Abstract
In this paper we discuss the results of an investigation aiming at mapping the conceptions of nature of protestant biology preservice teachers in a Brazilian university, State University of Feira de Santana, and elucidating their strategies to manage the coexistence of scientific and religious knowledge. We employ naturalistic semi-structured interviews about conceptualizations of nature to build first person interpretive narratives, which allow us to build a general characterization of the students’ conceptualizations of nature and science, as well as strategies to deal with the coexistence of religious and scientific knowledge. We use students’ personal statements to construct a general description of their religious and scientific upbringing. They are divided in two groups: (a) those with more scientifically compatible worldviews, who often make use of scientific ideas in their narratives about nature and build syntheses between scientific explanatory models and their religious worldviews; and (b) those who do not show evidence of meaningful learning of scientific ideas and are largely inclined to deliberately repudiate scientific knowledge. Our results show the complexity of the relationships between religious and scientific education in the trajectories of these preservice biology teachers.
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Notes
The quotations in this and the next section are from the first person interpretive narratives or students’ personal statements. They were freely translated into English by the authors. We tried to keep them as faithful to the original statements as possible, but this has been sometimes hard, given their colloquial nature and the consequent usage of a number of expressions and contractions which are not so easily translatable into another language. Furthermore, we did not try to reproduce occasional grammar and writing mistakes in the English translations. In the translations, pauses were preserved, being indicated by ellipses (…). In some cases, quotations from students’ narratives were numbered in order to facilitate the analysis. Any reader interested in checking the original quotations in Portuguese should write the authors to obtain them.
In this section, quotations are not from the first person interpretive narratives, as in the previous two sections (with the exception of those from the personal statements), but from the original interviews themselves.
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Acknowledgments
The authors wish to thank CNPq (National Council for Scientific and Technological Development) and FAPESB (State of Bahia Foundation for the Support of Research) for support in the form of grants and research funding. We are also thankful to Eduardo F. Mortimer for his comments on a preliminary version of the manuscript.
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El-Hani, C.N., Sepulveda, C. The relationship between science and religion in the education of protestant biology preservice teachers in a Brazilian university. Cult Stud of Sci Educ 5, 103–125 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11422-009-9212-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11422-009-9212-7