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.

This contribution aligns with the panel’s topic by examining how higher education in astrophysics can explicitly address the epistemic, social, and institutional dimensions of scientific research alongside disciplinary content, with the general objective to build the professional preparation of future scientists, and foster scientific citizenship. In fact, scientific knowledge is not merely a body of concepts, but a negotiated, collective and value-based enterprise. However, the majority of university curricula privilege focus on disciplinary content, leaving implicit the processes by which knowledge is produced, validated, and communicated within the scientific community and in society (see e.g. [1] for a review).

To address this gap, we investigate the educational potential of cinematic narratives to re-enact the scientific endeavour. The study centres on the analysis of the documentary "Black Holes: The Edge of All We Know" [2], narrating the realization of the first image of the supermassive black hole in M87. Beyond presenting scientific results, the film portrays the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration as a space of dialogue, negotiation and shared responsibility, where theory, observations, simulations and data analysis interact across diverse groups. In this sense, the movie can be interpreted as an example of democratic interaction within and across scientific communities, from which knowledge emerges. Also, black-and-white animation footages make visible the personal and collective emotions underlying contemporary research.

The movie has been analyzed through a framework integrating three complementary conceptual “lenses”. First, social semiotics supports the analysis of how disciplinary "modes" (e.g. equations, images, simulations) contribute to meaning-making [3]. Second, the Nature of Science (NOS) allows us to identify epistemic, social and institutional dimensions of research, combined within the FRA Wheel [4]. Finally, epistemic emotions examine how feelings such as curiosity, uncertainty and wonder shape both individual and collective inquiry. Taken together, these lenses show that the movie is able to render the scientific practice as a negotiated and inherently relational process, resonating with democratic forms of knowledge. Our analysis was complemented by an exploratory public screening, followed by a discussion and a questionnaire administered to the audience. Preliminary findings indicate that the film not only stimulates conceptual interest in black holes, but also foregrounds transversal aspects of research, such as uncertainty and the interaction between communities in large-scale collaborations. Moreover, the majority of participants reported strong emotional engagement with the scientific endeavour. Building on this, our next step is to realize a pilot internship for Astronomy undergraduate students, to be guided in a film analysis with our framework.

Overall, we claim that narrative-based re-enactments of research can open reflective spaces in higher education where to confront the complexity of research practices. By making visible the social and emotional nature of inquiry, this approach not only enriches disciplinary understanding, but also equips people with interpretative tools to critically engage with the public production and circulation of scientific knowledge. In this sense, engaging with cinematic narratives of research can support the development of scientifically literate and democratically engaged citizens capable of participating thoughtfully in collective decisions about the future of our communities.

Teachers' continuous professional development is crucial for improving science education, which is often perceived as too theoretical and inaccessible by students, particularly in the case of chemistry. This empirical study presents a laboratory-based training programme, grounded in action-research, designed for a small group of in-service mathematics and science teachers of Italian lower secondary school. The aim is to foster active learning (1,2), enabling teachers—as reflective practitioners—to rethink their teaching practices and prepare students to engage with contemporary socio-scientific challenges, in line with a vision of science as a democratic and situated practice. This is crucial as many science teachers in Italy has not received a specific professional training on science education issues regarding citizenship.

The training programme was designed to promote active learning for teachers in a setting analogous to the school environment (1), incorporating moments of critical reflection. It consists of two cooperative work sessions: an initial hands-on laboratory session followed by a reflective classroom session (focus group) (3). The first part takes place in the chemistry laboratory, where participants engage in an experimental inquiry, characterised by a phenomenological approach that does not require submicroscopic modelling of matter (4). This approach draws on an historical and epistemological analisis of acids and bases (5,6), using materials from everyday contexts. The second part focuses on reflecting on the knowledge and epistemic practices activated in the laboratory, with the goal of assessing their transferability to the school context.

This case study aims to analyse how a teacher training experience based on investigative—rather than confirmatory—experimental activities in a chemistry laboratory, employing a macroscopic phenomenological approach to chemical phenomena and using materials from daily life, can promote, by homology, active teaching practices. These practices should set students in a context of knowledge production through direct inquiry and collective negotiation.

The research methodology involves audio recording of the sessions to analyse the emerging professional knowledge and its links to teaching practices. The analysis of knowledge is based on a threefold perspective: chemical knowledge, Pedagogical Content Knowledge (2,7), and the Nature of Science (8), with particular attention to the role of everyday chemical knowledge and common sense. The connection of the professional knowledge to teaching practices is evaluated by analysing the reflective focus group, addressing the foundational aspects of the training: laboratory activities, investigative approach, and macroscopic approach to chemical phenomena.

In contemporary societies marked by uncertainty, complexity, and contested knowledge, science education must engage students not only with established concepts but with the epistemic practices through which scientific knowledge is generated and negotiated. Responding to calls to move beyond deterministic views of science (Levrini, Pietrocola, & Erduran, 2024), this contribution explores how structured problem posing and reflective documentation can foster early forms of scientific citizenship in primary education.

The paper presents a design-based research project conducted in fourth-grade classrooms engaged in a sequence of four Light Play tinkering sessions, in which the available materials and tools were progressively expanded across sessions.
Overall, the study highlights the pedagogical potential of combining informal constructionist practices (Papert, 1980) with formal curricula and disciplinary knowledge.
In fact, the design of the activities was informed by the TIDE Canvas (Rini & Ricciardi, 2025): the tinkering sessions were followed by “cold debriefs”, supported by two documentation tools: a collective Question Map and a personal Journal of Light.
These moments invited children to revisit their ideas through documentation (Giudici et al 2001), reconnect with emerging questions, and build conceptual bridges between tinkering experiences and disciplinary knowledge of light and shadow.
Documentation artefacts functioned as boundary objects (Akkerman & Bakker, 2011), enabling students and teachers to negotiate emerging problems and orient subsequent experimentation.

This iterative process resonates with Resnick’s learning spiral (2013; 2017) and can be interpreted as an enactment of its principles within tinkering-based learning supporting science learning at primary school, fostering emotional engagement, creativity, and scientific depth.

The findings underline the importance of equipping teachers with tools to facilitate this “third moment", ensuring that tinkering does not remain an isolated creative episode but a sustainable pathway toward creativity, identity, critical thinking, and disciplinary understanding.

Rather than organising inquiry around pre-framed research questions, the design sustained the articulation, stabilisation, and collective refinement of students’ own problem formulations. Documentation rendered epistemic processes visible, supported negotiation of uncertainty, and enabled shared decision-making about which questions deserved further investigation. In this sense, the classroom increasingly functioned as a community of inquiry, modelling forms of epistemic participation relevant to scientific citizenship (Greco et al., 2008). Such conditions resonate with post-normal understandings of science (Funtowicz & Ravetz, 1993), where uncertainty is intrinsic and deliberation becomes central.

The study suggests that NOS-informed, design-based approaches can create early educational experiences that prepare students to engage with science as a situated, negotiated, and socially consequential practice.

The current multiple and intertwined crises, unfolding worldwide, shape how we imagine the future, and threats of apocalyptic scenarios and dystopian societies appear increasingly concrete nowadays.

On the one hand, envisioning an increasingly uncertain and bleak future is negatively impacting the mental health of ever-larger segments of the global population, particularly the most vulnerable, including children, adolescents, and young adults (Cianconi et al. 2023). On the other hand, large segments of the global population, particularly those still experiencing the impact of processes of exploitation and domination rooted in European colonialism, find themselves daily confronting the challenges of a life in which even imagining a future becomes a form of resistance to deprivation.

The future is a “cultural fact” (Appadurai 2013): imagining and reinventing it, moving away from already established or imposed trajectories, requires the availability of accessible material and symbolic resources, as well as the ability to use those resources.

With these premises in mind, the project Closer to the Sky: Co-creating Astronomical Knowledge in the Favela Complex of Cantagalo Pavão Pavãozinho (PPG) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, was launched in 2023 (Cortesi et al. 2023). This project emerged from direct and long-term collaboration among astronomers and educators from the local Observatory of Valongo, the PPG astronomy club and the educational center Ninho das Águias, located in the Pavãozinho section of the favela complex.

In Brazil, the everyday routine of favela dwellers, mostly Afro-descendants, is marked by insecurity, violence and “peace-time crimes” (Scheper-Hughes 1997), affecting the population's psychological wellbeing, in particular that of children, with a negative impact on their learning ability (Data Favela 2025).

The project, funded by the International Astronomical Union - Office of Astronomy for Development (IAU-OAD), is addressed to children, adolescents, young adults, and adults living in the above-mentioned favela complex and is implemented by co-creating scientific content together with favela residents, artists, educators, and researchers in various disciplines. Its primary objective is using the inspiration and restorative power of astronomy (Mdhluli et al. 2025; Vertue 2022) to co-produce knowledge and promote the right to full and informed citizenship for favela dwellers who face discrimination and whose socioeconomic vulnerability is rooted in the structural racism and violence that still impact wide segments of Brazilian population, such as the Afro-descendants and indigenous communities (Ribeiro Corossacz 2005; Ioris 2023).

Through this paper, we share some reflections on: 1) the transdisciplinary dialogue established during the project, particularly among the astronomical, pedagogical, and anthropological perspectives; 2) the actions undertaken aimed at combating school dropout among children and developing professional skills among young adults and adults; and 3) on the co-production of knowledge and practices from a decolonial, participatory, transdisciplinary, and reflexive approach.

The combination of educational practices with the implementation of ethnographic research methodologies aimed at stimulating a reflection on the project experience itself aims at fostering the ability to imagine and design more just and sustainable futures in the global context, from below, by recognizing and enhancing the potential of too often silenced and marginalized voices.

In contemporary information ecosystems, critical thinking is increasingly challenged by conspiracy thinking and by what the literature defines as science-related populism (Mede & Schäfer, 2020). This notion refers to discursive and social dynamics that construct an antagonism between ordinary people, assumed to be virtuous, and scientific or academic elites, assumed to be corrupt or self-interested (Bory, Giardullo, Tosoni, & Turrini, 2023). Within this framework, scientific knowledge becomes a contested terrain where the legitimacy of expertise, the authority of institutions, and the boundaries of democratic participation are constantly negotiated (Pasta & Raviolo, 2023). Such tensions are particularly visible in highly mediatized environments, where the social web plays a central role in the circulation of alternative knowledge claims and in the delegitimization of epistemic authorities (Pasta, 2018).

In a post-truth regime (McIntyre, 2019), science-related populism mobilizes different “repertoires of contestation” (Ylä-Anttila, 2018), that is, argumentative strategies aimed at questioning established scientific knowledge and at weakening trust in those institutions responsible for its production and validation. These dynamics pose significant challenges for education, especially in relation to STEM disciplines, where the teaching of scientific concepts cannot be separated from the development of epistemic trust, critical inquiry, and responsibility in the public use of knowledge (Carenzio, Ferrari, Pasta, 2024; Pasta, 2025). In postdigital society, characterized by high uncertainty, collective stakes, and the need for inclusive deliberation, fostering scientific citizenship requires educational approaches that make visible the processes, negotiations, and limits through which scientific knowledge is produced.

This contribution is situated within the interdisciplinary research project Communicating Science. Mediation and mediators of scientific knowledge in complex societies (Catholic University of the Sacred Heart, 2022–2025), which investigates how individuals construct their understanding of science within contemporary media environments. The paper presents the results of a survey conducted in November 2025 among students enrolled in primary teacher education programmes at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart (Milan, Brescia, and Piacenza campuses). The survey explored sources of scientific information, media consumption related to science, trust in science, epistemic trust, science-related populism, naïve scientism, and beliefs about gender inequalities in STEM fields.

These data are compared with the results of the same survey administered in 2024 to a statistically representative sample of the Italian population. The comparison allows us to analyse how future teachers position themselves within current conflicts around scientific knowledge and to reflect on the educational implications of these attitudes in terms of scientific citizenship, epistemic responsibility, and democratic participation.

The findings suggest that the development of scientific citizenship cannot rely only on the transmission of scientific content, but requires educational practices that engage learners in the reconstruction of knowledge, in the recognition of uncertainty, and in the evaluation of the social consequences of scientific claims. In this perspective, teacher education becomes a crucial space for cultivating reflective and responsible forms of participation in the public life of science, capable of countering conspiracy thinking and science-related populism while preparing future citizens to navigate complex socio-ecological and technoscientific futures Brotherton, 2021).