Strategies for including science museums into supervised chemistry teacher internships

Abstract

Considering the importance of non-school educational spaces to diffusing scientific knowledge, as well as arguments for the inclusion of such spaces into initial teacher education, this study presents four strategies to make them practice field institutions in chemistry teacher licensure programs. Assuming that the modalities of the educational phenomenon can be divided into unsystematic and systematized – whether they be school or non-school forms –, the strategies were named as follows: a) Learning (from) the concept of systematicity; b) The school learns from the museum (or the museum learns from the school); c) The museum in the school; and d) Systematizing non-systematic school education. After describing the strategies, we analyzed reports of chemistry teachers in training. These reports included reflections on the social importance of school and chemical knowledge, and they overcame the technical and practical rationalities by incorporating principles of critical rationality.