Emotions, Feelings, and Conceptualizations in the Didactics of Physics

Abstract

In this chapter we propose the bases of a Didactics of Sciences that takes into account the emotions, feelings and reasoning in the reconstruction of a domain of scientific knowledge. The ideas of Humberto Maturana (1984, 1990, 1991, 1995, 2001) and the developments of Antonio Damasio (1994, 2005) are used, which offer neurobiological support to the relationship between emotions, actions, feelings and reasoning. The theory of conceptual fields of Gérard Vergnaud (1990) is adopted as a theory of cognitive development to study the process of conceptualization in a certain domain of knowledge. Finally we present the example of a didactic sequence to teach the foundations of the Quantum Mechanics for high school student, which has been designed and implemented by using the didactic principles proposed.