ABSTRACT:
Science Education researches have pointed out the importance of teaching about science in basic education and in Science teacher training courses, which materializes under the realm of the “Nature of Science” (NOS). Although one can recognize the consensus around the theme, we understand it is important to discuss about NOS teaching on the light of the reasons why one should teach science. Aiming to contribute to this debate, we propose, in this theoretical essay, to analyze the different types of educational phenomena that the three most cited proposals in the literature enable and disable. For this, we use two aspects concerning the debates about curriculum: the reconceptualization idea and their outspread for the understanding of curriculum and also the debate around the prescriptive-normative function of curricular documents. Our analysis found an estrangement from the questioning about the means of teaching about sciences in the analyzed proposals and the prescriptive-normative characteristic of all of them.
Keywords:
Nature of Science; Curriculum; Contextualization