Restriction and extension of knowledge in the scientific disciplines at high school level: subtleties of an “epistomology of frontiers”

Abstract

The teaching of scientific disciplines has presented itself, for a long time, as a fragmentary pedagogical practice that has been fundamented on assumptions of segmentations between the various fields of natural and exact sciences, which are transferred to school curricula, since elementary school teaching. The explanatory nexus to the multiple forms through which such a fragmentation perpetuates itself in the pedagogical process have not yet been the object of much research on this area. This article contributes to the elucidation of these processes with the investigation of teachers’ thought about this problematic (particularly at high school level), as well as about the more subtle aspects that delineate and support the fragmentation forms and the isolation of the scientific disciplines in the school curriculum, a phenomenom that can be characterized as an authentic “epistemology of frontiers”.