The relationship between science and religion in the education of protestant biology preservice teachers in a Brazilian university

Abstract

In this paper we discuss the results of an investigation aiming at mapping the conceptions of nature of protestant biology preservice teachers in a Brazilian university, State University of Feira de Santana, and elucidating their strategies to manage the coexistence of scientific and religious knowledge. We employ naturalistic semi-structured interviews about conceptualizations of nature to build first person interpretive narratives, which allow us to build a general characterization of the students’ conceptualizations of nature and science, as well as strategies to deal with the coexistence of religious and scientific knowledge. We use students’ personal statements to construct a general description of their religious and scientific upbringing. They are divided in two groups: (a) those with more scientifically compatible worldviews, who often make use of scientific ideas in their narratives about nature and build syntheses between scientific explanatory models and their religious worldviews; and (b) those who do not show evidence of meaningful learning of scientific ideas and are largely inclined to deliberately repudiate scientific knowledge. Our results show the complexity of the relationships between religious and scientific education in the trajectories of these preservice biology teachers.