Abstract
Despite the importance of evolution to understand living phenomena, evolution teaching confronts several tensions, especially with respect to teachers’ and students’ religious beliefs. These aspects have been widely investigated in the USA and Europe. However, little empirical research has been done on this issue in Latin America, despite their large religious diversity and the currently growing population of Evangelical Christians. This paper aims to fill this gap by exploring Colombian biology teachers’ ideas about the relationship between scientific views and religious ideas, and their evolution teaching practice. We carried out a qualitative multiple case study involving four biology teachers. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews, classroom recordings and discussion group. To analyse teachers’ discourses, we used a hermeneutic-phenomenological method. The results show that (a) there is a close relationship between the views about the science-religion relationships and evolution teaching practices; (b) the religious teachers did not fully assume the worldviews of their specific religions, but rather built a personal version of those worldviews; (c) the nature of each religious tradition was a key element for understanding how the teachers see the relationships between religious and scientific views.
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Data Availability (Data Transparency)
The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
Code Availability (Software Application or Custom Code)
Data were analyzed using Atlas-ti software.
Notes
For many religious people, evolution also conflicts with their views on the origins of life, but this is a confusion, since evolutionary theories do not address this issue, which is an object of other biological theories. Here we strive for not reinforcing this confusion.
The interview passages were freely translated from Spanish into English by the first author of the paper and revised by the other authors.
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Charbel N. El-Hani thanks CNPq (grant number 465767/2014–1) and CAPES (grant number 23038.000776/2017–54) for their support of INCT IN-TREE, to CNPq for support in the form of productivity in research grant (grant number 303011/2017–3), and to CAPES and UFBA for Senior Visiting Researcher Grant included in the CAPES-PRINT Program, which funds his stay in the Centre for Social Studies, University of Coimbra, Portugal (grant number 88887.465540/2019–00).
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Peñaloza, G., El-Hani, C.N. & Mosquera-Suárez, C.J. Between Scientific Ideas and Christian Religious Beliefs. Sci & Educ 30, 931–965 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11191-021-00218-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11191-021-00218-x