Open Meetings - Line 6
Institute of Advanced Studies/USP – Alfredo Bosi Room, Rua da Praça do Relógio, 109, São Paulo
Upcoming Events
Curriculum Policies and Science Education in Contexts of Risk and Uncertainty
08.SEP
14 p.m - 16 p.m
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Science education in the school context is a social construct, with educational models historically shaped by competing interests, values, and projects within society. As such, it plays a role in the production, reproduction, and transformation of forms of sociability and of educational and human development projects at different historical moments. From this perspective, what have been the roles and functions of scientific knowledge in processes of human development in the face of risks and uncertainties? This seminar presents preliminary findings from a study investigating curriculum policies: their objectives, challenges, and demands.
Presenter: Rodrigo Diego de Souza
Free public event with live streaming on the IEA’s YouTube channel
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Two Educational Interventions Involving Risks, Uncertainties, and Socio-Scientific Issues in Science Education
13.OCT
14 p.m - 16 p.m
Registration
Climate change and radiological risks are examples of complex socio-scientific issues that involve a high degree of uncertainty and are closely linked to what have come to be known as “civilizational threats.” Despite the urgency associated with problems of this nature, incorporating them into the school curriculum remains a major challenge. This open meeting presents and discusses the preliminary results of two studies investigating how students deal with the uncertainties and risks associated with contemporary challenges and how this perception impacts the relationship they establish with science and their ability to act individually and collectively.
Speakers: João Pedro Chidini, Gabriel Lanzillotta, and Samuel Vanique
Free public event with a live stream on the IEA’s YouTube channel
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Past Events
Assessing and Solving Socio-Scientific Problems: Anthrocomplexity as School Curriculum Content
Science education is based, to a large extent, on problem-solving—sometimes as a strategy for building concepts, and sometimes as a mechanism for developing specific skills. This approach is rooted in the premise that mastering problems historically solved by science equips students to deal with future problems. Underlying this curricular framework is the notion that the dilemmas of the future will resemble those of the past. However, major contemporary challenges, such as climate change and pandemics, call this premise into question, as they represent risks for which technoscience offers insufficient answers and whose causes lie, paradoxically, in technoscientific development itself. A contradiction thus emerges: while the contemporary world demands the incorporation of complexity in addressing global threats, the science taught in schools remains limited to solving paradigmatic problems. In this context, the aim of this discussion is to explore how the dimension of anthrocomplexity can be applied to the educational context and how the science curriculum can be reimagined to also bring the dimension of complex problems into the classroom.
Speakers: Maurício Pietrocola and Júlia Ogata
Free public event with a live stream on the IEA’s YouTube channel
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Creating Scenarios for Science Education: Two Comparative Case Studies Involving Brazilian Teachers and Italian Students
In an era of rapid technological change and environmental uncertainty, the ability to imagine and navigate possible futures is an essential skill. This seminar presents a comparative analysis of two distinct case studies focused on the methodology of scenario building in the context of science education. By bringing together two different geographic and educational contexts—Brazil and Italy—the research explores how “foresight” tools can be used to reshape scientific understanding and pedagogical practice.
Presenters: Leandro Nascimento e Silva and Lorenzo Miani
Session conducted in English
Free public event with live streaming on the IEA’s YouTube channel
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Science Education in a Risk Society: Challenges and Opportunities in an Uncertain Future
Current issues in science education are marked by the inevitable uncertainty of the consequences resulting from human actions. They encompass disasters, pandemics, and other events that have shaped our contemporary world. Understanding new risks—such as those resulting from human action, even when proposing a solution to a problem—is one of the central tenets of Risk Society theory. Given the challenges of teaching about uncertain scenarios, this paper addresses ways to handle science teaching situations in which unpredictable events are the norm. We report on the implementation of a teaching and learning sequence in the 9th grade of a Brazilian middle school, using a real-life disaster case to develop a didactic approach that takes human-induced risks into account. In this study, we seek to explore strategies for preparing teachers to deal with the uncertainty inherent in risk situations, combining semantic network analysis, the construction of risk matrices, and their collective evaluation with rounds of discussion, while emphasizing the risk-trust paradigm over the traditional danger-safety perspective. Our results show evidence that students have internalized the concept of manufactured risk by representing complex causal relationships in unpredictable scenarios, something also reflected in their expressions and decision-making patterns during the construction of the risk matrix.
Presenter: Maurício Pietrocola
Free public event with a live stream on the IEA’s YouTube channel
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