Microbiology education: The case of the SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 pandemic in didactic transposition

Abstract

The school constitutes a privileged setting for learning international scientific knowledge and local socio-economic and political context knowledge. Selecting content to be learned in school is a permanent tension matter of great social and political relevance. The didactic transposition looks at how and when scientific contents ("International scientific knowledge") are selected to be taught in school ("Knowledge to be taught") in the External Didactic Transposition (EDT) process and how this knowledge is taught and learned at school ("Learned knowledge") in the Internal Didactic Transposition (IDT). In the EDT process, policymakers select the knowledge to be taught in schools from international scientific knowledge, creating national school programmes that also serve as textbook guidelines to be used as pedagogical resources in the classroom. These decisions are subject to the influences of several sectors of society, such as politicians, agencies, educators and other stakeholders, and so they take a long time to be established. This work shows how critical social issues such as the SARS-CoV-2 and Covid-19 pandemic could disturb the usual process of didactic transposition. Indeed, usually, there is a considerable period between the emergence of a scientific concept and its appearance in the national curriculum called Didactic Transposition Delay (DTD). Therefore, it was expected that the SARS-CoV-2 and Covid-19 pandemic topics would be added, in the future, to the national curricula and textbooks of most countries. However, being a matter of great social interest, the SARS-CoV-2 and Covid-19 pandemic topic, which emerged in late 2019 and had a massive social impact on the whole planet in 2020, started almost immediately to be a matter of classroom discussions between teachers and students ("learned knowledge"), much time before textbooks were available to support the teaching and learning process and national programmes would be published even much later. Therefore, in this process, there was a shortcut where the SARS-CoV-2 and Covid-19 pandemic topic ("International scientific knowledge") surpassed the curriculum step ("Knowledge to be taught") to be taught in school ("Learned knowledge") at once.