Making sense of youth futures narratives: Recognition of emerging tensions in students' imagination of the future

In this era of great uncertainty, imagining the future may be challenging, especially for young people. In science education, the interest in future-oriented education is now emerging, research needs, however, to keep eyes on youngsters' future perceptions and on the development of a future literacy. In this article, starting from a sample of individual students' narratives about their future daily life in 2040, we aim to delineate which ways of grappling with the future can be observed in the essays and which methodological tools are suited to operationalize their identification and characterization. The analysis led to the definition of "polarization" and "complexification" attitudes that represent the ways in which the students' narratives are positioned with respect to a bunch of dichotomies: personal-societal, functional-aesthetics oriented, good-bad, natural-artificial, and certain-uncertain. Moreover, with this study, we provide a contribution to the methodological reflection that deals with the collection and analysis of data, when students' future perceptions need to be investigated. Discussing the limits of the current data collection tool, we introduce the design of a SenseMaker (R) questionnaire which contributed to feeding a collaboration with #OurFutures project, recently launched by the European Commission to collect future narratives all around Europe

Exploring the boundaries in an interdisciplinary context through the Family Resemblance Approach: The Dialogue Between Physics and Mathematics

Among the relevant aspects of the family resemblance approach (FRA), our study focuses on the potential of the approach to elaborate on disciplinary identities in an interdisciplinary context, specifically regarding the interplay between physics and mathematics. We present and discuss how the FRA wheel can be used and intertwined with the framework of boundary objects and boundary crossing mechanisms (Akkerman & Bakker, Review of Educational Research, 81, 132–169, 2011), which is well-known in STEM education for dealing with interdisciplinarity. The role of the FRA discussed in the article is dual: both practical and theoretical. It is practical in that we show how its use, in combination with the Akkerman and Bakker framework, appears effective in fostering productive discussions among prospective teachers on disciplinary identities and interdisciplinarity in historical cases. It is theoretical in that the combination of the two frameworks provides the vocabulary to characterise the ‘ambiguous nature’ of interdisciplinarity: like boundaries, interdisciplinarity both separates disciplines, making their identities emerge, and connects them, fostering mechanisms of crossing and transgressing the boundaries. This empirical study reveals how the theoretical elaboration took advantage of the prospective teachers’ contributions. We initially presented the FRA to characterise disciplinary identities, but the prospective teachers highlighted its potential to characterise also the boundary zone and the dialogue between physics and mathematics. The data analysis showed that the combination of the two frameworks shaped a complex learning space where there was room for very different epistemic demands of the prospective teachers: from those who feel better within the identity cores of the disciplines, to those who like to inhabit the boundary zone and others who like to re-shape boundary spaces and move dynamically across them

04 - Case studies : I SEE project

In this document we report the main research-based studies we carried out in order to monitor the impact of the I SEE modules on students’ learning and on students’ perception of the future. The case studies have been developed through the analysis of both quantitative and qualitative data collected by means of a multiplicity of tools: questionnaires, individual interviews, collective discussions, tutorials, audio/video records, specific grids and board diaries for observations. The specific tools for data collection have been chosen and designed to cover both individual development and collective dynamics. In order to guarantee the credibility, reliability and robustness of the data analysis and the results, a detailed description of the whole analytic work will be carried out and documented in this report for each case. Data have been collected during the two-round I SEE module implementations (“start-up I SEE module” O1 and the “I SEE modules” O2). The main results discussed here concern the data collected during the implementation of the start-up I SEE module (O1) in the Summer School (C1). In Chapter 3 we include the results about the analysis of data collected during the implementation of I SEE module on quantum computing (O2) in Finland; moreover, we refer here to the list of these developed at the University of Bologna and the University of Helsinki about the project. The analysis of the case studies translates into finding a way to not only explain what happens in the implementation of an I SEE module, but also what conditions are needed to overcome obstacles and maximise the probabilities of repeating successful experiences in different contexts. Moreover, the results allow to argue in deep detail what learning outcomes and skills can be developed through the implementation of the I SEE modules and how a teacher can reveal, monitor and evaluate them. The main results, indeed, of the whole process of investigation has been the list of the markers that can reveal the impact of students’ perception of the future (the widening and approaching markers) (see case study #1,2,3) and the markers that operationally define the future-scaffolding skills (see case study #3). The case studies are the basis for research papers that have been presented in national and international conferences and submitted to journals in science and mathematics education or to journals in the learning sciences. The published papers are reported in the Annexes

Developing future-scaffolding skills through science education

Can science teaching contribute to developing skills for managing uncertainty towards the future and projecting imagination forwards? If so, how? In this paper, we outline an approach to \u2018teach the future\u2019 through science education. In the first part, we describe a framework that has been constructed to orient the design of teaching modules comprised of future-oriented educational activities. Then, a teaching module on climate change is described. The module was tested in a class of upper secondary school in Italy (grade12) and the main results are reported. They concern a change in perception of the future, as revealed by students: from far and unimaginable, the future became conceivable as a set of possibilities, addressable through concrete actions and within their reach, in the sense that they became able to view themselves as agents of their own future. The results lead us to argue that the approach appears promising in developing \u2018futurescaffolding skills\u2019, skills that enable people to construct visions of the future that support possible ways of acting in the present with one\u2019s eye on the horizon

Identification of markers of Progressive Multifocal Leukoencephalopathy clinical evolution: molecular characterization of JC Virus genome isolated in Cerebrospinal Fluid of HIV+ and HIV- PML patients

Background/ Objectives: Due to the HAART use, the prognosis of Progressive Multifocal Leukoencephalopathy (PML) has changed and has become variable, and thus reliable and easy-to-use markers of PML clinical evolution are needed. The purpose of our study was to determine whether or not specific amino acid substitutions in the genomic region encoding Viral Protein 1 (VP1) outer loops, Transcriptional Control Region (TCR) rearrangements and viral load of JC Virus (JCV), isolated from Cerebrospinal Fluid (CSF) of patients with different forms of PML, could be associated with the progression of the disease. Methods: In the CSF collected from 20, both HIV+ and HIV-, PML patients (9 Fast Progressors-FP- and 11 Slow Progressors-SP), JCV viral load was evaluated by means of specific RealTime PCR. In addition, JCV TCR was isolated in CSF collected from 15 patients, and sequenced by direct nucleotide sequencing, while JCV VP1 outer loops were amplified in CSF collected from 7 patients, cloned, sequenced and analysed using the ExPASy software. Results: JCV viral load was significantly higher (p<0.001) in CSF of FP PML patients (5.51 log copies/ml) than in CSF of SP PML patients (4.14 log copies/ml). All the JCV strains isolated from CSF of SP PML patients showed specific amino acid mutations at four defined hot spots in the VP1 genomic region encoding the outer loops. No significant association was identified between TCR rearrangements and PML clinical evolution. Conclusions: Taken together, the results confirm that high CSF JCV viral load is predictive of poor outcome of PML patients, whereas some specific polymorphisms of VP1 loops are associated with longer survival of patients. Among slow progressors, mutation at Arg-75, recently suggested to be involved in cell recognition and resulting in non-viable virus, is highly frequent. Thus we could hypothesize that the alteration at the defined hot spots determines a decrease in the viral activity and a slow progression of the diseas

The Present Shock and Time Re-appropriation in the Pandemic Era : Missed Opportunities for Science Education

The crisis due to the COVID-19 pandemic led most people all over the world to deal with a change in their perception and organization of time. This happened also, and mainly, within the educational institutions, where students and teachers had to rearrange their teaching/learning dynamics because of the forced education at a distance. In this paper, we present an exploratory qualitative study with secondary school students aimed to investigate how they were experiencing their learning during lockdown and how, in particular, learning of science contributed to rearranging their daily lifetime rituals. In order to design and carry out our investigation, we borrowed constructs coming from a research field rather unusual for science education: the field of sociology of time. The main result concerns the discovery of the potential of the dichotomy between alienation from time and time re-appropriation. The former is a construct elaborated by the sociologist Hartmut Rosa to describe the society of acceleration in the “era of future shock”. The latter represents an elaboration of the construct of appropriation that the authors had operationally defined, starting from Bakhtin’s original idea, to describe the nexus between physics learning and identity. Thanks to the elaboration of the notion of time re-appropriation as feature of the “era of present shock”, the study unveils how school science, instead of preparing the young to navigate our fast-changing and complex society, tends to create “bubbles of rituals” that detach learning from societal concern

Recognition and operationalization of Future-Scaffolding Skills: Results from an empirical study of a teaching–learning module on climate change and futures thinking

This article takes its point of departure from the younger generation's problematic relationship with time and the future. A general sense of changeability and directionlessness in society compromises young people's confidence in themselves to make a difference as individuals in important global issues affecting their futures, such as climate change. Given recent aims and commitments of science education to promote sustainable development and student agency, this study explores how science teaching can help students imagine and face possible future scenarios and develop agency in the present to influence them. This article presents a science education approach to equip secondary school students with skills of futures thinking and agency that we call “future-scaffolding skills.” It also shows the process of building an operational definition for recognizing those skills in students' discourse and actions. For this purpose, an empirical study was carried out in the context of a teaching–learning module on climate change, consisting of activities inspired by the field of futures studies. Essays, individual and group interviews, questionnaires, and video recordings of students' final projects were collected from 24 students (16–19-years old) from three European countries. The results contribute to operationally defining “future-scaffolding skills,” consisting of “structural skills” (the ability to recognize temporal, logical and causal relationships and build systemic views) and “dynamical skills” (the ability to navigate scenarios, relating local details to global views, past to present and future, and individual to collective actions)