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IntroductionVaccines are the basis of health of our communities since they prevent severe infectious diseases. However vaccination rates continue to decrease due to the spread of misinformation about their side effects, which enhances vaccine hesitancy and puts at risk public health. Introducing vaccines from the One Health approach can help to develop an integral understanding of their role and to apply critical ignorance as part of criticality to avoid vaccine hesitancy and raise trust in science. This paper presents a design on vaccination for secondary-education teacher training developed toward this goal.MethodsThe design presented in this paper draws from previous studies on critical thinking, on vaccine rejection, and the One Health approach on other health issues in Secondary Education. The focus of this design is engaging secondary-education pre-service teachers in the practice of critical ignorance and criticality to assess diverse pieces of information on vaccination from the One Health approach.ResultsThis study discusses the design principles and the activities of an original design that aims to provide Secondary Education teachers with some tools to introduce critical ignorance and criticality for addressing misinformation on vaccines by using the One Health approach.DiscussionIf secondary science teachers are going to successfully confront misinformation on vaccination in their science instruction, we need to develop and test designs and approaches that prepare them for this purpose. Critical ignorance plays a central role in managing misinformation; thus, such instruction should engage future teachers in critical evaluation of information on vaccination, as well as in the application of the One Health approach to take responsible actions.

The science education curriculum has become increasingly focused on the study of complex systems and on the development of agency so that students make decisions on relevant issues. The current pandemic has underlined the need to look at health from a systemic “One Health” approach, but little is known about the knowledge, skills, attitudes, and actions necessary for individuals to successfully contribute to One Health. This study seeks to contribute to this knowledge, and explores preservice elementary teachers’ agency and systems thinking competencies to propose actions for preventing future pandemics from the One Health approach. The participants were 47 preservice elementary teachers working on a set of activities about the COVID-19 pandemic, in which they were asked about ways to prevent future pandemics. Content analysis of individual written responses was applied for addressing the level of systems thinking and the sense of personal and collective responsibility toward the action proposed. Results show that the preservice teachers initially referred mainly to actions in the human health dimension, and that the systems thinking showed a higher level when they made the activity in groups after reading information. Collectively proposed actions showed a lack of agency or individual responsibility compared to individually proposed ones. The implications of the results for science teaching are discussed.