Olivia Levrini

The Substantivalist View of Spacetime Proposed by Minkowski and Its Educational Implications.

The geometrical interpretation of general relativity provides the formalism with intuitive imagery (Chandler 1994). Such an interpretation often presupposes a substantival space: a space taken to be a real entity whose existence is independent of the matter contained. Nowadays an image of space-container seems to have wide acceptance among physicists. Special relativity is, however, usually still taught as the theory which overthrew Newtons absolute concepts (among which is the idea of a space-container).This inconsistency is considered here. Special relativity can also be interpretedsubstantivally, as Minkowski did in 1908. His substantivalism is the key to layingout an internally coherent substantivalist line running from Newtonian mechanicsto general relativity.Another plausible interpretative line, namely the ‘relationist line’, will be mentioned.It will allow us to conclude with remarks concerning the cultural and educationalimplications of a consistent interpretative apparatus organised in several interpretativelines.

Exploring students’ epistemological knowledge of models and modelling in science: results from a teaching/learning experience on climate change

ABSTRACT The scientific community has been debating climate change for over two decades. In the light of certain arguments put forward by the aforesaid community, the EU has recommended a set of innovative reforms to science teaching such as incorporating environmental issues into the scientific curriculum, thereby helping to make schools a place of civic education. However, despite these European recommendations, relatively little emphasis is still given to climate change within science curricula. Climate change, although potentially engaging for students, is a complex topic that poses conceptual difficulties and emotional barriers, as well as epistemological challenges. Whilst the conceptual and emotional barriers have already been the object of several studies, students’ reactions to the epistemological issues raised by climate changes have so far been rarely explored in science education research and thus are the main focus of this paper. This paper describes a study concerning the implementation of teaching materials designed to focus on the epistemological role of ‘models and the game of modelling’ in science and particularly when dealing with climate change. The materials were implemented in a course of 15 hours (five 3-hour lessons) for a class of Italian secondary-school students (grade 11; 16–17 years old). The purpose of the study is to investigate students’ reactions to the epistemological dimension of the materials, and to explore if and how the material enabled them to develop their epistemological knowledge on models.

The Role of History and Philosophy in Research on Teaching and Learning of Relativity

The paper provides an overview of the studies on teaching/learning special relativity carried out in physics education research. The purpose of the overview is to (i) show the main research strands or dimensions (namely, conceptual change, curriculum design and teacher education) on which the problem of improving teaching/learning of special relativity has been projected in order to be studied, (ii) present, within each strand, the results that can be considered stable and/or reflective of our most current understanding, along with the issues that remain unresolved and (iii) highlight the roles ascribed to history and philosophy of physics in the specific research domain which concerns teaching/learning special relativity.

Understanding first-year students’ curiosity and interest about physics—lessons learned from the HOPE project

This paper focuses on results of an interview based survey of first-year university physics students, carried out within the EU Horizons in Physics Education (HOPE) project (http://hopenetwork.eu/). 94 interviews conducted in 13 universities have been analyzed to investigate the factors that inspire young people to study physics. In particular, the main motivational factor, which was proven to consist of personal interest and curiosity, was unfolded into different categories and detailed interest profiles were produced. The results are arguably useful to help academic curriculum developers and teaching personnel in physics departments to provide guidance to students in developing and focusing their interest towards specific sub-fields and/or to design targeted recruitment and outreach initiatives.

From Heuristics to Humble Theories in Physics Education: The Case of Modelling Personal Appropriation of Thermodynamics in Naturalistic Settings

The paper concerns the analysis of a successful classroom experience where secondary school students made evident progress in appropriating thermodynamics according to personal approaches. The main result of the analysis is the construction of a definition of appropriation which is operational in two senses: (i) it includes the indication of what observable features must be searched in students’ discourses for recognizing appropriation; (ii) it is effective for recognizing appropriation also in cases where it is not evident. The study is the first step of an iterative process aimed at developing a “humble theory” for explaining when, how and why appropriation is triggered and supported in real classrooms.

The I SEE project: An approach to futurize STEM education

In the world where young people feel that the future is no longer a promise but a threat, and science and technology are sources of fears and global problems, a challenging task for education is to support students in imagining a future for the world and for themselves. The aim of the EU-funded project “I SEE” is to create an approach in science education that addresses the problems posed by global unsustainability, the uncertainty of the future, social liquidity and the irrelevance of STEM education for young people. This way, we believe, STEM education can support young people in projecting themselves into the future as agents and active persons, citizens and professionals, and open their minds to future possibilities. In this paper we propose a teaching and learning approach for futurizing science education, and describe how that approach was used to develop the first I SEE module implemented in summer school in June 2017 with students from three countries. In sum, the I SEE teaching and learning approach consists of three stages and learning outcomes connected to each of them: encountering the focal issue; engaging with the interaction between science ideas and future dimensions, and synthesizing the ideas and putting them into practice. The middle stage of the model is the main part, involving future-oriented practices that turn knowledge into future-scaffolding skills. We describe four kinds of such future-oriented practices: a) activities to flesh out the future-oriented structure of scientific discourse, language and concepts; b) activities inspired by futures studies or by the working life and societal matters; c) exposure activities to enlarge the imagination about possible future STEM careers; and d) action competence activities. We conclude the paper by reflecting on our experiences of the implementation of the climate change module with upper secondary school students.

The Challenge of Contemporary Society on Science Education: The Case of Global Warming

The big problems that contemporary society needs to address (e.g. climate change) challenge our traditional idea of education and require to revise the goals of science education research. Such problems are indeed so complex as to require a wide range of competencies to be engaged in producing and implementing solution strategies. Science education is forced to take into account the many dimensions that characterize contemporary science and to face the task of bringing together the potential of all the different perspectives [8]. An example of this kind of research, concerning environmental problems, will be briefly described and its first encouraging results illustrated.

An Alternative Approach to Canonical Quantization for Introducing Quantum Field Theory: The Double-Slit Experiment Re-Examined

In the last years a growing research concern, within physics education, has been addressed to the production of teaching proposals for introducing notions of quantum field theories (QFT) at the secondary school level. The proposals are usually the result of the effort of translating the most widespread approach to QFT in university textbooks, “canonical quantization”, into natural language. After a discussion of the pros and cons of taking canonical quantization as reference, an alternative educational approach is presented. The approach is not yet a teaching proposal but a set of criteria needed for extracting the conceptual and cultural essence of QFT to be taught also without sophisticated formalisms.