A cross-curricular content model for teaching experimental science: Vertebrate terrestrialization

Abstract

Transversality is a relatively new topic in education which, due to its globalizing approach to facts and phenomena, has the historical possibility of confronting the compartmentalized conception of knowledge that has characterized teaching. Although cross-cutting themes offer a new way of selecting and prioritizing contents and delimiting educational problems, and the possibility of breaking down the traditional boundaries between disciplines, their presence in the classroom is episodic and restricted. Because of this, we believe that it is very important to advance in the systematization of this innovative educational experience in the teaching of experimental sciences. Our model responds to a teaching process that allows, through the transversality of the contents involved in the terrestrialization of vertebrates, students to gradually reach higher and integrated levels of knowledge related to experimental sciences, within the framework of the particular domains of biology, animal anatomy and physiology, ecology, geology, evolution, paleontology, physics, etc. Thus, the construction of knowledge would not be a linear process, with a fixed sequence in the treatment of concepts, but a process of continuous reorganization in which, without neglecting the deepening of each concept, increasingly broader and more complex networks of knowledge are built.