Alternative Curriculum

The Alternative Curriculum In Science Education Through Action Research In Educational Institutions Of Colombia

Alfonso Claret Zambrano
Instituto de Educación y Pedagogía, Universidad del Valle
Cali-Colombia,S.A
alfonso.zambrano@correounivalle.edu.co

Abstract

This paper presents a proposal for curricular research in the framework of action research, which aims to show how teachersfrom three high schools in the city of Cali, Colombia, autonomously construct an alternative curriculum for teaching natural sciences. The proposal is obtained as a result of prior planning, monitoring and critical evaluation of it, during curriculum development in-a-period-of-three-years.

1. Introduction

The educational problem that arises is that the teachers in Colombia come from theeducative practice that since 1849 until 1994 has been characterized by conceptual pedagogical and scientific dependency of educational programs provided by the government in order to be implemented in to classroom [5].
The general law of education of 1994, the curricular guidelines in natural science education and environmental education and the basic standards of competence of natural sciencerecognized the intellectual autonomy of the teachers in their professional practice in education in science because they are responsible of their own educative practices [2]. But the teachers continue doing their tasks within the cultural context where they are conceived as the executors of a curricular proposal that has been previously elaborated by others, having few experience in the development ofcurricular proposals in experimental science as an expression of their own professional autonomy in educative institutions and classrooms. Hence, the research question is: How teachers assume autonomously the construction of a Alternative Curriculum proposal in Natural Sciences and environmental education based on the research of their teaching practice in the educative context of the Cali city?This research question requires an explicit concept from education and curriculum in a social context. With this purpose society is conceived as an organization of human beings with particular interests and it is responsible for the representation of their internal structures to make sure the knowledge, values and culture are there for future generations. The representation becomes the centralproblem of a society and it is carried out by two mechanisms that emerge in response to the situation in question: socialization as learning of general social practices by participating in them and education as a special case of socialization [4]. In both cases, the relationship between theory and practice, and the relationship between education and society [3], the curriculum plays a major role,in the first case establishing a bridge between the theoretical principles of an educational project and its effective translation into society in the context of permanent criticism and in the second one as a problem of representation of internal structures of a society in future generations. In this sense, the curriculum is not what it is anticipated as traditionally educational proposes that willbe done at school before being actually done. It is what actually is happening at school from the educational activities planned, the empirical study of its process and their fully justified completion. That is, the curriculum as a field of research covers three areas: planned project, empirical (processed) study and justification (obtained) [6] [7]. What the curricular research proposal inNatural Sciences tends to do is to establish the curriculum that the teacher obtains as a result of planning and processing (developing) through teaching, learning and assessing science in the classroom.
The main aspect, as a central issue, is to know the structure of the discipline, by selecting, teaching, learning and assessing the contents of natural sciences. The second examines and evaluates...