Science Education in Classrooms and Qualitative Research in Latin America Page 1 of 25 PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, EDUCATION (oxfordre.com/education). (c) Oxford University Press USA, 2019. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 09 December 2019 Subject: Education, Cultures, and Ethnicities, Research and Assessment Methods, Education and Society Online Publication Date: Sep 2019 DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780190264093.013.353 Science Education in Classrooms and Qualitative Re search in Latin America Antonia Candela and Gabriela Naranjo Summary and Keywords There are several different ways of understanding ethnography. On one extreme there are studies that use certain “ethnographic techniques” for practice observation, and on the other, there is the assumption that it is a complex theoretical-methodological framework that implies an ideological, political, and sociocultural approach, in order to describe the perspective of the participants. A third perspective seeks to broaden the understanding of the complex construction of scientific knowledge in the classroom. Surveys can unearth a clear tension between the etic and emic approaches, each one related to the theoretical- methodological allegiances of their researchers which can be modified somewhat through their findings. A future inquiry into the complex and heterogeneous contexts of Latin American classrooms can suggest a way to bridge macro with micro contexts of different socioeconomic and cultural and political conditions. Other growing topics that could be developed more thoroughly in the future are, for example, the multimodality of communi cation processes within the classroom, and studies on scientific education from an inter cultural perspective, particularly considering the debt we have with the 50 million indige nous people in our region in taking into account their cultural perspectives and contribu tions to knowledge. Keywords: science education, classroom, ethnography, qualitative, Latin America, teachers, students Within Latin America, there is not a strong tradition of ethnographic research in natural science education. Notably, however, there is a growing interest in examining science ed ucation within the classroom through qualitative and interpretive approaches (Erickson, 1986; Rockwell, 2009). In this article we survey research being carried out using these approaches throughout the region, analyzing some of their most important theoretical in fluences, their production contexts, and the specific ways in which they develop their methodologies, within the framework of the historical development of the field. We look at foundational articles that have been published in research journals, omitting books, articles from conference archives, and theses, both because of the difficulties of procuring equitable access to these resources throughout Latin America and because the most influential research results are found in articles. First we selected all of the articles