Nature of Worldview Presuppositions among Science Teachers in Italy and Brazil

Abstract

The paper re-employs the title of a previous article which reported the worldview presuppositions of Science teachers in Botswana, Indonesia, Japan, Nigeria and the Philippines. There was an interest to perform the same investigation in our countries, namely “Do science teachers in the western world similarly hold such a multiplicity of worldview presuppositions?” For comparison’s sake the same questionnaire was used, although adapted to our cultural contexts. From our investigation two positive points have emerged, or rather, that science teachers in Italy and Brazil hold a multiplicity of worldviews which coexist with the scientific one and that there are some differences between the Italian sample and all the others. More Italian teachers seem to accept scientific (or pseudoscientific) statements and to reject (in this order) magic-mystery, religion and spiritism, and parapsychology-oriented statements. Is it feasible to assign this difference to cultural context?