Interculturality and Meaningful Learning: Indigenous Schooling Education in Natural Sciences Teaching

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to analyse the possibility of an intercultural dialogue in Natural Sciences teaching; the study is centered in David Ausubel’s Meaningful Learning Theory and geared to indigenous students. It highlights the concepts that guide the meaningful learning concomitantly to the conceptual pillars of interculturality, treasuring the indigenous knowledge during the entire journey, and also, the premise that Maths and Sciences teaching must take place out of necessity and/or concrete situations. This study points the great didactic conceptual advantage of the utilization of the ethnophysics knowledge to represent and model the main concepts of Natural Sciences, it yet discourses about local conceptions and the pedagogical practices of teachers; the elaboration of an alternative school material contextualized with the indigenous reality, and the comprehension of the process that was fundamental to a meaningful answer of the indigenous students concerning Mathematics and Natural Sciences teaching. Reflections were proposed to enable the Teaching of Mathematics and Natural Sciences from an intercultural perspective, as it brings the possibility of analysis, aiming at the decolonization of knowledge and, therefore, the imagery that supports it.