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The increasing role of computational simulations as the basis for policies and decision-making processes imposes the educational community to think about ways to introduce them in upper high-school teaching of physics as the third pillar of scientific research. In this paper, we present the principles at the basis of the design of a teaching-learning module on simulations of complex systems and implemented in a course organized by the Department of Physics and Astronomy "A. Righi" of the University of Bologna for university orientation. Specifically, we discuss the value of computational simulations as interdisciplinary and future-oriented objects that can act as bridges between physics, STEM disciplines, and society.

Conceptual change, how conceptual understanding is transformed, has been investigated extensively since the 1970s. The field has now grown into a multifaceted, interdisciplinary effort with strands of research in cognitive and developmental psychology, education, educational psychology, and the learning sciences. Converging Perspectives on Conceptual Change brings together an extensive team of expert contributors from around the world, and offers a unique examination of how distinct lines of inquiry can complement each other and have converged over time. In this final overall, the authors point out a picture of conceptual change by exploring convergence and complementarity across perspectives. By mapping features of an emerging paradigm, they challenge newcomers and established scholars alike to embrace a more programmatic orientation towards conceptual change.

Conceptual change, how conceptual understanding is transformed, has been investigated extensively since the 1970s. The field has now grown into a multifaceted, interdisciplinary effort with strands of research in cognitive and developmental psychology, education, educational psychology, and the learning sciences. Converging Perspectives on Conceptual Change brings together an extensive team of expert contributors from around the world, and offers a unique examination of how distinct lines of inquiry can complement each other and have converged over time. Amin and Levrini adopt a new approach to assembling the diverse research on conceptual change: the combination of short position pieces with extended synthesis chapters within each section, as well as an overall synthesis chapter at the end of the volume, provide a coherent and comprehensive perspective on conceptual change research. Arranged over five parts, the book covers a number of topics including: • the nature of concepts and conceptual change • representation, language, and discourse in conceptual change • modeling, explanation, and argumentation in conceptual change • metacognition and epistemology in conceptual change • identity and conceptual change. Throughout this wide-ranging volume, the editors present researchers and practitioners with a more internally consistent picture of conceptual change by exploring convergence and complementarity across perspectives. By mapping features of an emerging paradigm, they challenge newcomers and established scholars alike to embrace a more programmatic orientation towards conceptual change.

In this paper, we report some results obtained in classroom implementations of Quantum Physics teaching proposals, carried out in different school contexts. In particular, we observed significant cases of students who did not accept quantum physics as a personally reliable and convincing description of physical reality – cases of ‘non-acceptance’ –, even though they seemed to understand the basic concepts of quantum physics as they were proposed. A qualitative semantic analysis has been carried out on students’ interviews, so as to individuate the main cognitive needs emerging in learning quantum physics, and that have to be satisfied in order to make it acceptable, to a degree. We found three of them - need of visualization, need of comparability, and need of ontology - emerging from students’ words, and used them to reread discourses of all students, despite their degree of acceptance. As this is a preliminary study, further work is suggested to better understand acceptance dynamics, to eventually operationalize its recognition in students’ discourses and to design instruction materials.

The fact that conceptual change in science education and in the learning sciences is traditionally thought of as an individual cognitive phenomenon and identity development has usually been conceived of as a social construct involving the relationship between groups and individuals raises important questions for how these constructs can be articulated in such a way as to be mutually illuminating. This section of the volume explores three different approaches to forging productive connections between the research agendas of conceptual change and identity development. The three contributions diverge for several deep reasons: they frame the relevance of investigating the nexus between identity and conceptual change within deeply different research programs, they choose different research approaches, they provide different definitions of identity, and refer to different processes of conceptual change. In spite of the differences, the three approaches share a theoretical skeleton that enabled all the researchers to rigorously address the nexus between the two constructs – identity and conceptual change – that can appear very distant in their time scale, in the involved actors and in the cognitive and social processes they refer to. In this synthesis chapter, the three approaches are compared through a framework that allows for pointing out a common theoretical structure of the approaches. This structure is argued to be potentially fruitful for orienting a program of further rigorous investigations of the nexus between conceptual change and identity.

The European shortage of students pursuing further studies and careers in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) is particularly severe in the field of physical sciences. Many physics departments suffer from high dropout rates, partly caused by students' decrease of interest during their studies. To address these problems and to help teachers at all educational levels improve their practices, the EU-funded HOPE (Horizons in Physics Education) project examined the views of first-year Physics students in European universities. Here we report the results of an interview study on how students perceive their reasons for choosing physics as their field of study. 94 semi-structured interviews were conducted in 16 universities and analysed through a two-round process. The results show that the first-year students used chiefly expressions of interest and intrinsic motivation to describe factors inspiring them to study physics, while expectations of success as well as utility and attainment values played smaller roles. The interviewees were either strongly motivated by their curiosity in understanding how the world works, or interested in what characterises physics as knowledge (its practises, methods, and way of knowing and thinking). Often both aspects were present. The division in subcategories shed more light on the precise nature of such curiosities and interests. We will discuss these tendencies using exemplary quotes, and contrast our results with earlier research. We suggest the articulated picture of interest and curiosity built in this study could inform the development of first year Physics courses - both the choice of contents and pedagogical approaches. Results can also be useful for designing targeted recruitment and outreach initiatives, which aim to foster interest in physics at pre-college levels.

The Comenius Network STENCIL - Science Teaching European Network for Creativity and Innovation in Learning - is funded with support from the European Commission within the Lifelong Learning Programme, and has been running from 2011. STENCIL involves members from 9 different European countries: Bulgaria, Germany, Greece, France, Italy, Malta, Portugal, Slovenia, Turkey, working together to the improvement of science teaching. STENCIL offers to science teachers, school leaders, policy makers and all practitioners in science education from all over Europe, a platform - www.stencil-science.eu - to encourage joined-up thinking and European cooperation.

This article provides an empirical analysis of data collected during the implementation of a teaching proposal on thermodynamics in a class of 20 students (17 year olds) of a scientifically-oriented secondary school in Italy. During the activities, each student made evident progress in gaining intellectual autonomy as they took part in the teaching/learning dynamics of the classroom. Although the research had, up to now, an empirical orientation, this paper aims to provide a contribution for advancing theory development in physics education research. The study gives an example of the application of a specific model of teaching/learning (the Model of Longitudinal Development) that acted as “framework for action” in the design of the learning environment as “properly complex territory.” The data analysis gives indications for how to develop a theoretical understanding of the concept of “personal learning trajectory” and it provides a basis for exploring the factors that can trigger intellectual autonomy.

Among the relevant aspects of the family resemblance approach (FRA), our study focuses on the potential of the approach to elaborate on disciplinary identities in an interdisciplinary context, specifically regarding the interplay between physics and mathematics. We present and discuss how the FRA wheel can be used and intertwined with the framework of boundary objects and boundary crossing mechanisms (Akkerman & Bakker, Review of Educational Research, 81, 132–169, 2011), which is well-known in STEM education for dealing with interdisciplinarity. The role of the FRA discussed in the article is dual: both practical and theoretical. It is practical in that we show how its use, in combination with the Akkerman and Bakker framework, appears effective in fostering productive discussions among prospective teachers on disciplinary identities and interdisciplinarity in historical cases. It is theoretical in that the combination of the two frameworks provides the vocabulary to characterise the ‘ambiguous nature’ of interdisciplinarity: like boundaries, interdisciplinarity both separates disciplines, making their identities emerge, and connects them, fostering mechanisms of crossing and transgressing the boundaries. This empirical study reveals how the theoretical elaboration took advantage of the prospective teachers’ contributions. We initially presented the FRA to characterise disciplinary identities, but the prospective teachers highlighted its potential to characterise also the boundary zone and the dialogue between physics and mathematics. The data analysis showed that the combinination of the two frameworks shaped a complex learning space where there was room for very different epistemic demands of the prospective teachers: from those who feel better within the identity cores of the disciplines, to those who like to inhabit the boundary zone and others who like to re-shape boundary spaces and move dynamically across them.

The scientific community has been debating climate change for at least twenty years. The EU has recommended a set of innovative reforms to science teaching, incorporating environmental issues in the scientific curriculum, answering the need for making school a place of civic education. This paper focuses on the presentation of materials designed to foster both deep understanding of the basic concepts involved in climate change as well as critical thinking for addressing some cognitive and emotional barriers that have been proved to hinder individual behavioural reactions.

Il contributo analizza diversi approcci all'insegnamento della relatività ristretta, noti e diffusi a livello internazionale, e individua criteri per la progettazione di proposte innovative efficaci e culturalmente significative

The crisis due to the COVID-19 pandemic led most people all over the world to deal with a change in their perception and organization of time. This happened also, and mainly, within the educational institutions, where students and teachers had to rearrange their teaching/learning dynamics because of the forced education at a distance. In this paper, we present an exploratory qualitative study with secondary school students aimed to investigate how they were experiencing their learning during lockdown and how, in particular, learning of science contributed to rearranging their daily lifetime rituals. In order to design and carry out our investigation, we borrowed constructs coming from a research field rather unusual for science education: the field of sociology of time. The main result concerns the discovery of the potential of the dichotomy between alienation from time and time re-appropriation. The former is a construct elaborated by the sociologist Hartmut Rosa to describe the society of acceleration in the “era of future shock”. The latter represents an elaboration of the construct of appropriation that the authors had operationally defined, starting from Bakhtin’s original idea, to describe the nexus between physics learning and identity. Thanks to the elaboration of the notion of time re-appropriation as feature of the “era of present shock”, the study unveils how school science, instead of preparing the young to navigate our fast-changing and complex society, tends to create “bubbles of rituals” that detach learning from societal concern.

The article sets out to contribute to the educational challenge launched by the second quantum revolution. An approach to quantum computing has been outlined for secondary school students. The approach is shaped as a set of four principles that have been pointed out to design instructional materials to enhance the educational and cultural potential of quantum computing, beyond the technical aspects. In the paper, following a presentation of the design principles, we focus on an activity on quantum teleportation protocol. The activity is described in detail to show how the principles have been concretely implemented. A pilot study with a small sample of secondary school students has been carried out to evaluate the potential of the approach. The results, although preliminary, show that the approach appears to be promising in creating an inclusive and productive learning environment, in which students feel encouraged to search for personal ways to combine different levels of discourse (narrative, logical, mathematical, technicalexperimental) and generate meaningful descriptions of the phenomenon.

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.

The article describes the analysis of the Italian physics curriculum documents in terms of the coverage of nature of science (NOS). NOS is not explicitly presented as part of the Italian high-school physics curriculum. The article focuses on analysing the implicit aspects of the curriculum documents. The Family Resemblance Approach (FRA) to NOS was used as an analytical lens. FRA was chosen because of the broad range of categories that it provides to trace curriculum content. Curriculum documents were analysed using the FRA categories as well as an Epistemic Network Analysis (ENA) which has shown important limitations in the FRA categories ‘Political Power Structures, Scientific Ethos, Professional Activities’. These aspects of NOS belong to the social-institutional aspects of the FRA framework. There were also some inconsistencies between the general section and the specific sections of the curriculum. The study elaborates on how FRA and ENA can be used to analyse NOS content in a science curriculum. The epistemic networks provide concrete illustrations of where curriculum revision can best be carried out to promote underrepresented aspects of NOS. Implications for future research and recommendations for curriculum reform internationally are suggested.

Growing numbers of Citizen Science (CS) projects focus on learning about science through the collaboration of professional scientists and citizen scientists. However, resources for the design and evaluation of CS projects in terms of learning about science are scarce. Therefore, this chapter aims to provide a model for the heuristic analysis of the supply and use of learning opportunities in CS and apply it to different CS projects. We hope that the design of future CS projects considers the MODEL-CS as an approach to enable as many participants with different prerequisites as possible to take advantage of the learning opportunities provided.

It is widely acknowledged today that an Inquiry-Based approach to Research and Innovation processes can improve the interest of students in studying scientific topics. Such approaches can enable students to have the opportunity to interact with cutting edge topics, research results and work with researchers and other societal actors to better align research processes and their outcomes with the values, needs and expectations of today's society. However, there is still no clear consensus between researchers about the impact that inquiry-based approaches have on the student scientific knowledge and conceptual understanding at different ages and cultural levels. This paper discusses these aspects from a vertical and interdisciplinary curriculum perspective. Firstly, the impact of a series of inquiry-based learning activities on the acquisition of scientific knowledge and in the development of pupils' positive attitudes toward science in pupils aged 10–13 is discussed. Secondly, a discussion on important preconditions needed for an introduction of cutting-edge topics to the classroom, and the role of the inquiry that has to be offered to students to effectively construct knowledge is considered at the pre-university level. Following this, an approach adopted by three large scale European projects (ESTABLISH, SAILS and OSOS) that focus on enhancing science education curricula, pedagogy and assessment practices and supporting science educators in embedding Inquiry-Based Education or Responsible Research and Innovation principles in science education is presented. Finally, an innovative Doctoral Degree in Sustainability Science, which seeks transformative education that challenges the attitudes of both professors and students is presented and some of its most relevant aspects are discussed.

Strand 14 of ESERA addresses an internationally increasingly recognized complex field of science education research: in-service teacher education and continued professional development of science teachers. It is obvious that the value and success of any educational system strongly corresponds with the quality of its teachers’ competences and practices. In this sense, it is not surprising that the strand on in-service science teacher education is always one of the most active strands of ESERA. Compared to the last ESERA conference proceedings, the number of papers presented in this strand was growing from 10 to 32 pieces.

Can science teaching contribute to developing skills for managing uncertainty towards the future and projecting imagination forwards? If so, how? In this paper, we outline an approach to ‘teach the future’ through science education. In the first part, we describe a framework that has been constructed to orient the design of teaching modules comprised of future-oriented educational activities. Then, a teaching module on climate change is described. The module was tested in a class of upper secondary school in Italy (grade12) and the main results are reported. They concern a change in perception of the future, as revealed by students: from far and unimaginable, the future became conceivable as a set of possibilities, addressable through concrete actions and within their reach, in the sense that they became able to view themselves as agents of their own future. The results lead us to argue that the approach appears promising in developing ‘futurescaffolding skills’, skills that enable people to construct visions of the future that support possible ways of acting in the present with one’s eye on the horizon.

In science education, the influence that students’ identities have on learning appears a rather familiar focus. However, the inverse question of how disciplinary content learning can be a vehicle for identity formation is little explored. In the contribution, the authors focus on this direction and pursue this agenda by operationally defining a theoretical construct, appropriation. In particular, they first explore how the construct of appropriation sheds light on the process by which content knowledge learning influences identity development. The authors then use appropriation to develop some nuance related to the notion of concept projection from coordination class theory, a well-known perspective within the landscape of theoretical approaches on conceptual change.

The main goal of the study is to test teaching materials designed for making particle physics conceptually relevant for secondary school students. In designing the materials the concept of symmetry has been assumed as core-idea because of its structural and foundational role in particle physics, its crosscutting character and its epistemological and philosophical value. The materials have been tested in a pilot-study which involved 19 students of a regular class (grade 13) of an Italian school. The data have been collected through: a) a questionnaire on a selection of the teaching materials; b) audio-recordings of a lecture (2 hours) and of a classroom discussion (1 hour); c) individual written essays. The data analysis shows that the students were in their “regime of competence” for grasping subtle nuances of the materials and for providing important hints for revising them.

The paper presents the design process we followed to recast particle physics so as to make it conceptually relevant for secondary school students. In this design process, the concept of symmetry was assumed as core-idea because of its structural and foundational role in particle physics, its crosscutting character and its epistemological and philosophical value. The first draft of the materials was tested in a pilot-study which involved 19 students of a regular class (grade 13) of an Italian school. The data analysis showed that the students were in their “regime of competence” for grasping subtle nuances of the materials and for providing important hints for revising them. In particular, students’ reactions brought into light the need of clarifying the “foundational” character that symmetry attained in twentieth-century physics. The delicate step of re-thinking the materials required the researchers to articulate the complex relationship between researches on physics teaching, history and philosophy of physics. This analytic phase resulted in a version of the materials which implies the students to be guided to grasp the meaning of symmetry as normative principle in twentieth-century physics, throughout the exploration of the different meanings assumed by symmetry over time. The whole process led also to the production of an essential, on-line version, of the materials targeted to a wider audience.

The EU funded IRRESISTIBLE-project (Project Coordinator: Jan Apotheker, University of Groningen, Netherlands) develop activities designed to foster the involvement of high school and elementary students and the public in Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI). In the project, awareness about RRI is raised in two ways: increasing content knowledge about research by bringing topics of cutting edge research into the program; fostering a discussion among the students on RRI issues about the topics that are introduced. Responsible Research and Innovation focuses on six key issues: Engagement, Gender equality, Science education, Ethics, including societal relevance and acceptability of research and innovation outcomes , Open access, Governance. The project combines formal and informal teaching to familiarize schoolchildren with science. Sixteen partners in ten countries are involved and coordinated by Science LinX. Each participants will establish a community of learners (CoL). The communities include school teachers together with university experts in the field of science communication and science centre staff. Each CoL will develop materials that the teachers will use at their own schools and students will develop an exhibit for a science centre in their own country. Once they have completed their teaching module, the teachers will each train five colleagues, in using the developed modules from the first year. Ultimately, this project will train almost ten thousand pupils to consider the social impact of scientific research.

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 (Tasquier & Nonni, 2011). An example of this kind of research, concerning environmental problems, will be briefly described and its first encouraging results illustrated.

The paper discusses teaching materials on thermodynamics, designed and implemented in 5 classes of scientifically-oriented secondary schools in Italy (grade 12). The materials are designed to: i) foster conceptual understanding; ii) create a learning environment rich enough to enable each student to find a personal way for appropriating content knowledge. In order to achieve the first aim, the design takes into account the main results of literature about student's difficulties in thermodynamics. In order to achieve the second aim, forms of “productive complexities” are implemented. The paper presents the design criteria and shows why they have the potential to create an inclusive and creative learning environment.

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.

This paper concerns the analysis of data collected during the implementation of a teaching proposal on thermodynamics in a class of 20 students (17 year-olds) of a scientifically-oriented secondary school in Italy. After a brief presentation of the teaching proposal design and of the notion of learning environment as properly complex territory, the results of two levels of analysis are discussed. The first level regards a phenomenological (bottom-up) analysis of a selection of individual interviews to students. The analysis allowed us: i) to reconstruct how different students approached the study of thermodynamics; ii) to show in what sense we can infer, in the words of Confrey, that the teaching activities have shaped a “classroom corridor” that the students were enabled to navigate by constructing “individual trajectories” (Confrey, 2006). The second level of analysis regards the development of a “humble, or local, theory” (diSessa, Cobb, 2004; Levrini, diSessa, 2008) aimed at explaining why and how a specific interplay between the collective and individual dynamics fosters and supports the construction of personal learning trajectories. Such a humble theory is comprised of: - an agent stimulating and supporting students’ in their construction of trajectories - the imaginative game put in action by the students and represented by the circularity between i) recognizing a space of possibilities for developing thinking, ii) anticipating where the various possible paths can lead, iii) testing the possibilities against reality (reification); - boundary conditions – classroom norms (trust in teacher and an acknowledged and productive role that the students were encouraged to play within the classroom) and being in their regime of competence; - a dynamical mechanism lying at the back of the process – the specific action of mediation operated by the teacher in order to manage the collective time and to tune the individual cognition, the collective dynamics and the discipline. The specific example of humble theory will provide the basis for addressing methodological issues raised by the Design Studies (Cobb et al., 2003) and concerning the development of theories in Physics Education Research. References: Confrey, J., (2006). The evolution of design studies as methodology, in Sawyer K. (ed.), The Cambridge Handbook of The Learning Sciences, Cambridge University Press, 135 – 152. Cobb, P., Confrey, J., diSessa A., Lehrer, R., Schauble, L. (2003). Design Experiments in Educational Research, Educational Researcher, 32 (1), 9-13. diSessa, A. A., Cobb, P. (2004). Ontological innovation and the role of theory in design experiments. The J. of Learning Sciences, 13(1), 77-103. Levrini, O., diSessa, A A., (2008). How Students Learn from Multiple Contexts and Definitions: Proper Time as a Coordination Class. Phys. Rev. STPER, 4, 010107-1-18.

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.

The paper deals with physics teaching/learning in high school. An investigation in three upper secondary school classes in Italy explored the reactions of students to a structuring lecture on optics within the discipline-culture (DC) framework that organises physics knowledge around four interrelated fundamental theories of light. The lecture presented optics as an unfolding conceptual discourse of physicists regarding the nature of light. Along with the knowledge constructed in a school course of a scientific lyceum, the students provided epistemological comments, displaying their perception of physics knowledge presented in the classroom. Students’ views and knowledge were investigated by questionnaires prior to and after the lecture and in special discussions held in each class. They revealed a variety of attitudes and views which allowed inferences about the potential of the DC framework in an educational context. The findings and interpretation indicate the positive and stimulating impact of the lecture and the way in which DC-based approach to knowledge organization makes physics at school cultural and attractive.

The overarching goal of this paper is to contribute to our understanding of the interplay between students’ disciplinary engagement and their identity construction. The term appropriation, borrowed from scholars in linguistics and education, was chosen to capture this broader sense of productive learning that sits at the nexus of disciplinary engagement and identity. Appropriation implies productive learning including deep conceptual understanding, but it also involves a reflexive process of populating scientific discourse with personal intentions, purposes and tastes that allow a student to embody scientific discourse and concepts in a way that is authentic and personal. The core aim of this paper is to transform the term appropriation into a theoretical construct by means of an analytic process of defining, operationalizing and testing the definition against student interview and classroom data. Five discourse markers for operationalizing the construct of appropriation were discovered through this process. Appropriation, in our study, implies students’ discourse is (1) an expression of a personal “signature” ideas, (2) grounded in the discipline, (3) thick, in that it involves a metacognitive and epistemological dimension, (4) non-incidental, in the sense of being consistently used throughout classroom activities and (5) a carrier of social relationships, in that it positions the student within the classroom community. The study is grounded in data from an extended intervention on thermodynamics in a class of 20 students (17 years old) from a scientifically-oriented secondary school in Italy (grade 12). The goal of this article is to contribute to understanding the interplay between students' disciplinary engagement and their identity construction. The term appropriation, borrowed from scholars in linguistics and education, was chosen to capture this broader sense of productive learning that sits at the nexus of disciplinary engagement and identity. Appropriation implies deep conceptual understanding, but it also involves a reflexive process of transforming scientific discourse in a way that is authentic and personal. The core aim of this article is to turn the term appropriation into a theoretical construct by means of an analytic process of defining, operationalizing, and testing the definition against student interview and classroom data. Five discourse markers for operationalizing appropriation were discovered through this process. Appropriation, in our study, implies students’ discourse is (A) an expression of a personal “signature“ idea, (B) grounded in the discipline, (C) thick, in that it involves a metacognitive and epistemological dimension, (D) non-incidental, in the sense of being consistently used throughout classroom activities, and (E) a carrier of social relationships, in that it positions the student within classroom. The study is grounded in an extended intervention on thermodynamics in an Italian secondary school class (grade 12).

We address some problems related to teaching Quantum Field Theory (QFT) at the university level. After a discussion of the pros and cons of the canonical quantization approach, we present an alternative teaching proposal. The novelty of this approach rests on the idea of using a multilevel structure, where the levels of phenomenology, formalism and interpretation are related but distinguishable. In this context, the quantization of the electromagnetic field, which is taken as a paradigmatic case in the standard approach, is addressed as a special case and studied only in the last step.

This paper aims at supporting the claim that some forms of hyper-simplification, by making physics seem easy, are at risk of dangerously distorting the content as well as the process of learning physics. The paper presents examples of dangerous simplifications in the teaching of quantum physics. Then, examples of productive forms of complexity are discussed, both as criteria for designing teaching proposals, and for realizing appropriate learning environments, namely properly complex territories. Empirical results, from a teaching/learning experiment on quantum physics at upper secondary school (grade 13), are reported. These results show examples of students’ reactions to travelling through a complex territory, and allow us to argue that unavoidable difficulty in learning quantum physics can be transformed into cultural challenges within reach of secondary school students.

The paper considers the data (answers to open questionnaires, audio- and video-recording of classroom discussions and individual interviews) collected during the implementation of a teaching proposal on thermodynamics in classes of scientifically-oriented secondary schools in Italy (grade 12). In a previous study framed within the Design Studies, a qualitative data analysis allowed us to work out an operational definition of appropriation. The presentation will aim at answering the following research question: what metacognitive skills and competences trigger and support appropriation? On the basis of a qualitative data analysis, it will be showed that the individual attitudes and abilities, recognisable as particularly evident in those students who appropriated thermodynamics, are: i) the ability of recognizing, in the conceptual scenario, a space for multiple possible paths for understanding; ii) the ability of moving back-and-forth from local details to global views; iii) the emotional disposition to taking care of and accountability for their learning and to venturing their guess for anticipating where the various paths for understanding can lead.

This paper concerns an empirical study carried out with a group of high school physics teachers engaged in the Module on relativity of a Master course on the teaching of modern physics. The study is framed within the general research issue of how to promote innovation in school via teachers' education and how to foster fruitful interactions between research and school practice via the construction of networks of researchers and teachers. In the paper, the problems related to innovation are addressed by focusing on the phase during which teachers analyze an innovative teaching proposal in the perspective of designing their own paths for the class work. The proposal analyzed in this study is Taylor and Wheeler's approach for teaching special relativity. The paper aims to show that the roots of problems known in the research literature about teachers' difficulties in coping with innovative proposals, and usually related to the implementation process, can be found and addressed already when teachers approach the proposal and try to appropriate it. The study is heuristic and has been carried out in order to trace the ``appropriation path,'' followed by the group of teachers, in terms of the main steps and factors triggering the progressive evolution of teachers' attitudes and competences.

E’ oggi ampiamente riconosciuto che la mancanza di una formazione scientifica qualificata dei cittadini ha preoccupanti ripercussioni a livello economico e sociale. Benché sia ampiamente dimostrato a livello internazionale che la ricerca in Didattica della Fisica può fornire un contributo importante nella direzione di formulare proposte decisamente innovative finalizzate ad innalzare la qualità della cultura scientifica, la maggior parte delle proposte innovative sono rimaste limitate ai contesti locali nei quali state realizzate (Report Rocard, 2007). Nel contributo sono discussi: - alcuni esempi di interazione ricerca-scuola che hanno portato alla progettazione/realizzazione di ambienti di apprendimento fecondi per una formazione scientifica di “alto profilo”; - alcune ipotesi formulate al fine di individuare modi efficaci di interazione tra ricerca e realtà scolastica mirati ad innescare e sostenere un processo di diffusione dell'innovazione nell’insegnamento della fisica. In particolare, il contributo è focalizzato ad argomentare, con risultati di ricerca ottenuti in progetti PRIN (FFC e F21, coordinati a livello nazionale da P. Guidoni), quanto e come i concetti di “complessità” e “lungimiranza” possano svolgere un ruolo guida nella costruzione di percorsi didattici in grado di innalzare la qualità dell’apprendimento della fisica e diffondere la fisica come cultura.

Risultati di ricerca in Didattica della Fisica hanno evidenziato l’importanza di introdurre, nell’insegnamento della fisica, forme di complessità produttiva al fine di promuovere processi di insegnamento/apprendimento didatticamente efficaci e culturalmente significativi. Saranno discusse alcune forme di complessità specificamente progettate ed introdotte, in collaborazione con insegnanti, in classi di Liceo Scientifico su temi di fisica moderna (relatività, meccanica quantistica, termodinamica). La discussione consentirà di mostrare come tali forme di complessità abbiano permesso di costruire ambienti di apprendimento, oltre che intelligibili e praticabili, anche sufficientemente ricchi da permettere ad ogni studente di trovare, e percorrere, una propria traiettoria d’apprendimento, ovvero una traiettoria congeniale al proprio stile cognitivo e/o ai propri interessi culturali.

The contribution concerns an empirical study carried out with a group of high school physics teachers involved in at distance master course on the teaching of modern physics. The main aim of the study is to reconstruct the “appropriation path” of an innovative teaching proposal (the Taylor and Wheeler’s approach for teaching special relativity), followed by the teachers from the perspective of designing their own paths for the class work. The focus on the appropriation phase in teacher education is argued to have a good potential for linking heuristic researches in teacher education and the issue of theory development in conceptual change.