Giulia Tasquier is a Post-doc fellow in Physics Education at the Department of Physics and Astronomy of the University of Bologna, Italy. She got her PhD at the University of Palermo in History and Education of Mathematics, Physics and Chemistry, curriculum in Physics Education, with a thesis titled “Leading secondary school students to face the disciplinary, epistemological and societal challenges of climate change: design and analysis of multi-dimensional teaching/learning experiences”. Her research interests include: Design and implementation of innovative teaching materials on modern physics and socio-scientific issue (thermodynamics, climate change); The correlation between knowledge and behaviour in climate change; The role of epistemological knowledge on models and modelling in teaching/learning physics; Qualitative methods of data analysis; Development of strategies, tools and activities for transforming scientific knowledge into transversal skills about future.
From more than 10 years, the European Union recommends significant reforms for science teaching a... more From more than 10 years, the European Union recommends significant reforms for science teaching at school in order to include environmental issues in the scientific curricula. As Osborne and Dillon argue in an important European Report (Science Education in Europe: Critical Reflections. A Report to the Nuffield Foundation, 2008), although climate change is one of the five major problems facing humanity in the coming century, there is still little emphasis within the science curriculum on discussion or analysis of environmental issues. In this paper a pilot study is presented and discussed. It focuses on the issue of climate change (global warming and the greenhouse effect) carried out with secondary school students as part of the Italian National Project for Scientific Degrees (Piano Nazionale Lauree Scientifiche). During the pilot study some data on students\u2019 reactions to the materials were collected. The data were analyzed with the aim of gathering feedback and planning a tea...
Dealing with the threatening challenges and profound changes that characterise our era requires t... more Dealing with the threatening challenges and profound changes that characterise our era requires the development of knowledge and skills to navigate the uncertainty and complexity of science as part of society and everyday life. How can we support school students in transforming the base of knowledge and experiences to face the ongoing crises and contribute as individuals, citizens, and active participants in a democratic society to enable the transformation that is called for? We address this broader question through a study framed within the Horizon 2020 project titled Science Education for Action and Engagement toward Sustainability (SEAS), aimed at promoting new forms of scientific literacy and skills to empower students to become agents of change. Most centrally, SEAS aims at incorporating a transformative dimension that is often lacking in current conceptions of scientific literacy. In SEAS, school and school science are conceived as involving learning and transformation across...
Involvement in climate change has been proven to be hindered by emotional and social barriers, as... more Involvement in climate change has been proven to be hindered by emotional and social barriers, as well as by conceptual difficulties that students may encounter in dealing with scientific content related to particular issues such as the greenhouse effect. In this study, we start from the conjecture that behind many conceptual difficulties and emotional barriers lie particular epistemological obstacles related to a naive and stereotypical view of science. These include, in particular, the belief that science still has the role and power to provide a unique, unquestionable, and certain explanation of events and processes. Such a naive idea clashes strongly with the intrinsic complexity of climate science. This paper sets out to investigate if and how the improvement of epistemological knowledge can influence behavioural habits and foster students’ engagement in climate change. In order to explore such an issue, we focus on five interviews collected at the end of a teaching experience ...
In this era of great uncertainty, imagining the future may be challenging, especially for young p... more 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...
How can physics teaching contribute to developing competencies for pushing imagination forward an... more How can physics teaching contribute to developing competencies for pushing imagination forward and to manage, rationally and emotionally, students\u2019 uncertainty about the future? In this talk, we address this question by presenting a teaching module on climate change that has been designed to develop what we termed \u201cfuture-scaffolding skills.\u201d The notion includes concepts that came from the science of complex systems and that can be turned into abilities to construct visions of the future that support possible ways of acting in the present with one\u2019s eye on the horizon. We refer, for example, to the concepts of "space of possibilities," "future scenarios," "projection instead of deterministic prediction," \u201cfeedback and circular causality.\u201d Our notion of \u201cfuture-scaffolding skills\u201d includes also transversal skills that labour market requires and that, meanwhile, can support students to push imagination toward the future. Futurescaffolding skills include, for example: strategic thinking and planning, risk taking, possibilities thinking, managing uncertainty, creative thinking, modelling and argumentation. In the talk, we will present the module, as well as the pilot study we carried out to test if the module effectively impacted students\u2019 views of future. The study has been carried out in a class of 24 students (17 years old) from a scientifically-oriented secondary school in Italy (grade 12). The main result concerns the change in the perception of future that students\u2019 discourse reveals: from far and unimaginable, it became thinkable as a bunch of possibilities, addressable through concrete actions and at their reach, in the sense that they found room to see themselves agents of their own future. The positive results inspired the Erasmus + Project \u201cI SEE \u2013 Inclusive STEM education to Enhance the capacity to aspire and to imagine future careers\u201d, that started in September 2016 and involves 7 partners from 4 different countries
Science Education Research For Evidence-based Teaching and Coherence in Learning, 2014
This paper examines the relationship between classroom discourse and a particular kind of learnin... more This paper examines the relationship between classroom discourse and a particular kind of learning, termed appropriation, that encompasses both the mastery of disciplinary content as well as situating one's learning in wide and personal projects of intellectual and emotional growth. Our analysis focuses on data collected during an extended teaching/learning path on thermodynamics that took place in a scientifically oriented high school in Italy. Previous analysis of this data corpus resulted in the generation of an operationalizable definition of appropriation. We build upon this work here in beginning to elaborate the relationship between classroom discourse and individual cases of appropriation. In interviews, the teacher of this class used a metaphor of " pulling the rope and letting it go " to describe: (1) How she managed the pace of collective construction of knowledge i.e., keeping the whole class tuned (pulling the rope) and (2) Introducing variations in the rhythm of the discussions so as to allow students with different styles of learning to engage (letting it go). This combination of " pulling the rope " and " letting it go " was conjectured to be instrumental in supporting appropriation. Here we investigate this conjecture by studying two contrasting lessons in which the teacher (A) " pulled the rope " and (B) " let it go. " We created maps of the structure and dynamics of each lesson to gain insight into particular macro features that distinguished the two lessons (e.g., patterns of turn-taking, fluctuations in pace of the discussions, etc.) Finally, we zoomed in on the way the participation of particular focal students was structured with an eye toward uncovering aspects particularly relevant for understanding individual processes of appropriation.
New Perspectives in Science Education : 22-23 marzo, 2018
Within the research literature in STEM education, documented difficulties concern the epistemolog... more Within the research literature in STEM education, documented difficulties concern the epistemological issues arisen by the relationship between the technical aspects of mathematical models and the empirical reality. The transition from classical to quantum physics makes this aspect more problematic because of the need to give up familiar images or space-time descriptions. These problems were addressed by designing and implementing a teaching/learning path whose design principles cohere with the theoretical construct of 'Appropriation'. In this paper, we focus on a case study built on the analysis of an interview in which a female student expressed a problematic position towards mathematical reasoning in physics. The analysis of the student's discourse is based on Habermas's rationality construct. We show both the productiveness and the limits of her forms of epistemic rationality in appropriating quantum physics. The teaching/learning of quantum physics (QP) is an articulated educational issue in which sophisticated mathematical models are intertwined with epistemological obstacles [1][2]. Even more than in classical physics (CP), QP requires to pose and discuss questions like "What does the model represent? Where and how do the mathematical outputs of the model relate to reality? ". The use of mathematical models in science is often an obstacle because of their abstractness. In the transition from CP to QP this aspect becomes more problematic, because the criticalities associated to the observation and visualization of quantum phenomena. The research group in STEM education of the University of Bologna developed an educational reconstruction that problematizes the epistemological and metacognitive issues that characterize the mathematical models used in QP [1][2]. One of the main goals of the path was to promote a process of 'Appropriation' through which students are encouraged to attribute personal meanings to words and expressions of scientific discourse, loading them with nuances which reflect their epistemological positions [3]. Since Appropriation is strictly related to the formation of identity in a lifelong learning perspective, it is also relevant for adult learning, both for formal and informal contexts. Indeed, by using Appropriation is possible to design activities based on authentic scientific concepts in order to develop not only knowledge but also skills that are relevant for facing the complex problems of this century [4]. The path was experimented with high-school students. The main goal of this paper is to show the emergence of the games between different epistemic rationalities in students' discourses. We focus on a specific case study built up on the analysis of a student's interview, carried out by adapting a model based on Habermas' construct of epistemic rationality, which can be applied to scientific discourses requiring the validation of statements. 2. Framework and research problem The construct of rationality, introduced by Habermas in 1998 in reference to discursive practice, was adapted to the investigation of mathematical activity in educational contexts [5]. In this paper, we focus
Excellence in Education 2012: Theory-Research-Practice, 2012
Gifted to science students in Italy can choose to attend an experimental curriculum within a type... more Gifted to science students in Italy can choose to attend an experimental curriculum within a type of school called Liceo Scientifico. There, they are exposed to a broad curriculum including classical and modern physics. Yet, the framework of school and the young age of students, curious and thirsty for knowledge, pose a challenge to their teachers to encourage students' engagement in the course beyond a mere coverage of a longer than usual list of disciplinary contents. Such students if adequately stimulated show to be interested in a big picture of physics knowledge and its philosophical underpinnings. Facing this challenge, we believe that dealing with physics knowledge as a special culture may provide a suitable tool to answer this intellectual challenge. The recently introduced framework of knowledge, discipline-culture (DC) , seemed to us appropriate to engage students in this new to them perspective on physics knowledge, and we decided to perform a pilot study. In two special meetings (lecture and discussion) accompanied with home questionnaires we addressed three classes in two such schools \u2013 grades 11, 12, 13 (ages 16, 17, 18 in accordance), N=54. The lectures represented the evolution of knowledge about light (optics) as a diachronic scientific discourse framed in four fundamental theories \u2013 rays, particles, waves and photons \u2013 each possessing DC structure. Scientific knowledge appeared as a polyphonic dialogue of ideas corresponding to the Cultural Content Knowledge. The reactions of the students to the argument and evidence physicists mounted in history revealed emotional involvement and intellectual resonance in much wider spectrum of topics than expected. Students' veracity of views, nuances and perceptions were documented. We could infer about the high potential of vista-point lectures in science teaching seeking the way of engaging talented, curious and creative students. We will briefly describe the innovative approach and some students' responses
The EU-project I SEE aims at facing young’s difficulties in imagining their future from the persp... more The EU-project I SEE aims at facing young’s difficulties in imagining their future from the perspective of STEM education, assuming that STEM disciplines provide both epistemological and technical tools to deal with cross-cutting and societally relevant topics and to scaffold students’ approaches to the future. Within the project, the Italian community designed and implemented an interdisciplinary module on Artificial Intelligence for high school students. The data analysis revealed that the students were intellectually and emotionally engaged by the richness and the interdisciplinarity of this module, which encouraged them to become agents in the present in order to face future challenges.
In the world where young people feel that the future is no longer a promise but a threat, and sci... more 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 teac...
Il volume - a cura di Margherita Venturi e di M. Venturi, Barbara Pecori, Giulia Tasquier, Paola ... more Il volume - a cura di Margherita Venturi e di M. Venturi, Barbara Pecori, Giulia Tasquier, Paola Govoni, Michelangelo Rocchetti, Cinzia Bernardi, Paola Ambrogi, Edoardo Giuliani, Federico Plazzi - è uno dei risultati conseguiti nell'ambito del progetto europeo IRRESISTIBLE. E' possibile insegnare le scienze in modo nuovo, introducendo nei programmi scolastici temi di ricerca d'avanguardia e sviluppando nei giovani la consapevolezza delle relazioni esistenti tra ricerca scientifica e società? Il progetto IRRESISTIBLE (Università di Bologna) dimostra che, con l'aiuto di scienziati e ricercatori e con l'ausilio di metodologie didattiche innovative, non solo si tratta di una strada percorribile, ma anche che i risultati sono ottimi; gli studenti hanno, infatti, scoperto che la scienza non è qualche cosa da studiare sui libri, ma una componente essenziale e ineludibile della nostra vita quotidiana.
Global crises and societal uncertainty mean that youth perceive the future no longer as a promise... more 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.
Contributions from Science Education Research, 2019
The paper is framed within a broader research programme aimed at investigating how science educat... more The paper is framed within a broader research programme aimed at investigating how science education can enhance the formation of what we call future-scaffolding skills: the abilities to construct visions of the future that support possible ways of acting in the present with one’s eye on the horizon. To this end, we designed a module (targeted at secondary school students) on climate change, focused on causal modelling in science of complex systems and enriched with future-oriented activities. The study presented here reports on the second implementation of the module, carried out in a weekly summer school for a mixed class of 39 voluntary high school students (17–18 years old) from different secondary schools in Italy. The results confirm trends already observed in a previous pilot study: the present evolves from being perceived as a frantic standstill to becoming viewed as a collection of events that can be organized in a comprehensible picture; the future from being distant and unimaginable becomes instead conceivable as a set of possibilities, addressable through concrete actions and within the students’ reach (in the sense that they found room to see themselves as agents of their own future). Moreover, the analysis contributes to our theoretical reflection on future-scaffolding skills, by highlighting specific structural and dynamical skills that can be developed and recognized in the implementation of our modules.
The crisis due to the COVID-19 pandemic led most people all over the world to deal with a change ... more 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 so...
From more than 10 years, the European Union recommends significant reforms for science teaching a... more From more than 10 years, the European Union recommends significant reforms for science teaching at school in order to include environmental issues in the scientific curricula. As Osborne and Dillon argue in an important European Report (Science Education in Europe: Critical Reflections. A Report to the Nuffield Foundation, 2008), although climate change is one of the five major problems facing humanity in the coming century, there is still little emphasis within the science curriculum on discussion or analysis of environmental issues. In this paper a pilot study is presented and discussed. It focuses on the issue of climate change (global warming and the greenhouse effect) carried out with secondary school students as part of the Italian National Project for Scientific Degrees (Piano Nazionale Lauree Scientifiche). During the pilot study some data on students\u2019 reactions to the materials were collected. The data were analyzed with the aim of gathering feedback and planning a tea...
Dealing with the threatening challenges and profound changes that characterise our era requires t... more Dealing with the threatening challenges and profound changes that characterise our era requires the development of knowledge and skills to navigate the uncertainty and complexity of science as part of society and everyday life. How can we support school students in transforming the base of knowledge and experiences to face the ongoing crises and contribute as individuals, citizens, and active participants in a democratic society to enable the transformation that is called for? We address this broader question through a study framed within the Horizon 2020 project titled Science Education for Action and Engagement toward Sustainability (SEAS), aimed at promoting new forms of scientific literacy and skills to empower students to become agents of change. Most centrally, SEAS aims at incorporating a transformative dimension that is often lacking in current conceptions of scientific literacy. In SEAS, school and school science are conceived as involving learning and transformation across...
Involvement in climate change has been proven to be hindered by emotional and social barriers, as... more Involvement in climate change has been proven to be hindered by emotional and social barriers, as well as by conceptual difficulties that students may encounter in dealing with scientific content related to particular issues such as the greenhouse effect. In this study, we start from the conjecture that behind many conceptual difficulties and emotional barriers lie particular epistemological obstacles related to a naive and stereotypical view of science. These include, in particular, the belief that science still has the role and power to provide a unique, unquestionable, and certain explanation of events and processes. Such a naive idea clashes strongly with the intrinsic complexity of climate science. This paper sets out to investigate if and how the improvement of epistemological knowledge can influence behavioural habits and foster students’ engagement in climate change. In order to explore such an issue, we focus on five interviews collected at the end of a teaching experience ...
In this era of great uncertainty, imagining the future may be challenging, especially for young p... more 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...
How can physics teaching contribute to developing competencies for pushing imagination forward an... more How can physics teaching contribute to developing competencies for pushing imagination forward and to manage, rationally and emotionally, students\u2019 uncertainty about the future? In this talk, we address this question by presenting a teaching module on climate change that has been designed to develop what we termed \u201cfuture-scaffolding skills.\u201d The notion includes concepts that came from the science of complex systems and that can be turned into abilities to construct visions of the future that support possible ways of acting in the present with one\u2019s eye on the horizon. We refer, for example, to the concepts of "space of possibilities," "future scenarios," "projection instead of deterministic prediction," \u201cfeedback and circular causality.\u201d Our notion of \u201cfuture-scaffolding skills\u201d includes also transversal skills that labour market requires and that, meanwhile, can support students to push imagination toward the future. Futurescaffolding skills include, for example: strategic thinking and planning, risk taking, possibilities thinking, managing uncertainty, creative thinking, modelling and argumentation. In the talk, we will present the module, as well as the pilot study we carried out to test if the module effectively impacted students\u2019 views of future. The study has been carried out in a class of 24 students (17 years old) from a scientifically-oriented secondary school in Italy (grade 12). The main result concerns the change in the perception of future that students\u2019 discourse reveals: from far and unimaginable, it became thinkable as a bunch of possibilities, addressable through concrete actions and at their reach, in the sense that they found room to see themselves agents of their own future. The positive results inspired the Erasmus + Project \u201cI SEE \u2013 Inclusive STEM education to Enhance the capacity to aspire and to imagine future careers\u201d, that started in September 2016 and involves 7 partners from 4 different countries
Science Education Research For Evidence-based Teaching and Coherence in Learning, 2014
This paper examines the relationship between classroom discourse and a particular kind of learnin... more This paper examines the relationship between classroom discourse and a particular kind of learning, termed appropriation, that encompasses both the mastery of disciplinary content as well as situating one's learning in wide and personal projects of intellectual and emotional growth. Our analysis focuses on data collected during an extended teaching/learning path on thermodynamics that took place in a scientifically oriented high school in Italy. Previous analysis of this data corpus resulted in the generation of an operationalizable definition of appropriation. We build upon this work here in beginning to elaborate the relationship between classroom discourse and individual cases of appropriation. In interviews, the teacher of this class used a metaphor of " pulling the rope and letting it go " to describe: (1) How she managed the pace of collective construction of knowledge i.e., keeping the whole class tuned (pulling the rope) and (2) Introducing variations in the rhythm of the discussions so as to allow students with different styles of learning to engage (letting it go). This combination of " pulling the rope " and " letting it go " was conjectured to be instrumental in supporting appropriation. Here we investigate this conjecture by studying two contrasting lessons in which the teacher (A) " pulled the rope " and (B) " let it go. " We created maps of the structure and dynamics of each lesson to gain insight into particular macro features that distinguished the two lessons (e.g., patterns of turn-taking, fluctuations in pace of the discussions, etc.) Finally, we zoomed in on the way the participation of particular focal students was structured with an eye toward uncovering aspects particularly relevant for understanding individual processes of appropriation.
New Perspectives in Science Education : 22-23 marzo, 2018
Within the research literature in STEM education, documented difficulties concern the epistemolog... more Within the research literature in STEM education, documented difficulties concern the epistemological issues arisen by the relationship between the technical aspects of mathematical models and the empirical reality. The transition from classical to quantum physics makes this aspect more problematic because of the need to give up familiar images or space-time descriptions. These problems were addressed by designing and implementing a teaching/learning path whose design principles cohere with the theoretical construct of 'Appropriation'. In this paper, we focus on a case study built on the analysis of an interview in which a female student expressed a problematic position towards mathematical reasoning in physics. The analysis of the student's discourse is based on Habermas's rationality construct. We show both the productiveness and the limits of her forms of epistemic rationality in appropriating quantum physics. The teaching/learning of quantum physics (QP) is an articulated educational issue in which sophisticated mathematical models are intertwined with epistemological obstacles [1][2]. Even more than in classical physics (CP), QP requires to pose and discuss questions like "What does the model represent? Where and how do the mathematical outputs of the model relate to reality? ". The use of mathematical models in science is often an obstacle because of their abstractness. In the transition from CP to QP this aspect becomes more problematic, because the criticalities associated to the observation and visualization of quantum phenomena. The research group in STEM education of the University of Bologna developed an educational reconstruction that problematizes the epistemological and metacognitive issues that characterize the mathematical models used in QP [1][2]. One of the main goals of the path was to promote a process of 'Appropriation' through which students are encouraged to attribute personal meanings to words and expressions of scientific discourse, loading them with nuances which reflect their epistemological positions [3]. Since Appropriation is strictly related to the formation of identity in a lifelong learning perspective, it is also relevant for adult learning, both for formal and informal contexts. Indeed, by using Appropriation is possible to design activities based on authentic scientific concepts in order to develop not only knowledge but also skills that are relevant for facing the complex problems of this century [4]. The path was experimented with high-school students. The main goal of this paper is to show the emergence of the games between different epistemic rationalities in students' discourses. We focus on a specific case study built up on the analysis of a student's interview, carried out by adapting a model based on Habermas' construct of epistemic rationality, which can be applied to scientific discourses requiring the validation of statements. 2. Framework and research problem The construct of rationality, introduced by Habermas in 1998 in reference to discursive practice, was adapted to the investigation of mathematical activity in educational contexts [5]. In this paper, we focus
Excellence in Education 2012: Theory-Research-Practice, 2012
Gifted to science students in Italy can choose to attend an experimental curriculum within a type... more Gifted to science students in Italy can choose to attend an experimental curriculum within a type of school called Liceo Scientifico. There, they are exposed to a broad curriculum including classical and modern physics. Yet, the framework of school and the young age of students, curious and thirsty for knowledge, pose a challenge to their teachers to encourage students' engagement in the course beyond a mere coverage of a longer than usual list of disciplinary contents. Such students if adequately stimulated show to be interested in a big picture of physics knowledge and its philosophical underpinnings. Facing this challenge, we believe that dealing with physics knowledge as a special culture may provide a suitable tool to answer this intellectual challenge. The recently introduced framework of knowledge, discipline-culture (DC) , seemed to us appropriate to engage students in this new to them perspective on physics knowledge, and we decided to perform a pilot study. In two special meetings (lecture and discussion) accompanied with home questionnaires we addressed three classes in two such schools \u2013 grades 11, 12, 13 (ages 16, 17, 18 in accordance), N=54. The lectures represented the evolution of knowledge about light (optics) as a diachronic scientific discourse framed in four fundamental theories \u2013 rays, particles, waves and photons \u2013 each possessing DC structure. Scientific knowledge appeared as a polyphonic dialogue of ideas corresponding to the Cultural Content Knowledge. The reactions of the students to the argument and evidence physicists mounted in history revealed emotional involvement and intellectual resonance in much wider spectrum of topics than expected. Students' veracity of views, nuances and perceptions were documented. We could infer about the high potential of vista-point lectures in science teaching seeking the way of engaging talented, curious and creative students. We will briefly describe the innovative approach and some students' responses
The EU-project I SEE aims at facing young’s difficulties in imagining their future from the persp... more The EU-project I SEE aims at facing young’s difficulties in imagining their future from the perspective of STEM education, assuming that STEM disciplines provide both epistemological and technical tools to deal with cross-cutting and societally relevant topics and to scaffold students’ approaches to the future. Within the project, the Italian community designed and implemented an interdisciplinary module on Artificial Intelligence for high school students. The data analysis revealed that the students were intellectually and emotionally engaged by the richness and the interdisciplinarity of this module, which encouraged them to become agents in the present in order to face future challenges.
In the world where young people feel that the future is no longer a promise but a threat, and sci... more 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 teac...
Il volume - a cura di Margherita Venturi e di M. Venturi, Barbara Pecori, Giulia Tasquier, Paola ... more Il volume - a cura di Margherita Venturi e di M. Venturi, Barbara Pecori, Giulia Tasquier, Paola Govoni, Michelangelo Rocchetti, Cinzia Bernardi, Paola Ambrogi, Edoardo Giuliani, Federico Plazzi - è uno dei risultati conseguiti nell'ambito del progetto europeo IRRESISTIBLE. E' possibile insegnare le scienze in modo nuovo, introducendo nei programmi scolastici temi di ricerca d'avanguardia e sviluppando nei giovani la consapevolezza delle relazioni esistenti tra ricerca scientifica e società? Il progetto IRRESISTIBLE (Università di Bologna) dimostra che, con l'aiuto di scienziati e ricercatori e con l'ausilio di metodologie didattiche innovative, non solo si tratta di una strada percorribile, ma anche che i risultati sono ottimi; gli studenti hanno, infatti, scoperto che la scienza non è qualche cosa da studiare sui libri, ma una componente essenziale e ineludibile della nostra vita quotidiana.
Global crises and societal uncertainty mean that youth perceive the future no longer as a promise... more 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.
Contributions from Science Education Research, 2019
The paper is framed within a broader research programme aimed at investigating how science educat... more The paper is framed within a broader research programme aimed at investigating how science education can enhance the formation of what we call future-scaffolding skills: the abilities to construct visions of the future that support possible ways of acting in the present with one’s eye on the horizon. To this end, we designed a module (targeted at secondary school students) on climate change, focused on causal modelling in science of complex systems and enriched with future-oriented activities. The study presented here reports on the second implementation of the module, carried out in a weekly summer school for a mixed class of 39 voluntary high school students (17–18 years old) from different secondary schools in Italy. The results confirm trends already observed in a previous pilot study: the present evolves from being perceived as a frantic standstill to becoming viewed as a collection of events that can be organized in a comprehensible picture; the future from being distant and unimaginable becomes instead conceivable as a set of possibilities, addressable through concrete actions and within the students’ reach (in the sense that they found room to see themselves as agents of their own future). Moreover, the analysis contributes to our theoretical reflection on future-scaffolding skills, by highlighting specific structural and dynamical skills that can be developed and recognized in the implementation of our modules.
The crisis due to the COVID-19 pandemic led most people all over the world to deal with a change ... more 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 so...
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