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We live in a historical period that sociologists call the “society of acceleration”, where changes, mainly triggered by science and technology, occur over increasingly shorter time intervals. International reports by the OECD, the European Commission, and UNESCO highlight a worrying detachment between scientific education at school and societal issues, in terms of topics and practices. To address this gap, the H2020 project FEDORA1 designed and implemented several school activities centered around topics related to current challenges, aimed to increase students’ feeling of relevance toward formal scientific education. These implementations are: (i) based on the three FEDORA framework’s theoretical pillars: interdisciplinarity, search for new languages, future-oriented education; (ii) informed by some FEDORA’s recommendations to curricula developers, then turned into operational design principles: cross and integrate different disciplines, elicit epistemic emotions, embrace and embed complexity and uncertainty, dismantle dichotomous thinking and telling, exercise scenario building and thinking about the future in a pluralistic way. After presenting the general framework and the recommendations, we will discuss the details of two activities (“Mocku for change,” “Physics of clouds”) which, respectively, exploit the use of creative writing and mockumentary as forms of new languages. They concern topics such as sustainability or complexity and are aimed to help students engage and make sense of contemporary challenges in a personal and emotional way. In the end, we will argue why we consider them to be examples of practical and (to some extent) reproducible activities in class, which could reduce the gap between science at school and science outside school; in this sense, we claim to shed light on possible ways by which formal educational systems can reposition themselves to deal with societal needs.

In this era of great uncertainty, imagining the future may be challenging, especially for young people. In science education, the interest in future-oriented education is now emerging, research needs, however, to keep eyes on youngsters’ future perceptions and on the development of a future literacy. In this article, starting from a sample of individual students’ narratives about their future daily life in 2040, we aim to delineate which ways of grappling with the future can be observed in the essays and which methodological tools are suited to operationalize their identification and characterization. The analysis led to the definition of “polarization” and “complexification” attitudes that represent the ways in which the students’ narratives are positioned with respect to a bunch of dichotomies: personal–societal, functional–aesthetics oriented, good–bad, natural–artificial, and certain–uncertain. Moreover, with this study, we provide a contribution to the methodological reflection that deals with the collection and analysis of data, when students’ future perceptions need to be investigated. Discussing the limits of the current data collection tool, we introduce the design of a SenseMaker® questionnaire which contributed to feeding a collaboration with #OurFutures project, recently launched by the European Commission to collect future narratives all around Europe.

[This paper is part of the Focused Collection on Curriculum Development: Theory into Design.] The overarching goal of this paper is to illustrate the interplay between theory, design principles, and curriculum (meant broadly, to include both written and enacted curriculum). This dialogue is illustrated in the context of the design and implementation of a particular curricular unit on thermodynamics intended for advanced secondary students in Italy. The approach to the discipline and design of learning materials that we take in this work challenges a conventional view of physics disciplinary content as hierarchically organized and instead promotes a multidimensional and thematically organized physics curriculum. In this paper, we emphasize not only the influence of theory on design, but also the reverse influence: how the analysis of specific classroom data from enactments of a designed curriculum can contribute to refining and building a local theory of how to learn and teach physics in a way that is inclusive and responsive to classroom diversity.

Royal jelly has been demonstrated to have several physiological activities. However, in the literature, different reactions induced by royal jelly are reported. We describe a case of seven-year-old child that was referred to our observation for two episodes of oral allergy syndrome (OAS) that appeared ten minutes after ingestion of royal jelly. Skin prick test with standard panel of inhalant and food allergens, a prick-to-prick test using the royal jelly's extract responsible for patient's reactions, and royal jelly patch test with extemporaneous preparation were performed. The specific IgE by ImmunoCAP System method versus Hymenoptera venom, inhalant allergens, food allergens, and lipid transfer proteins was dosed. According to the positive reactions to royal jelly both by prick-by-prick test and by a first reading patch test, royal jelly immediate hypersensitivity was diagnosed. According to the positive response for almond in both in vivo and in vitro tests we can think of the royal jelly contamination with almond pollen as possible cause of patient's reaction. Moreover, from the results of specific IgE titers versus Compositae pollens, we have argued the possibility that this case of royal jelly allergy could be explained also by the mechanism of cross-reaction with Compositae pollens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]