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The Contribution of Ethnobiology to the Construction of a Dialogue Between Ways of Knowing: A Case Study in a Brazilian Public High School

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Abstract

This paper reports results obtained in pedagogical interventions in a Brazilian public high school which aimed at promoting a dialogue between scientific and traditional knowledge in the context of biology teaching. The interventions were based on the use of a didactic material and teaching sequence elaborated on the grounds of school knowledge about botany, as presented in biology textbooks, and interviews with students who were also farmers, so as to gather data about their ethnobiological knowledge. Our goal was to develop and test resources that can offer support for teachers who wish to build a dialogue between different ways of knowing in multicultural settings. Our results indicate that the use of the didactic material and teaching sequence indeed created possibilities for a dialogue between the students’ ethnobiological knowledge and biology school knowledge. We observed some shortcomings in classroom practice, partly reflecting our very choice of subject matter to develop the teaching sequence. But the interventions also revealed important limitations that we regard as representative of problems that may generally make multicultural science teaching a hard goal to achieve. It was clear that important shortcomings were related to teachers’ difficulties to conduct a dialogue between ways of knowing in a science classroom, and, thus, called attention to the importance of introducing a multicultural dimension into teacher education. We also observed that the fact that students did not show much sensitivity towards dealing with cultural diversity was a factor constraining the success of the interventions. These results highlight the importance of proposing and testing teacher education initiatives aiming at preparing them to teach science in a culturally sensitive manner, and also managing classroom tensions and conflicts so as to make it possible an effective dialogue between different ways of knowing in a multicultural setting.

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Notes

  1. Even though we cannot expand on the issue here, we follow Geertz (1989, p. 5) in his understanding of human culture as “an ordered system of meaning and symbols, in terms of which social interaction takes place.” In these terms, human cultures encompass specific patterns or modes of interaction that mediate the social lives of human beings, many of them involving linguistic mediation.

  2. A ‘quilombola’ is a resident of a ‘Quilombo’. A ‘Quilombo’, in turn, is a community formed by slaves who escaped from farms before the abolition of slavery in Brazil, which happened in 1888. There are still many communities that were created out of Quilombos, where the descendants of slaves developed characteristic cultures.

  3. This is, in fact, quite similar to the conception of ethnobiology found in Berlin (1992).

  4. The didactic material and teaching sequence can be found, in Portuguese, at http://www.ppgefhc.ufba.br/dissertacoes/geilsa2004.pdf.

  5. All passages derived from the students’ interviews or classroom events were freely translated from Portuguese into English by the authors.

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Acknowledgments

We show our gratitude to the school community in which we conducted the study reported here, and, in particular, to the teacher who collaborated with the research. We are also thankful to the farmer students who participated in the study, giving access to the local knowledge about agriculture through the interviews. We are also indebted to Fábio de Souza Ferreira Bandeira, José Geraldo Wanderley Marques, and Claudia Sepulveda for the debates, contributions, and support during the development of this work. The research project has been supported by the State of Bahia Foundation for the Support of Research (FAPESB) and the Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Research Group on History, Philosophy and Biology Teaching—Department of General Biology, Institute of Biology, Federal University of Bahia, Salvador, Bahia, Brazil

    Geilsa Costa Santos Baptista & Charbel Niño El-Hani

  2. Graduate Studies Program in History, Philosophy and Science Teaching, Federal University of Bahia, Salvador, Bahia, Brazil

    Geilsa Costa Santos Baptista & Charbel Niño El-Hani

  3. Graduate Studies Program in History, Philosophy and Science Teaching, State University of Feira de Santana, Feira de Santana, Bahia, Brazil

    Geilsa Costa Santos Baptista & Charbel Niño El-Hani

  4. Department of Education, State University of Feira de Santana, Feira de Santana, Bahia, Brazil

    Geilsa Costa Santos Baptista

  5. Graduate Studies Program in Ecology and Biomonitoring, Federal University of Bahia, Salvador, Bahia, Brazil

    Charbel Niño El-Hani

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  1. Geilsa Costa Santos Baptista
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Correspondence to Charbel Niño El-Hani.

Additional information

This paper is based on a Master’s thesis prepared by Geilsa C. S. Baptista, under the supervision of C. N. El-Hani. The thesis is listed at the end of the paper as Baptista (2007).

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Baptista, G.C.S., El-Hani, C.N. The Contribution of Ethnobiology to the Construction of a Dialogue Between Ways of Knowing: A Case Study in a Brazilian Public High School. Sci & Educ 18, 503–520 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11191-008-9173-3

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