Science and common sense: conceptions of university teachers of physics

Abstract

Naturally, teachers and science communicators often run into the previous knowledge and spontaneous conceptions of their interlocutors. Common sense knowledge that, do not always, agrees with the scientific explanations and conclusions. How to deal with this issue in practice? How do these forms of knowledge can relate? This work presents the results from a research that aims to identify the concepts of physics teachers about these two forms of knowledge inside their difficult relationship in the daily science classrooms. We want to know if the teachers' thoughts approached or distanced from the thought of some theorists who, in our point of view, have shown an interesting solution for this paradoxical question. We consulted 13 Physics Professors linked to various public universities in the State of Paraiba, Brazil, who, from a semi-structured interview, presented their contributions on this interesting and persistent issue.