La inserción de la Astronomía Cultural en la educación formal: fundamentos y propósitos

There are vast educational research works that highlight the serious difficulties that students present in learning astronomical subjects, as well as the prevalence of a traditional education distanced from the observational and experiential, thus accentuating the difficulties detected. We argue that progressive teaching with a topocentric and contextualized approach would favor the motivation of the students, the construction of a more real view of current science and a more active role in the learning process. Cultural Astronomy (CA) is an academic discipline that seeks to understand the multiple ways in which societies relate to celestial objects and phenomena. For this reason, we consider that it would be a powerful resource for teaching, since it provides tools for contextualization and allows working with sky experiences linked to "naked eye astronomy", which requires little or no instruments. It should be noted that CA involves aspects of archaeoastronomy, ethnoastronomy and the history of astronomy, thus offering multiple dimensions to take into account. The present work seeks to base the incorporation of CA studies for astronomy teaching in secondary and tertiary education.