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Indigenous knowledge is at risk of being lost in many parts of the world. It is important to find ways to preserve it for both cultural and practical reasons, since it is often well-suited to addressing local needs using available resources. If indigenous knowledge can be incorporated into school science curricula, it can also provide familiar contexts within which to learn scientific concepts, as well as helping the younger generation to recognise its value. The purpose of this study was to identify indigenous knowledge that could be related to physics concepts, with a view to integrating it into school curricula. Twenty-nine senior citizens from Chókwé, a rural village in Mozambique, volunteered to participate in two sets of in-depth interviews. The first set of interviews was individual and unstructured in order to explore which aspects of indigenous knowledge might be related to physics concepts. The second set was semi-structured and conducted in small groups in order to probe participants' understanding and application of the identified physics concepts. The results showed that participants had indigenous knowledge that was useful to them in their daily lives and that were applications of thermal physics, static electricity and mechanics concepts. In some cases participants' explanations were aligned to physics explanations, in some cases they were similar to students' alternative conceptions identified in the literature, and in other cases they referred to supernatural phenomena.

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The research is part of science teaching, whose objective is to bring teaching approaches that allow an active participation of the student, allowing the students’ alternative conceptions to be valued, enabling the student to build his/her own knowledge. The research is part of David Ausubel’s theoretical assumptions and was developed in a Mozambican school with 9th grade students. The work emerges as a way to bring alternatives to the traditional method of teaching physics predominantly to the whole world. Two classes of 101 students were submitted to a questionnaire elaborated by the researcher in order to identify the alternative conceptions of the students in the concepts of heat and temperature. Then they were submitted to a didactic intervention on the concepts of heat and temperature using the active methodology in the experimental and traditional class in the control class, at the end a post-test was applied. The results show that the strategy used in the experimental class allowed greater participation of students during classes and also noticed a substantial improvement in the formulation of heat and temperature concepts, having significantly reduced alternative conceptions about these concepts.