Making explicit some tensions in educational practice: science education in focus

The relevance of Science Education to the modern world nowadays is the subject of many authors. There are a lot of expected outcomes and also a lot of different perspectives that teachers, researchers and educational policy makers have been using to grasp teaching-learning process and to plan/conduct educational activities in science classrooms. Most of these perspectives are grounded in a logic that is incapable to deal with contradictions reinforcing dichotomies and most of them are unable to properly analyze controversial social issues that are more frequently introduced in sci- ence educational practice. The main consequence of this framework is the emerging apparent oppositions between individual and collective; ontology versus epistemology; alienation versus emancipation. Bearing in mind these cir- cumstances we understand the necessity of a dialectical approach. In this paper we address some of those emerging ten- sions analyzing its consequences to Science Education considering Cultural Historical Activity Theory. To deal with those oppositions we propose three analytical categories for tensions: a) the subject of activity; b) the content of activ- ity; c) the outcome of activity to fully understand the dialectical nature of contradictions.

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