Engaging with Contemporary Challenges through Science Education Research

This book starts with the premise that beauty can be an engine of transformation and authentic engagement in an increasingly complex world. It presents an organized picture of highlights from the 13th European Science Education Research Association Conference, ESERA 2019, held in Bologna, Italy. The collection includes contributions that discuss contemporary issues such as climate change, multiculturalism, and the flourishing of new interdisciplinary areas of investigation, including the application of cognitive neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and digital humanities to science education research. It also highlights learners’ difficulties engaging with socio-scientific issues in a digital and post-truth era. The volume demonstrates that deepening our understanding is the preferred way to address these challenges and that science education has a key role to play in this effort. In particular, the book advances the argument that the deep and novel character of these challenges requires a collective search for new narratives and languages, an expanding knowledge base and new theoretical perspectives and methods of research. The book provides a contemporary picture of science education research and looks to the theoretical and practical societal challenges of the future.

Olivia Levrini is Associate Professor in Physics Education and History of Physics at the Department of Physics and Astronomy of the University of Bologna, Italy. Her current research work concerns interdisciplinarity in STEM education, cognition and conceptual change, identity and processes of appropriation, instruction design on future-oriented STEM issues (climate change, artificial intelligence, quantum computing), educational reconstruction of advanced current topics in physics (thermodynamics, relativity, quantum physics). She served as Conference President at the 2019 ESERA conference.

Giulia Tasquier is Junior Assistant Professor in Physics Education at the Department of Physics and Astronomy of the University of Bologna, Italy. Her research interests include design and implementation of innovative teaching materials on modern physics and SSI; the correlation between knowledge and behaviour in climate change; the role of epistemological knowledge on models and modelling in teaching/learning physics; qualitative methods of data analysis; development of strategies, tools, and activities for transforming scientific knowledge into transversal skills about the future. She served as Conference Manager at the 2019 ESERA conference

Tamer Amin is currently Associate Professor of Science Education in the Department of Education and member of the Science and Mathematics Education Center at the American University of Beirut, Lebanon. His research focuses on conceptual change in science learning. He has been examining how the cognitive linguistic theory of conceptual metaphor can help uncover image schematic structures implicit in the language of science and how these can support and sometimes hinder learning scientific concepts. In a parallel line of research, he is investigating the challenges of teaching and learning science in the multilingual contexts of the Arab world and how these challenges might be overcome.

Laura Branchetti is a researcher in Mathematics Education at the Department of Mathematics "Federigo Enriques" of Milan, Italy. She is a member of an interdisciplinary research group in physics, mathematics and computer science education in Bologna and she has been involved in European projects about STEM education and interdisciplinarity in preservice teacher training. Her main research interests concern mathematics education and interdisciplinarity in secondary school and at the transition from secondary to tertiary education; in particular she carried out research in the teaching of calculus and analysis and of the interplay between mathematics and physics. 

Mariana Levin is Associate Professor of Mathematics Education in the Department of Mathematics at Western Michigan University. Her research focuses on understanding the role of knowledge and epistemic affect in moment-by-moment processes of reasoning and sense-making.  Her edited volume “Knowledge and Interaction: A Synthetic Agenda for the Learning Sciences” (with A. A. diSessa and N.J.S. Brown) explores this line of work, connecting insights from diverse research traditions on learning processes as they unfold in real-time in real-world contexts.  Her current work explores the development of mathematical agency and autonomy in undergraduate students’ experiences in proof-intensive mathematics courses.