Teaching as a Bridge Between Scientific Knowledge at School and Traditional Ecological Knowledge

This paper proposes a new, richer look at education as a bridge between Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) and Scientific Knowledge in Schools (SKS), based on other research. It widens the conceptual descriptions of perspectives found in literature: the assimilationist (focused on SKS), the moral and humanist (focused on the recognition of the other), the plural epistemic and ontological (focused on alternate episteme and the subject) and the contextual (focused on meaning, interpretation, sociocultural aspects of science, TEK). The paper concludes that bridges are open in both directions and that they imply a more complex scenario than described by teachers. A wider understanding of the topic may allow deconstructing the assimilationist perspective and may guide education processes toward developing an interest in the other bridges.