Abstract:

For a few years now, the curriculums of formal education in Europe have shown a tension between two coexisting purposes of scientific literacy, namely scientific literacy for scientists and scientific literacy for citizenship (OECD, 2017). Although Scientific literacy for citizenship is often overlooked or neglected in classroom practice (COSCE, 2011), it is gaining importance in educational systems in Europe (Lundström Sjöström & Hasslöf, 2017; Garrido & Simarro, 2015).

The learning goals of scientific literacy for citizenship are currently under discussion in the light of the Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) policy put forward in 2012 by the EU. This policy essentially proposes that R&I is a collaborative endeavour between those who devote their professional activity to R&I and citizens (von Schomberg, 2011; Owen, Macnaghten & Stilgoe, 2012). Dedicated frameworks establishing learning goals for equipping citizens to participate in this vision of R&I have appeared in the literature (see, for example: Heras & Ruiz Mallén, 2017; Domènech-Casal, 2018). These frameworks point to several components, the main ones being knowledge about the nature of science and decision-making skills.

Inquiry-Based Learning (IBL) on Socio-Scientific Issues (SSI) has been seen as an effective pedagogy to teach the new scientific literacy for citizenship. One reason for this could be the positive results of using SSI to improve students' understanding of the nature of science (Lederman, Antink & Bartos, 2014) and make IBL more meaningful (Ariza, Abril, García & Quesada, 2014).

However, teachers' lack of skills (Vázquez-Alonso and Manassero-Mas, 2017) as well as teacher resistances have hindered the application of a SSI curriculum and the most effective pedagogies.

The Engaging Science project, which was funded by the European Commission, aimed to help teachers to implement IBL scenarios on current Socio-Scientific Issues. To that goal, it developed an RRI curriculum based on four knowledge areas (Okada, Young & Sherborne, 2015). On this basis, a digital repository was made available for teachers at http://www.engagingscience.eu/. It includes ready-made digital educational resources, readings, videos and teachers’ forums for communication about the usefulness of the resources.

In this paper, we present the results of a case study on the application of IBL for SSI with fifty preservice science teachers. Within the subject Didactics of Experimental Sciences, the socio-scientific scenario concerned the design by the students of different controversies related to an emerging pathogen virus in Europe. The students were able to define different controversies and inquire about the scientific knowledge related the science curriculum. The results show that this approach supported students' reflective analysis on the dynamics of science and risk-assessment, which have been identified as key RRI skills.

Keywords:

STEM in education, new teaching/learning models, Teacher professional development, Socio-Scientific Issues, IBL.