Scientific education in teacher training

Epistemological (re)writings from the periphery

Abstract

In this article, I carry out an epistemological analysis of the curricular guidelines that, in the last twenty years, normalized the area of scientific education for Primary Education Teachers (PEP), a career offered in teacher training institutions dependent on the Government of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires (GCABA). First, I present the curricular documents for the PEP-GCABA. In the second place, I show that the guidelines established for our area of work by such documents have certain common epistemological bases. For this purpose: a) I establish some lines of continuity among the guidelines from the notions of science they present; and b) I identify the origin of such notions by tracing their specific genealogies, going back to certain currents and productions of the last decades of the 20th century framed in the Anglo-Saxon tradition in philosophy of science, one of the hegemonic traditions of the North Atlantic. Thirdly, by referring to some of the theoretical-critical currents and productions that in the first decades of the 21st century contributed to energize the epistemological field, I present certain contributions from peripheral critical theories; particularly, I refer to contributions that recognize the geopolitical and situated character of thought and knowledge and that critically assume the logics of the coloniality of power-knowledge. Fourthly, I analyze the guidelines presented by pointing out that, in epistemological terms, they are located within the theoretical framework offered by those Anglo-Saxon currents and productions, while at the same time they tend to make their own epistemological affiliation invisible. Likewise, I indicate that, although these documents affirm the situated character of science, they do not assume an enunciation from the peripheries or from colonial difference. In this sense, following the theoretical-critical contributions mentioned, I emphasize that the guidelines tend to be situated in a differential place of enunciation marked by coloniality.