Abstract:

This action-research project, launched in 2023 and still ongoing, aims to devise and implement museum education experiences specifically for kindergarten and primary school pupils by combining the skills of a group of professionals collaborating on this initiative.

In detail, annually, the following participants have been involved:
- the scientific director and guides coordinator of Esapolis Museum in Padua; it is the largest insectarium in Europe and a major environmental education Center. It contains both important historical artefacts related to arthropods and a lot of living invertebrates;
- two Biology professors in Primary Education Sciences course at the University of Padua; they provide pre-service teachers with disciplinary and methodological skills needed to train effective teachers in STEM;
- two hundred and fifty pre-service teachers attending the single cycle degree course in Primary Education Sciences at the University of Padua. They are about to start working as teachers, or sometimes they are already in the profession simultaneously with the course. The opportunity to play the role of both teacher and learner allows them to more easily understand the importance of elaborating, even in a museum, engaging and age-appropriate activities for visitors. In addition, these experiences should be able to fit in a formative continuum with what they do in school daily;
- five teachers with experience either in kindergarten or primary school; they are Biology Lab tutors in the Primary Education Sciences course at the University of Padua. Their expertise helps pre-service teachers to elaborate STEAM immersive experiences and to become "Nature-familiar adults” (Malavasi, 2021) as teachers provide them with “scientific experiences of wonder” to arouse amazement, which is an essential element of interest in learning. In this way, students can realise that academic studies and the professional reality of the school can work in synergy, making evident the closeness between research and educational practice during the initial training of teachers.

In these two years of partnership, original museum experiences have been elaborated to constitute new stimulus in the STEAM perspective; they have been realised partly in the museum and partly in the schools where the protagonists will operate.

These experiences will be tested at the museum with kindergarten or primary school visitors and also with their accompaniers to assess their effectiveness, especially in terms of their capacity for wonder, as "For a child to keep alive his innate sense of wonder, he needs the company of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy, excitement and mystery of the world in which we live" (Rachel Carson).

After a testing phase, a few of these experiences will be made available to teacher colleagues and young visitors’ parents to create connections and interdependence between the formal, non-formal, and informal systems. In this way, it will be able to use synergistically many opportunities that authentic contexts can offer in a kind of “decentralised classroom” (Frabboni, 2007).

Keywords:

Arthropods, didactics of biology, laboratory activities, learning by doing, museum teaching.