Conference Program

This contribution presents Let's Interplay and Experiment, a year-long teacher professional development programme (Carli et al., 2023) developed at the University of Padua in collaboration with the Giovanni Poleni Museum of the History of Physics. The programme engages secondary mathematics and physics teachers in interdisciplinary, inquiry-based activities centred on modelling practices and historical scientific instruments (Cavicchi & Heering, 2021), including the Galilean telescope, the spectroscope, and experiments on the measurement of the speed of light, using light as a paradigmatic case study.

The course is explicitly framed through the Family Resemblance Approach (Erduran & Dagher, 2014) to Nature of Science (NOS), with structured reflective sessions designed to connect classroom practices to the epistemic, methodological, social, and axiological dimensions of science. Through inquiry-based sequences informed by NOS perspectives (Irzik & Nola, 2014), teachers engage in modelling, measurement, argumentation, and interpretation, whilst also examining the socio-cultural contexts in which instruments were developed and legitimised. In this framework, historical scientific instruments are treated not merely as illustrations of disciplinary content, but as epistemic mediators that make visible key features of scientific practice: the instrumental mediation of knowledge, the dependence of what can be known on what can be observed or measured, and the ways in which instruments embody theoretical assumptions, limits, and uncertainties.

The initiative is embedded within the Erasmus+ project INSIGHT (2024-2027), which brings historically contextualised scientific instruments into classrooms through hands-on reconstruction, shared online resources, and collaboration between schools and science museums (Heering & Wittje, 2025). The (re)construction of instruments thus becomes a pedagogically rich activity that bridges disciplinary learning, historical inquiry, and explicit NOS reflection, positioning teachers as both learners and designers of epistemically-aware science education experiences.

The guiding question of this contribution is: how can the reconstruction of historically situated scientific instruments foster NOS reflection among teachers and support the design of classroom activities in which scientific knowledge is constructed, questioned, and socially negotiated? More specifically, we explore how instrument-based inquiry can deepen teachers' awareness of key NOS dimensions, including the tentative character of scientific knowledge, the role of models and instruments in shaping what can be observed and measured, the pervasiveness of uncertainty, and the axiological and socio-cultural embeddedness of scientific practice.

Data are drawn from teacher professional development activities, a final focus group, and questionnaires and interviews with participating teachers, and NOS-oriented student questionnaires administered in classrooms where selected activities were piloted. Data collection is currently ongoing; this contribution presents the design of the programme alongside initial observations examining whether engagement with historical instruments and epistemic negotiation prompts teachers to develop more explicit and reflective attention to NOS dimensions in their classroom planning. The programme is further designed so that classroom activities piloted by participating teachers will subsequently involve students in science communication beyond school walls: through planned collaborations with third-sector organisations and public engagement initiatives, students will have the opportunity to share and discuss scientific ideas with broader audiences, extending the reach of NOS-informed science education into the wider community.