Teoria da deriva dos continentes de Alfred Wegener nos manuais escolares de Ciências Naturais Portugueses

The Alfred Wegener’s theory of Continental Drift revolutionized the Earth Sciences at the beginning of the XX century. This study, part of a larger research project on textbooks, shows how the authors of two books of Natural Sciences of junior high school presented this theory. Therefore, we analyzed the exploitation of the arguments used to validate it, as well as the iconography, the sources of History of Science and the relations between science, technology and society used to their aid. The results showed that the exploratory journey of Continental Drift was similar, although there are some differences in teaching strategies used to explain it. To emphasise the analysis of the palaeontological, palaeoclimatic, lithological and morphological arguments of the Continental Drift, the authors used essentially schematic illustrations. The use of History of Science was intensive and was still present some relations between science, technology and society during the exploration of the theory in a post-positivist nature of science.