Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

Nicolas-Jean-Baptiste-Gaston Guibourt (1790---1867), a French pharmacist, who studied the oxides, sulfides, and other compounds of mercury, arsenic and its compounds, a large number of natural products, among them turpentine, starch, astringent juices, and musk; also established the norm to express the power of pepsin.

This article reflects on the concepts of sustainability, environment, and sustainable livelihoods, mentioning its integrative points, on environmental, social, and personal levels. It defines these concepts, criticizing, for example, some definitions that overlap, such as that of environment, sustainable development and environmental education, education for Sustainable Development or education for sustainability. Additionally, stresses the complexity of education for sustainability in that it should reflect the complexity of the environment. It follows that educators on sustainability who work in the country’s protected areas are understanding that his/her role does not only require knowledge of ecology and pedagogy in designing and implementing processes of “teaching-learning”, but also implies that he/she must attend to, and be prepared for, the organizational and social dimensions, diagnosis and planning, and productive- and communicativetechniques, amongst others. The article also demonstrates that education is not only the transfer of prominent scientific know-how, nor a parade of exhortations through various media. Education requires the creation of emotional ties to nature and the development of environmental ethics, which is a long, systematic process. Education on sustainability promotes a systematic vision that permits us to see ecological deterioration not only as a remote phenomenon circumscribed to the poor management of ecosystems, but as part of a complex plot in which cultural, economic, and political dimensions and ethics play important roles as causal factors. Educational practices carried out within a Protected Area cannot be removed of their political dimension. They must integrate such aforementioned reflections on deterioration and implement alternatives that propose links between the quality of ecosystems and the quality of life of those who inhabit them or those who are benefited by their influence.

For over 40 years criteria to select science contents for basic education in Mexico focus on structure, fundamental ideas and methodology of scientific disciplines. The science curriculum declares that science education should be useful to students to prepare them as citizens who could use scientific knowledge and process to solve problems of their everyday living. These ideas were justified with the argument that citizens who knew science would be able to understand their social and natural environments and therefore they could act on it. The objective of this article is to promote the debate about the disadvantages of designing the science curriculum from this perspective. Author’s work in rural and indigenous communities shows that educational needs of the students are not in agreement with the science contents in the curriculum: a) The knowledge that students need for understanding a specific problem of their everyday living and make decisions to solve it bears no relation to the science content in the curriculum. b) The levels of generality and abstraction of the science content do not correspond with those that students require to understand their reality. c) The organization and distribution of the science contents in the different educational levels do not correspond with student’s needs or wishes to know them at specific moments of their lives. d) Science curriculum is not useful for satisfying the educational necessities of the rural and indigenous communities. They need scientific and technological knowledge but schools are unable to offer it to them properly.

This conference aims to show how the results of research in science teaching can be used by teachers in the design and development of a sequence of learning from a socio-constructivist view. Based on the training needs of the teacher to successfully face the challenges of teaching, teachers have to develop four skills in the design of a teaching sequence: the history and epistemology of the concepts and theories taught and, in particular, major problems in its construction; namely the sequencing of objectives and appropriate content to the student’s psychological problems, in the form of interest; determine the specific knowledge and skills students should acquire in relation to the contents and understand their key difficulties; finally find a teaching model selection to derive coherent strategies that facilitate learning. In the talk has been applied the model of teaching-learning based on developing guided research focused on the design of a sequence of teaching on the atomic theory of matter for high school students.

As in other countries in which Catholicism is an important part of the cultural background, Mexican society as a whole is not only predominantly secular, but also takes for granted the existence of strong laical institutions. These include our public school system, where evolutionary biology has been part of curricula without leading to rejection from the Church. In contrast to fundamentalist groups, Catholics tend not to read the Old Testament as the literal truth, but as a depiction of the ways in which divine creation, when it is accepted, may have taken place. The high number of fundamentalist missionaries and the influence of American creationists must be acknowledged as a potential threat to Mexican public education, together with the reduced budgets for primary and secondary schools, poor libraries and laboratories and, equally significant, the reduced attention to teachers’ working conditions and social appreciation.

Diverse studies have shown that, increasingly, there are less people who feel attracted to sciences. The problem is especially serious, on the one hand because the scientific knowledge is called to play a more and more important role in the social-decision making process and the citizenship must be able to participate in it and, on the other, because the number of students that attends university science degrees is decreasing, circumstance that will have undesirable socioeconomic effects. This work analyses some of the causes of this situation and presents the contributions that can be done, in the Spanish case, to the scientific formation of students and to the renovation of the subject “Sciences for the Contemporary World” that is currently taught in the Spanish classrooms and has been offered since September 2008.

The International Year of Astronomy 2009 celebrates a crucial moment in the history of science: the first astronomical observations through a telescope, carried out by Galileo Galilei in 1609. The invention of the telescope was the starting point of what turned out to be a sequence of astonishing astronomical discoveries. At present we can assert that astronomy is a topic of attraction for youngsters at all ages, so that calling their attention to astronomy we should be able to draw their interest in science and explain a set of basic physics concepts. In this endeavor, mathematics and physics teachers of this association can play a very significant role. In my presentation I describe our plans to be carried out in our country and I also demonstrate some possible practical activities to be carried out by secondary and middle school teachers.

Critical thinking is a crucial aspect that every citizen needs to be able to take part in a democratic and plural society. The current society, with a generalized access to information through Internet and with a constant bombardment of data, opinions and watchwords, demands new competences. Among them we would choose the one that relates to the capacity to think critically and to understand every kind of text to which it has had access and that are related to subjects, many times with a scientific basis, that affect us directly (climate change, alternative energies, transgenic foods...). This article shows the results of applying two activities of critical reading carried out in the context of Chemistry classes. The texts have been selected taking the contents worked previously and the social relevance of the problem that they discuss, without forgetting and taking into account its possible potential for arousing the interest of the student.

Networks are thought to be essential in understanding the emergence and sustainability of collective behaviour in many complex systems often found in fields such as physics, sociology, biology, ecology and economy, to name just a few. The problem is that although they can be represented mathematically as a graph, the characterisation of nodes and links in it is usually quite arbitrary, and therefore basic quantities such as space dimension and metrics are not well defined, which leads to ambiguities in the establishment of dynamical equations to dictate the state of the system. In this paper we propose and review a general framework to study the dynamical evolution of networks based in the concept of coevolution, which implies a feedback between the state variables defined over the nodes and the structure of the network itself. The usefulness and generality of such a framework is shown by modelling an opinion formation process in human societies, in which the dynamical formation of community structures is predicted and characterised in terms of the parameters of the model.

El presente trabajo investiga los contenidos de química que los profesores de bachillerato brasileños encuentran difíciles de trabajar dentro del aula, así como las estrategias y los recursos pedagógicos que emplean para enseñar tales contenidos y cómo los estudiantes los ven. Las entrevistas con 79 profesores de bachillerato de química del Estado de Minas Gerais revelan un sobreénfasis en cálculos en detrimento de la comprensión conceptual.