.

Abstract

Educational perspectives that focus on efficiency and quality indicators within the school, lead the attention away from the complexity of relationships that shape the school as a space where cultural transformation occur. That is to say, a space where individuals, based on their own representations, images, wishes and feelings, get in contact to knowledge and practices historically sanctioned, in order to legitimize, make more dynamic and transform the relationships established with their natural and social world. From the approach described above, this article outlines, in a historical and epistemological perspective, that images and representations of beings, circulating in the leaming of biology, influence the way individuals understand, relate to their environment, and represent the basis for building a complex discourse field of natural and social phenomena.