TWENTY-FOUR YEARS TRAINING TEACHERS TO TEACH CHEMISTRY. THE CHALLENGE OF BEING A SCIENCE EDUCATOR

LORENZO, MARÍA GABRIELA

Paris

Congreso; 50th general assembly & 47th IUPAC world chemistry congress; 2019

IUPAC

One of the paramount belongings that teachers have, are their pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) because itallows them to surf ably each lecture, workshop or any class. But this professional knowledge requires a lot ofyears and praxis to be developed. Neither having read or studied about the topic nor having been a researcherare enough to achieve a good PCK level. It is necessary to have dived into the depth of educative practice, tohave faced and overcome its obstacles, to learn to be a teacher.The aim of this work is to review 24 years as a science teacher educator and to discuss some evidences thathave arisen from that. It describes the journey since the beginnings as an organic chemistry teacher untilbecoming a consultant and postgraduate teacher, going through training courses for teacher assistants atuniversity labs, science teaching workshops and courses included in Chemistry and Science meetings. Thestudents of all these activities were faculties (teacher and scientist-researchers at colleges (Biochemistry,Engineering, Chemistry, others) and secondary science teachers. Throughout this time, much data and detailedexperiences were gathered, so several aspects were detected in-service teachers:They often work alone. Their practices are mostly based on their scholar biography and their ownexperiences. They are overly occupied in many responsibilities, so they have not enough time to becomeaction-researchers by themselves. Thus, they need a special environment to share a common space ofcollaboration with colleagues and researchers to conform a learning community to discuss, review and reflectabout their hits and misses.Their training is organized in two very separated branches. One about general pedagogical topics and the otherabout specific subject matter knowledge. Everybody expects the teacher to be the one who must blend bothtypes of knowledge. Hence, one of the best ways to face this dichotomy is to use the model to teach teaching,where specialized science educators instead of scientist or pedagogues are in charge of disciplinary courses, inorder to use significant subject-matter examples.In summary, some real examples will be shown to think about the challenge of undertaking a context-basedteaching to promote a professional teachers´ development considering theories and proposals of the scienceeducation research.