what is science?

Science is a system that organizes and builds knowledge through testable questions and a structured method that studies and interprets natural , social , and artificial phenomena .  Scientific knowledge is obtained through observation and experimentation in specific fields. This knowledge is organized and classified on the basis of explanatory principles, whether theoretical or practical. From these questions and reasoning are generated. , hypotheses are formulated , scientific principles and laws are deduced , and scientific models , scientific theories and knowledge systems are built by means of a scientific method . 

Science considers and is based on experimental observation . This type of observation is organized through methods, models and theories in order to generate new knowledge. For this, criteria of truth and a research method are previously established. The application of these methods and knowledge leads to the generation of new knowledge in the form of concrete, quantitative and testable predictions referring to past, present and future observations. These predictions can often be formulated through reasoning and structured as general rules or laws, which account for the behavior of a system and predict how the system will act under certain circumstances.

Since the  , scientific knowledge has increased so much that scientists have become specialists, and their  have become very difficult for non-specialists to read.  This has given rise to various  efforts , both to bring science closer to the general public, and to facilitate understanding and collaboration between scientists from different fields.

from the great centers of knowledge development contributes to the permanent split between scholars and laymen.

It seems to me that science and technology must respond not only to the needs of society in order to systematically improve the living conditions of the majority of the population living in situations of extreme poverty, but also that scientific advances -technological must be well used by citizens and for this to be possible they must know, understand and use them appropriately within a given context. In this sense, science education occupies a key place to improve the quality of life and responsible and informed citizen participation in the decisions of the community as a whole

The main theoretical argument that guides this article has to do with the relevance and complexity of communication processes and the use of language,as the main instrument-strategy for teaching and modeling school science or science 'at school'.

 In this way, its purpose is to contribute to the natural sciences teacher having new theoretical and practical elements to support an epistemological position regarding the knowledge that is developed in the classroom and that is transmitted in a 'spoken or written' way as part of school scientific activity. To this end, the components of scientific discourse and explanations constructed by a group of students from a secondary school in Santiago who systematically develop experimental activities are analyzed through an experimental narrative by high school students. Finally, some duly grounded actions and strategies are proposed from the didactic theory, in accordance with enhancing the functions of language in the science class from a realistic pragmatic epistemological orientation.

Currently, many schools and researchers located in metascientific disciplines –such as epistemology, history of science and didactics of natural sciences– conceive science as a human activity of production, evaluation, application and dissemination of knowledge. scholars, immersed in a historical, social and cultural context that gives meaning to the so-called scientific activity, by specifying the purposes of intervention that are pursued and the values that are sustained or at stake, in scientific communities and institutions, whose actions are determined by multiple factors and processes. Hence the enormous importance of including reflection on and on the process of historical construction of scientific

 knowledge in the new curricular projects for teaching natural sciences, highlighting the fact that science must be taught to speak and write with a human sense, which is the support of the naturalized epistemological argumentation (Quintanilla, 2006a).

According to Izquierdo (2001), the natural sciences can be characterized by at least four main dimensions: its essential objective (Why do we want to know, describe and interpret the world?); its methodology (How do the different experiments and theories relate to each other?); its rationale (How and why do theories change throughout human history?) and the nature of scientific representations (Do science tell us anything about the real world?).

From the consolidation of these dimensions in the different curricular approaches to and about science teaching, the most essential thing would be, then, to teach students to think about the diverse situations with which they systematically interact with the physical world. or stuff. If, for example, it is considered that what is most typical of the natural sciences in a textbook is theoretical thinking, the semantic conception of theories allows great flexibility, since we would be talking about achieving the same objective, that is, thinking differently. through the theories although in different contexts, the scientific and the school (Izquierdo, 2001).

In this training scenario, efforts to address the specific problems of 'the discursive communication of science at school' by teachers, with new educational purposes, have been significant and growing in recent decades.

These efforts have been predominantly motivated by practical concerns that circulate around the use of media and new technologies in school work, as well as by the identification and characterization of the metatheoretical representations of science teachers and their incidence in the promotion and consolidation of a new teaching culture of the language of science in the classroom, as specific research on the subject has been pointing out for some time (Candela, 1999; Lemke, 1997; Mortimer, 2000; Ogborn et al., 1998).

We start from the fact that learning science, and with it the specificity of its language, has to do with the complex evolution and differentiation of ideas in the history of science itself, as well as the different points of view of the students against the knowledge that is transmitted in the scientific-communicative activity of

the classroom, but also in the own history of the subject that learns and changes conceptually (Labarrere & Quintanilla, 2006; Nussbaum, 1989).

These developments, permanent and situated in themselves, are only possible through social interaction that has to be theoretically and experientially intended under a certain epistemological status of science, its method, instruments and values (Izquierdo, 2001; Echeverría, 1995).

. It is the language, spoken or written, the means by which thought is expressed and it is communication with others that promotes gradual modifications in the ideas that are expressed and evolve from simple and little elaborated models to models or families of scientific models. more complex and coherent from the 

theories of science as proposed by diverse and solid research by cognitive scientists.The foregoing implies on the part of the teaching staff a serious and rigorous assessment of the 'school discursive activity of science' and of its nature that is transmitted in a 'spoken or written' way on the basis of certain theoretical conceptions that imply, among other things, conceptual categories and meta-scientific status of the didactics of natural sciences (Quintanilla, 2006a).

It is about assuming that the language of science communicated to experts and laymen intends certain ways of understanding the world at a given time, in such a way that it teaches the student to develop cognitive-linguistic skills to understand the knowledge

he learns and stimulate the creativity in the process of modeling science, promoting the evolution of its ideas in a process that does not begin or end with the culture of symbols and the formulas of scientific theories. However, to make the school pedagogical practices of science say is to make a commitment to a theoretical orientation in the sense of the relationships that are woven in them between the teacher's discourse and the ideas expressed by the students. It implies understanding those same practices of the language of science in terms of very complex educational processes, traversed by the status of scientific theories, cultural identities, by the histories of the subjects who teach and learn, by cultural and political matrices.

institutions, among other components. In any case, we are not talking about naive processes of the nature of science and its teaching, since we start from the basis that in them the life of people and social groups is built with some specific epistemological intention but, as stated by Bordieu (2003), also ideological and social. For Bordieu, science refers to a very defined range of problems, whose paradigm or disciplinary matrix1.

it is accepted by an important fraction of scientists who tend to impose themselves on all the others in a continuous and disciplined manner, not only to validate the knowledge built, but also to legitimize the authority of their actions, procedures and convictions.

This undoubtedly makes those who listen to a lecture or read about popular science think that its language is difficult to understand, build and, therefore, to teach 

and learn2.We can say then, without a doubt, that the language of science has to be characterized under an epistemological theoretical domain as an instrument-strategy for the construction of school knowledge that requires a product worked socially and culturally by the teacher or didact. Thus, some questions arise such as the following: What are the most appropriate facts of the real world for the student to develop a theoretical model through the different learning activities, evaluation instruments, images and formal symbols that the ' written science' for example in a textbook? How to give an adequate start to the theoretical thinking of the students and know what are the most appropriate propositions to relate the phenomena of 

the world with said theoretical models in the science class, making them evolve appropriately in the minds of children and young people? What are the most appropriate and consistent evaluation strategies with the chosen science teaching model, to enable the construction of these concepts, making the 'discursive activity' of school science a mediating instrument between the science of scientists and the science that we teach to all young people in Chile, taking into account the heterogeneity and social and cultural diversity of our classrooms?

The 'dogmatic' conceptions about and about the natural sciences and technology have persistently revolved in the orbits of scientists and pedagogues, leaving out the notion of science education based on innovation that derives from the body of research of the metascientific activity of epistemology, the didactics of natural sciences and the history of science. In this regard, I would like to resignify the name of natural sciences as natural sciences of man, appropriating the pragmatic realist vision that we have been holding in other works and research bodies (Izquierdo et al., 2006; Quintanilla et al., 2005; Quintanilla, 2006 ).

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Rev. Educational Thought, Vol. 39, no 2, 2006. pp. 177-204

Science at school: fascinating knowledge to learn to 'read the world' 181 Mario Quintanilla Gatica

 I have raised these ideas in other documents and articles such as the one that was presented in the course The Publics of Science, taught by Dr. Agustí Nieto at the Center for the History of Science of the Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain, in June 2005 with the title: John Dalton and the controversies about chemical atomism in the nineteenth century.

 Consequently, a good school scientific explanation, enhanced through a 'teaching discourse' theoretically grounded from the metasciences, is one that responds