Primary school teachers’ training needs to meet the challenges of 21st century science education

In the age of the Anthropocene, ordinary citizens have to make choices and decisions on complex and controversial socio-scientific issues that can have dramatic consequences on both their individual lives and the community's public life. That is why today, more than in the past, science education matters, and in OECD countries, it is compulsory for all students from kindergarten to age 15 or higher. According to the Pisa 2025 Science Framework, a 15-year-old school leaver aspiring to think and act as a responsible citizen should have developed specific scientific competencies that require the mastery of content, procedural and epistemic knowledge in order to be performed. Such an ideal of science education – which implies a certain image of science (epistemological variable), a specific educational task of the school (pedagogical variable), and a peculiar conception of scientific learning (didactic variable) – raises two distinct but related problems, which will be addressed concerning the Italian situation. The first problem concerns how to conceive of teachers' didactic competency in relation to the type of variables mentioned above. The position defended in this contribution is that the epistemological and pedagogical variables are mutually independent but not the didactic variable. Insofar as the choice of what is worth teaching and having students learn is concerned, the latter is constrained by the first two. Embracing this stance entails recognizing that teachers' didactic competency depends as much on their disciplinary expertise as on specific epistemological and pedagogical awareness. The second problem concerns the types of learning at stake. Since the competencies identified by Pisa 2025 are complex long-term learnings, hindered by deep-rooted misconceptions about what science is and how it works, it is necessary to define the goals of science education from the perspective of a vertical curriculum and to identify the specific training needs of teachers of different school orders accordingly. Taking physics education as a case study to explore these issues, a theoretical reflection and operational suggestions are provided for updating in-service and pre-service teacher training, focusing on primary school teachers.