What knowledge future teachers mobilize in order to explain the model of infection by tb?

Abstract

This study tries to make an original contribution to the research on modelling in the context of health issues in pre-service primary teacher education. We address some results of a teaching sequence about TB that uses an approach based on science learning as participation in the scientific practices. The episode of TB infection suffered by the participants (N=61) is used as a context for the design of the activities. The research questions are: a) what knowledge future teachers mobilize in order to explain the model of infection by TB? b) to what extent the knowledge mobilized by the participants change after the construction of the TB model? The knowledge applied by the participants for the construction of the TB model is distributed in three categories: scientific, based on personal experiences and drawn from the media. The last one plays a central role in the explanation of the stage 2 about the immune response. The meaning constructed around some notions such as vaccine, immune response and lymphocyte change along the modelling task achieving the scientific ones, which emphasizes the importance of promoting this type of modelling-based task for health literacy.