, this trend advocates
the full dissemination of scientific knowledge, as well as its effects and
impacts on people's lives, resulting in the formation of a solid scientific
culture that allows grassroots citizens to exercise some control over the
production, financing, use, effects and impacts of scientific knowledge. In
order to cultivate the necessary competencies, training processes should be
promoted, aimed at freeing the subjects of the communities from their
ignorance about the most relevant topics. (Camejo, 2015) .
Intercultural and multicultural science education. Inspired by sociocultural
approaches to learning, it is proposed that science education should be a
sociocultural action specifically located in a given space and in a given
sociohistorical context, which values the multiplicity of values, needs and
problems of institutions; recognizing that the living of human subjects is a
cultural fact in which their relationships and social practices are
circumscribed. This current is inspired by the integrating proposal presented
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by Delors in 1994 and assumed by the United Nations Educational and
Cultural Organization UNESCO, of the four modalities of knowledge favored
by education: The knowledge related to science and technology, the
knowledge to do, the knowledge to value and the knowledge to live and live
together. In such a way that interculturality claims the close link between the
first and the fourth of knowledge. For the first, scientific education which,
linked to the fourth, leads to learning to live together, in coexistence with
others, without hateful discrimination and respecting ethnic differences,
gender or traditions and customs. The aim is to vindicate those minorities,
mainly of some other ethnic origin, especially the native peoples, against the
majorities that occupy a territory (Valladares, 2011). Thus, the praxis of
education must explicitly incorporate sociocultural contexts, which are
marked by the diversity of values, beliefs, relational practices, traditions,
ancestral knowledge, all of which claim and deserve the recognition of
validity together with those coming from practice and scientific knowledge,
for the achievement of improvements in the quality of life of human beings
in their social context. The view that defends this tendency rejects the
pretensions of assimilation by modern urban society with respect to the
members of socioculturally differentiated communities, especially with
respect to the imposition of the official language, which in practice promotes
the disappearance of multiple native languages and cosmovisions. This trend
advocates that the intercultural perspective be explicitly incorporated in the
curricula of the different educational levels, as well as in the training of
teachers and professors and in instructional resources, from a pluralistic
perspective of knowledge. The traditional position of scientists, and in this
case of social scientists, of trying to explain, from the frame of reference of
scientistic universalism, the knowledge and traditions framed in the great
diversity of worldviews that coexist in today's world, is rejected. In this sense,
the dialogic posture pretends to be a relationship of equals that vindicates
humans coming from other cultures in their right to Be from their own
worldview, even when they participate in the common life with the majority
groups integrated to the culture imposed by the colonizers. The legitimacy
and rationality of ancestral traditional knowledge and practices is thus
vindicated at the same level of valuation as that of those coming from the
modernizing scientific tradition. Beyond this, it even proposes a productive
dialogue among the diversity of knowledge, for which it is necessary to open
the spaces dominated by scientistic rationality to the study, from a pluralistic
epistemology, of the knowledge shared by the diverse socio-cultural
communities. This would undoubtedly contribute greatly to learning to live
well in coexistence, without any human being feeling marginalized and
devalued, for which the learning processes, educational practices play a stellar
role if they associate the multicultural perspective. This is intended to heal
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the historical and cultural wounds derived from the organic segregation
towards native human beings that is experienced in the school, conditioning
the very existence and learning to live. (Chadwick & Bonan, 2018) .
Science education and environmental education: It raises the need for
integration between the two educational modalities: science education and
environmental education, considering them complementary in terms of their
ways of questioning science in its relationship with the world. From this
perspective, science education highlights the path progressively taken by the
epistemology of science in order to revise the positivist hegemony of science,
revaluing uncertainty as opposed to the certainties claimed by traditional
positivist science. It aims at rescuing a look from the humility of science in
its relationship with the world, recognizing its complexity from its rigorous
and demanding essence. It also tends to be assumed more clearly that
scientific knowledge is not the only way of knowing, which generates ample
possibilities of complementation with views and trends that are positioned
from creativity and intuition, while the sacrosanct principle of scientific
objectivity is questioned and the role of subjectivity and its validity as a
relational construction of the scientific is increasingly accepted. The data, the
evidence, the facts "objectively" taken by the scientist are also questioned and
relativized, within the framework of a thought that is assumed to be
"interobjective", historically contextualized, which significantly impacts the
mentality of the agent of science: the scientist. One of the most striking
aspects would be those that incorporate ethical and political concerns, which
places at the center of the debate and of the evaluation of scientific activity
the problem of its social relevance, as well as the quality of the relationship
between science and technology. Finally, scientism as a deviation of
overvaluation and positivist hegemony of scientific knowledge has become
evident, especially with regard to its validity criteria (replicability and
generalization), so that the validity of other ways of knowing the world, such
as experience, tradition or common sense, tends to be recognized. He
mentions that recently there have been important curricular reforms in terms
of the conception of science that would reflect what is stated here. An
integrative perspective of multiple currents would be the one proposed by
Bader & Sauvé (2011) who values the intersection between the three currents
mentioned in the socioecological theme. The latter author would then propose
a kind of synthesis between health education, environmental education and
education for citizenship, which she labels as "citizen science education",
which she considers to be the most attractive point for students in terms of
their scientific training. (Bader & Sauvé, 2011) . However, an intersection
between science education and environmental education would be possible
by examining the multiplicity of the very notion of environment. Thus, its
role in the apprehension of the growing complexity of socioecological
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realities increases exponentially, even more so when incorporating critical
views such as that of Enrique Leff, who attributes to current environmental
studies a radical questioning of hegemonic rationality, with its logocentric
and atomizing scientism, which from environmental education would be a
driving force for social transformation. (Sauvé, 2013) . In this context we find
the intersection of extremely relevant issues such as human health
(livelihoods) with the biophysical and technological manifestations of social
realities, where science would play a stellar role in decoding the
environmental elements of everyday life, with its objects and phenomena, as
well as with the socio-political expressions of the environment that would
claim citizen commitment, with whose knowledge people are enabled for
their participation in citizen political diatribes. While the priority of science
education focuses on the training of future science professionals, it is intended
that, by incorporating environmental knowledge, they become sensitive to
living beings and therefore value ecologically friendly socio-productive
systems, or address interdisciplinary socio-ecological issues, for which it
would be essential to build a professional profile of flexible, humble,
cooperative beings, open to the diversity of approaches. However, this author
claims that the present reality is rather one of opposition, given the enormous
resistance presented by those in charge of science education, who would
adduce certain incompatibilities based on a vision of Science Education as a
cultivator of traditional positivist scientificity as qualities derived from the
characteristics of the scientific method, while Environmental Education
would focus on attitudinal changes in the face of environmental realities.
Science education and citizenship: This trend has been officially assumed by
UNESC; in such a way that its motivation is framed in the objectives of the
United Nations expressed in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development,
which places at the center of its intentionality the actions to overcome poverty
(Macedoi, 2016) . It is based on a diagnostic position that states that in the
Latin American and Caribbean region, quality education, which is one of the
goals of science education, is predominantly absent, from which it would
follow that there is very little interest on the part of young people to be trained
in the scientific area. Evidence of this would be the results published in the
PISA reports, in which Latin American and Caribbean youth are classified as
undertrained in scientific and technological subjects. It finds its starting point
in the realization of the need for scientific and technological literacy of the
population as a prerequisite for the country to reach acceptable standards of
development, to achieve solutions to the problems felt by the population and
for the subjects to reach the full exercise of citizenship. Science education
would underpin the formation of a scientific culture, which in turn would lead
to greater democratic participation in decision-making on problems of
growing scientific and technical complexity. There is evidence of enormous
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obstacles to the achievement of significant goals in scientific learning, since
these seem to be closely linked to socioeconomic status, so that people from
poor strata of the population would be farther away from reaching the
standards of training in the scientific area, which in turn would become a
vicious circle of reproduction of poverty and therefore of the worst living
conditions, in a context of profound distortions of socioeconomic inequality
in these countries. It is understood that underpinning science education from
this perspective would be reflected in improvements in the capacities of
individuals and human collectives to improve their living conditions and
simultaneously be protagonists of fundamental decisions in the democratic
management of their societies. On the other hand, this tendency defends the
idea that curricular designs in science education would be insufficient in their
capacity to promote the changes in society necessary to achieve global
development goals. In other words, the vision of scientific literacy should be
replaced by a broader vision of scientific culture within the framework of a
comprehensive citizenship education, for which the institution would be
responsible. (Macedoi, 2016) This would be the responsibility of the school
institution, but with links to the world of computer networks in which young
people relate to an incalculable amount of information, which leads to the
need for greater school innovation. One of the challenges is to overcome the
separation between the education system and science education, on the one
hand, and on the other to rescue the fundamental right of access to quality
education in general and to science education in particular, with a view to the
democratization of scientific knowledge. But for this to happen, the obstacles
should be removed so that all members of society have access to training in
scientific knowledge, with the desire and enthusiasm to learn collaboratively
and creatively, which would be a huge challenge for the political, social and
institutional elites in the educational area to promote education by and
through science. This trend identifies the immediate context as one of
consumerist capitalism, and the frustration, discouragement, and lack of
enthusiasm to learn collaboratively and creatively. (Macedoi, 2016) and the
frustration, demotivation and sense of failure of the majority, the
impossibility of satisfying the desires of young people to achieve consumer
goals very quickly and with minimal effort, which is in contradiction with the
need to mature training in the scientific area, which takes considerable time.
He then proposes to reinforce the formative efforts towards the incentive and
motivation of creativity, rationality and innovative competences. In its
relation to learning to live, this tendency maintains that science education
would contribute to learning in the solution of environmental problems such
as the adequate and rational use of drinking water, or health problems,
contributing to the strengthening of healthy habits and customs of life that
would reach from the students to their parents or responsible adults. And seen
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in a larger context, contribute significantly to the achievement of the goals of
overcoming poverty in the 2030 agenda.
Figure 2 Problems of Science Education. Own elaboration based on
(Macedoi, 2016)
Science education and new trends in education: This trend led by Lemke
(2006) shares a series of provocative questions to linked in the first instance
to the role of science education in the context of new developments in ICT,
in terms of its contribution to students in particular as direct subjects of the
educational fact, but also to society in general and to the interests of all people
(Lemke, 2006) . In order to answer his questions, he indicates that the
fundamental efforts of science didactics, a qualifier equivalent to science
education, should be directed to the understanding of four themes that he
considers: a) the first of them raises the question of how it would be possible
to establish a link between the astonishment that learners of different ages
should experience for natural phenomena, with what he calls emotional and
intellectual commitment. This is reinforced by other authors (López &
Velazco, 2017), who refer to the experience in primary education focused on
problems coming from the reality lived by the students, giving special
relevance to their emotions in order to awaken the necessary enthusiasm for
learning those realted with the view of the world from the scientific
perspective. b) the second corresponds to the concern of many intellectuals
regarding the ethical problem linked to scientific and technological
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developments in terms of both beneficial and harmful uses, for whose
discernment it would be necessary to learn to look critically. What in the
experience referred to by López & Velazco (2017) would lead to the
strengthening of a universal citizenship sensitive to the ecological limits of
economic and social development, the contradictions between the global and
the local, projection of the action of the present on uncertain futures from
solidarity and cooperative and interdependent relational, from the
multicultural. This would link science education with environmental
education. This necessarily implies the incorporation of the key elements of
reflective and questioning thinking. c) The third is oriented to the effort to
tighten the links between the different ways of knowing in their relationship
with the so-called scientific knowledge. d) finally, how science education
could have a significant impact both on students with respect to their
competences in the use of multimodal technologies, but also on those that
report critical thinking. (Lemke, 2006) . In order to make possible the
necessary transformations in science education so that it can have a
significant impact on learning to live, we should start by recognizing that
innovative visions have been put forward today that go beyond the old views
on the nature of human learning.
Figure 3 New visions about the nature of learning. Own elaboration based on
(Lemke, 2006)
This trend also identifies specific social problems in which science education
would play a transcendental role in the path to support learning to live: in the
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first instance, it mentions the necessary orientation to the population on how
to contribute significantly to the critical global environmental situation,
promoting the understanding of the phenomenon as well as the necessary
changes in the attitudes and behaviors of human subjects. Secondly, to help
understand, manage and transform the growing injustice in the distribution of
wealth both at the global level between some countries and others, and at the
level of each country between privileged groups that are enriched and the
impoverished majorities, benefiting the former from the aforementioned
social injustice. The author considers that if the appropriate measures are not
taken, the victims of injustice will act with justified anger, undertaking the
destabilization of the affluent societies. (Lemke, 2006) . Finally, he identifies
another social problem derived from generational conflicts in which power
tends to concentrate in the hands of middle-aged population groups to the
detriment of other age groups such as the young and the elderly. He believes
that science education should contribute to giving greater decision-making
capacity to the youngest people who have been trained, thus avoiding the
accumulation of social tensions that could lead to rebellion by the youth.
Finally, learning for life through science education requires changes both in
this branch of education and in the educational system, which must recognize
the recently discovered forms of learning and act accordingly, generating
more diverse learning spaces in terms of environments, means, times, ages,
problems, among other parameters, in such a way that conditions are
generated so that learning for life is fostered from lifelong learning.
The bibliographic review has shown the diversity of trends that are currently
in force, which reflect on the contribution of education to learning to live,
concentrating on science education, given that in modernity the great promise
has been that, through scientific and technological developments, the promise
of the broadest progress of humankind would be achieved, which would result
in the dominion over nature to achieve the full satisfaction of human needs.
The various trends coincide in the need to review and transform science
education according to the demands of the new times. Epistemological
pluralism calls for a total break with the traditional narrative of science since
positivism, a teaching not based on a single and universal method that
constrains the researcher on the basis of the old criteria of validity. Therefore,
a teaching of science seen as a construction of knowledge from a plurality of
methods. This certainly coincides with the inter- and multicultural trend,
which claims the legitimacy of ancestral knowledge and traditions shared by
aboriginal communities, as well as those coming from other ethnic groups.
Thus, science education should not simply reproduce a western instrumental
rationality, but should lend itself to the understanding, comprehension and
recognition of the validity of knowledge transmitted from generation to
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generation and that responds to other logics and worldviews. Therefore, it
must explicitly incorporate socio-cultural contexts to prevent discrimination
and marginalization of diverse communities.
The proposal for transformation from environmental education agrees that
science education must transcend positivist epistemology, with its atomistic
rationality, to advance in the recognition of the growing complexity of the
world in the integration of what was seen separately as the natural with respect
to the social world, to reintegrate the human being to his nature,
understanding him as such in his socio-environmental context, which leads to
the synthesis of aspects that are traditionally seen as separate, such as health,
environment and citizenship.
On the other hand, the changes suggested by the current of citizenship aim at
abandoning curricular policies that promoted scientific and technological
literacy towards the promotion of a scientific culture that provides citizens
with the knowledge and skills to participate in decision-making, which until
now has been the responsibility of science specialists. However, it diagnoses
the current situation and limitations of science education, in view of its
predominant decontextualization and therefore its remoteness from the daily
life of the learners; the lack of training and outdatedness of the educators that
reproduce the aforementioned decontextualization. The very lack of
significance of science teaching itself, which is enclosed within itself and its
super-specialized codes, as well as the predominance of a didactics foreign to
scientific and technological production itself, which is also a reflection of the
isolation and lack of relations between the scientific community and the
educational communities.
This contrasts with a proposal that is based on the incorporation of new
visions about the nature of learning, which would promote, in the first
instance, the elimination of the classification of learners according to age, and
of other segregationist criteria that fortunately have been overcome, such as
school separation by gender. In other words, this trend considers that science
education, in order to be significant in its effects and impacts, must disrupt
the current logics in the organization of learning groups so that learners of
different ages, genders, ethnicities, cultures, etc. can teach other diverse
learners. Additionally, assuming learning as a lifelong process, in dissimilar
time scales, environments and media. It criticizes traditional scientific
teaching for its isolation from the interests of the great majority, failing to
engage the new members of society in their learning. He agrees with the trend
of citizenship in the sense that science education should make an enormous
effort to excite, to amaze, to emotionally engage learners, leaving the isolation
of classrooms and laboratories towards contact with the natural, social and
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community context, in order to sensitize the student and encourage him/her
to be trained in scientific knowledge, reinforcing the corresponding creativity
and innovation.
The next element of comparison that stands out has to do with the very
conception of science. In this sense, there is a generalized coincidence
regarding the limitations of the positive empirical conception of science,
which is described as simplifying, falsely objective and the product of
rigorous rules that would guarantee the validity of the knowledge produced,
and which belittles and despises the knowledge and knowledges that do not
pass the filters of the academy, labeling them as superfluous, among other
adjectives. Multiculturalism adds the appreciation of science as a hegemonic
narrative of the colonial world over the colonized and subjugated, which
pretends to explain the world with its alleged universalist rationality,
appropriating any possibility of legitimacy of knowledge. The critique from
the perspective of environmental education focuses on the issue of the
certainties and exactitudes that positivist science attributes to itself, proposing
the acceptance of uncertainty as a reality of the world. She also criticizes the
super-specialization that separates the knowledge of the natural physical
world from the social world when for her it is evident the integration of the
human social and cultural world with the natural world. It also criticizes the
criterion of validation of knowledge based on objectivism, undervaluing or
despising the complementarity of knowledge based on subjectivities and
intuition. Thus, for them the traditional conception of science would be a
scientistic deviation that evidences the hegemonistic pretensions from the
perspective of the social influence of knowledge on the established powers,
which coincides with the qualification of "ideology" made from the pluralist
and anarchist perspective of epistemology.
The tendency that most assimilates the tradition of science as it is currently
presented is that of citizenship, which does not question it, and on the contrary
vindicates its vision of rationality, locating the problematic situation rather in
other spheres such as that of the scarce scientific training, in traditional terms,
of the great majority of the impoverished population of Latin America and
the Caribbean.
The linkage and effects of science education with respect to society is an
obvious criterion for comparison. From the point of view of epistemological
anarchism, the link with society begins with the notion of domination,
denouncing the double authority and therefore legitimate domination in
Webri's terms on the part of science, as theoretical authority and as social
authority denying the freedom of the Being, which would be subject to
knowledge of scientific origin. His proposal has expressions in the ethical-
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political field, claiming epistemological pluralism, betting on the co-
responsibility of social subjects in the face of the monopoly of power
exercised by experts in science and technology, legitimized by the modern
State. For its part, the multiculturalist tendency tends to coincide with the
previous one in terms of denouncing the discriminatory social power of
science against other knowledge, which is shared and reproduced by the
traditions of communities of diverse ethnic origins, especially the native
aborigines of our America. For its part, the trend of environmental education
privileges the relationship between science and society through the interest in
the integration of three pillars of education, such as health, environmental and
citizenship education, to address the growing socio-environmental
complexity with its biophysical, technological and socio-political expressions
with serious effects on people's daily lives. The citizen trend emphasizes the
relationship in the possibilities of enhancing citizen participation in terms of
a scientific culture for the resolution by democratic means of problems arising
from extreme inequality and poverty in Latin America and the Caribbean.
While the last of the trends claims the need to link science with the daily
experiences of the population, but also promoting the capacity of discernment
of the population with respect to ethical issues related to the positive but also
negative effects of the application of science and technology in society.
Conclusions
The present study, which started from the central purpose of exploring
the different trends that have emerged in recent times about human
learning linked to life and being from the role of science education and its
mission in the 21st century, reaches the following conclusions:
Learning to live is seen from different perspectives in each of the tendencies,
however, the majority tendency points towards the search for respect by the
hegemonic positivist official science towards the knowledge, values, beliefs,
experiences, cosmovisions that are different and diverse from the objectivist
and instrumental rationality dominant in scientism, since such hegemony
tends to translate into domination, exploitation, marginalization of a large
number of human subjects who are unable to fully realize themselves in terms
of their Being.
The transformation of scientific thought and practices, together with their
teachings, are demanded from diverse ethical and political perspectives with
the aspiration of conquering the necessary harmony in a complex world, with
a revaluation of the unity of diversity and therefore plural, in order to
trulylearn to live together in the true freedom that comes from the recognition
of the diversity and complementarity of worldviews.
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