Abstract:
Usually, we don't thinking about the epistemologies that support and guide the actions in classrooms. There is a relative consensus that the textbooks play an important role in the definition of science curricula. The aim of this article is to analyze the epistemological filiations in the science textbooks for elementary school. Activities from a series of science textbooks for elementary-middle school were analyzed, considering a review of the history of didactic manuals. The study was complemented with interviews with students of this level of education. The illuminists' philosophical principles had been taken to assist in the interpretation of the origin of some recurrent ideas in the education of sciences, for example, in respect to the importance that the senses have in understanding and explaining the natural world. In the confluence of the Cartesian and illuminist rationalism emerged a theoretical-methodological orientation with an empiricist-sensualist nature that persists until today in school practices without a critical analysis of this orientation based on the contemporary epistemology.
Keywords:
science textbooks; elementary school science teaching.