Ethology in natural science teaching. An activity at the zoo as an environmental education model

Abstract

This article pretends to enhance the importance that Ethology should have in a Natural Science syllabus as much as in Secondary Education as in the future one. The difficulties that arise in the new curricula for its development should standd out. We propose to use the contents of animal behaviour as organizer of the most general ones in zoology as its academic and social interest to be able to reach the aims in environmental education. We would also like to make clear the need to detect preactitudes among the students (apart from preconcepts) as to the process of teaching how to learn in zoology. Finally, we meticulously describe an activity about animal behaviour at a COU level developed in a Zoo as a model of environmental education in a urban setting. We finish with the transcriptions of a medley of fragments of resumés made by students of a grammar school.