La formazione iniziale degli insegnanti di fisica da una prospettiva culturale

none2noneN. Grimellini Tomasini; O. LevriniN. Grimellini Tomasini; O. Levrin

Editorial : Future-oriented science education for agency and sustainable development

Peer reviewe

L'irriducibile complessità del pensiero scientifico : ostacolo o sfida per la diffusione della cultura scientifica?

none3noneP. Fantini; N. Grimellini Tomasini; O. Levrini O.P. Fantini; N. Grimellini Tomasini; O. Levrini O

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 'teach the future' 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 'futurescaffolding skills', skills that enable people to construct visions of the future that support possible ways of acting in the present with one's eye on the horizon

Exploring students’ epistemological knowledge of models and modelling in science:results from a teaching/learning experience on climate change

The scientific community has been debating climate change for over two decades. In the light of certain arguments put forward by the aforesaid community, the EU has recommended a set of innovative reforms to science teaching such as incorporating environmental issues into the scientific curriculum, thereby helping to make schools a place of civic education. However, despite these European recommendations, relatively little emphasis is still given to climate change within science curricula. Climate change, although potentially engaging for students, is a complex topic that poses conceptual difficulties and emotional barriers, as well as epistemological challenges. Whilst the conceptual and emotional barriers have already been the object of several studies, students\u2019 reactions to the epistemological issues raised by climate changes have so far been rarely explored in science education research and thus are the main focus of this paper. This paper describes a study concerning the implementation of teaching materials designed to focus on the epistemological role of \u2018models and the game of modelling\u2019 in science and particularly when dealing with climate change. The materials were implemented in a course of 15 hours (five 3-hour lessons) for a class of Italian secondary-school students (grade 11; 16\u201317 years old). The purpose of the study is to investigate students\u2019 reactions to the epistemological dimension of the materials, and to explore if and how the material enabled them to develop their epistemological knowledge on models

The challenge of working with the future within STEM education

Global crises and societal uncertainty mean that youth perceive the future no longer as a promise but as a threat, and have difficulty projecting themselves into the future. Future studies and action competence pedagogies partly inform our EU-funded strategic partnership to develop teaching strategies and materials that build future-scaffolding skills. The first teaching module on climate was implemented in June 2017 in Italy, with 24 Finnish, Icelandic and Italian upper secondary school students and their teachers. Qualitative data were analysed to shed light on how the module impacted on students' attitudes toward present and future.Peer reviewe

FEDORA. Excerpts from essays on students’ future perception. Italy

The data set consists of a selection and organization of pre-existing raw data on students’ future perception. This raw data have been collected in Italian implementations of the Erasmus+ project “I SEE” (GA 2016-1-IT02-KA201-024373, https://iseeproject.eu) and consists of more than 100 anonymized essays on “a typical day in 2030 or 2040”. In these essays, 17-19 years old students describe how they imagine their future (the job, the technologies, the social and natural environments). The dataset includes transcriptions of the most relevant parts of “I SEE” essays and the results of their quantitative and qualitative software analysis. The aims of these analyses are to build a framework on students (15-19 years old) perception of the future and to point out markers for assessing eventual changes in students’ perception of the future, through teaching

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).Peer reviewe

The I SEE project : An approach to futurize STEM education

In the world where young people feel that the future is no longer a promise but a threat, and science and technology are sources of fears and global problems, a challenging task for education is to support students in imagining a future for the world and for themselves. The aim of the EU-funded project “I SEE” is to create an approach in science education that addresses the problems posed by global unsustainability, the uncertainty of the future, social liquidity and the irrelevance of STEM education for young people. This way, we believe, STEM education can support young people in projecting themselves into the future as agents and active persons, citizens and professionals, and open their minds to future possibilities. In this paper we propose a teaching and learning approach for futurizing science education, and describe how that approach was used to develop the first I SEE module implemented in summer school in June 2017 with students from three countries. In sum, the I SEE teaching and learning approach consists of three stages and learning outcomes connected to each of them: encountering the focal issue; engaging with the interaction between science ideas and future dimensions, and synthesizing the ideas and putting them into practice. The middle stage of the model is the main part, involving future-oriented practices that turn knowledge into future- scaffolding skills. We describe four kinds of such future-oriented practices: a) activities to flesh out the future-oriented structure of scientific discourse, language and concepts; b) activities inspired by futures studies or by the working life and societal matters; c) exposure activities to enlarge the imagination about possible future STEM careers; and d) action competence activities. We conclude the paper by reflecting on our experiences of the implementation of the climate change module with upper secondary school students.In the world where young people feel that the future is no longer a promise but a threat, and science and technology are sources of fears and global problems, a challenging task for education is to support students in imagining a future for the world and for themselves. The aim of the EU-funded project “I SEE” is to create an approach in science education that addresses the problems posed by global unsustainability, the uncertainty of the future, social liquidity and the irrelevance of STEM education for young people. This way, we believe, STEM education can support young people in projecting themselves into the future as agents and active persons, citizens and professionals, and open their minds to future possibilities. In this paper we propose a teaching and learning approach for futurizing science education, and describe how that approach was used to develop the first I SEE module implemented in summer school in June 2017 with students from three countries. In sum, the I SEE teaching and learning approach consists of three stages and learning outcomes connected to each of them: encountering the focal issue; engaging with the interaction between science ideas and future dimensions, and synthesizing the ideas and putting them into practice. The middle stage of the model is the main part, involving future-oriented practices that turn knowledge into future- scaffolding skills. We describe four kinds of such future-oriented practices: a) activities to flesh out the future-oriented structure of scientific discourse, language and concepts; b) activities inspired by futures studies or by the working life and societal matters; c) exposure activities to enlarge the imagination about possible future STEM careers; and d) action competence activities. We conclude the paper by reflecting on our experiences of the implementation of the climate change module with upper secondary school students.In the world where young people feel that the future is no longer a promise but a threat, and science and technology are sources of fears and global problems, a challenging task for education is to support students in imagining a future for the world and for themselves. The aim of the EU-funded project “I SEE” is to create an approach in science education that addresses the problems posed by global unsustainability, the uncertainty of the future, social liquidity and the irrelevance of STEM education for young people. This way, we believe, STEM education can support young people in projecting themselves into the future as agents and active persons, citizens and professionals, and open their minds to future possibilities. In this paper we propose a teaching and learning approach for futurizing science education, and describe how that approach was used to develop the first I SEE module implemented in summer school in June 2017 with students from three countries. In sum, the I SEE teaching and learning approach consists of three stages and learning outcomes connected to each of them: encountering the focal issue; engaging with the interaction between science ideas and future dimensions, and synthesizing the ideas and putting them into practice. The middle stage of the model is the main part, involving future-oriented practices that turn knowledge into future- scaffolding skills. We describe four kinds of such future-oriented practices: a) activities to flesh out the future-oriented structure of scientific discourse, language and concepts; b) activities inspired by futures studies or by the working life and societal matters; c) exposure activities to enlarge the imagination about possible future STEM careers; and d) action competence activities. We conclude the paper by reflecting on our experiences of the implementation of the climate change module with upper secondary school students.Peer reviewe