Conference Agenda

The work presented is part of a research that studies the classroom practices in Primary Education. The paper studies the tasks involved in these classroom practices when teaching different learning subjects. One of the curricular aspects studied involves scientific literacy; that is, an analysis is made of those teaching methods used to teach the scientific literacy to pupils from 6 to 12. The research has adopted an intensive case-study model that has provided access to a systematic analysis of the classroom practices of the teachers involved (16 teachers, from five different schools). Each case, involved the video and audio recording of complete sessions (from 9 am to 2 pm), which means a total of 159.5 hours of class. Later, for this paper, the time corresponding to the subjects Mathematics and Natural Sciences was studied.

The last two regulations on the curriculum of Primary Education in Spain established as one of the aims the development of scientific culture in pupils. This scientific culture is reflected in the objectives and competences of subjects such as Mathematics and Natural Sciences. And it refers to the two senses that Norris & Phillips (2003) distinguished as components of scientific literacy: the fundamental sense and the derived one. Examples of the first would be in Mathematics: Interpreting simple mathematical language present in everyday life in different formats, acquiring appropriate vocabulary and showing understanding of the message; and the second in Natural Sciences: providing students with a solid and well-structured scientific background will help them to understand the world and encourage them to care for, respect and value it.

Thus, scientific literacy includes the specific scientific knowledge necessary for understanding reality in general (derived sense) and for reading and writing in particular (fundamental sense). The educational challenge that this idea poses is realised in the case of primary education because fundamental sense links science subjects with the rest of the curriculum subjects that are also related to fundamental sense. Particularly with Language and Literature. Therefore, working to promote a scientific culture in primary can be interpreted as part of a broader and more relevant project that has to do with the development of literacy throughout the primary stage. Starting from the fundamental sense of scientific literacy, science would not be possible without texts, without the capacities of comprehension, interpretation, analysis and critique inherent to scientific thought and communication.

Unfortunately this challenge has not been included in the basic core of Primary Education agendas so far in Spain (García Carmona, 2021) and raises important questions for teachers about what it means in terms of classroom practice to educate their pupils in a scientific culture (Smith et al. 2012). It is vital to know what literacy processes teachers undertake when they teach science and how they do so, as we can understand what learning opportunities pupils are offered (Rodríguez et al., 2018).

Knowing how teachers address scientific literacy is essential for understanding how pupils are helped to develop a scientific culture. The following research goals have therefore been formulated:

- Describe and understand how the scientific literacy process (fundamental sense) is undertaken in different classrooms across several levels in Primary Education where Mathematics and Natural Sciences are being taught.

- Analyse the teaching strategies teachers use to address scientific literacy in the classroom and compare them to our knowledge on the issue of Literacy in general.

- Develop a procedure that may help teachers to improve their teaching processes, to contribute to the development of the scientific culture regulated in the official curriculum.

Theorical framework and research questions

This contribution explores the potential of the carbon cycle for teaching an environmental issue through chemistry lessons at the lower secondary school.
Environmental issues are complex by essence. Morin (1990) uses the Latin etymology of the word “complex”: complexus, “weaving together”, as a metaphor to illustrate the very close relationship between academic subjects in a complex approach: as each coloured thread is important to build the pattern of a fabric, we need to cross different subjects’ approaches to understand environmental issues challenges and to be able to solve them (Morin, 1990, p. 21). As an example, the carbon dioxide produced by human activities – modelized as a chemical reaction in chemistry - must be connected to the greenhouse effect model to deal with the complexity of the Anthropocene. According to Mohan et al. (2009) and Zangori et al. (2017), the carbon cycle seems to be a good entry into the Anthropocene’s complexity. Mohan et al. (2009) shows how the principle of conservation of matter is important for analyzing the carbon cycle, especially to understand natural and human carbon dioxide productions. In their study, Zangori et al. (2017) try to connect the carbon cycle, the chemical reaction, and an environmental issue: the global warming. Results from their experiment show an improvement of the learning of the principle of conservation.
In French-speaking countries, the curriculum is organised into school disciplines, taught during distinctive time slots by specialised teachers at secondary level. Such an organisation questions the teachability of topics such as environmental issues and sustainable development. Martinand (2016) suggests that it requires many adjustments between school disciplines with specifics traditions, epistemologies, methodologies, and sometimes different purposes. However, the implementation of these adjustments in teaching and learning practices brings out new questions for didactic research.
In France and Western Switzerland, curricula texts at lower secondary level show some tensions between two purposes of sciences curricula: educate citizens on the one hand and teach specific scientific concepts on the other hand (Auteure1 et al., accepted). Moreover, these tensions are also reflected in the different purposes assigned to the school disciplines at lower secondary school. Whereas chemistry education seems oriented towards the teaching of specifics concepts and models (e.g., atoms, molecules, chemical equations), environmental issues tend to be taught in biology and geology only. However, chemistry is involved in environmental issues. Firstly, because it is historically connected with the industry (Bensaude-Vincent and Stengers, 2001), chemical products can potentially impact the environment. Secondly, because chemistry develops a range of models useful to analyse and understand environmental issues. Hence, chemistry as a school discipline has a role to play in understanding environmental issues (Martinand, 2016), but this role remains to be defined.
According to Chevallard (2004), the “co-disciplinary approach to a problem” (p. 8, our translation) consists in the balanced collaboration of the academic disciplines involved, oriented towards a shared goal: finding an answer. The carbon cycle is a common model in biology and geology: its structure in circle allows to connect human activities and their environmental consequences. From a chemical point of view, each arrow on the cycle could be modelized as a chemical reaction (photosynthesis, respiration, combustion, etc.) From our perspective, integration of the carbon cycle in a chemistry teaching could create the conditions for a co-disciplinarity approach. Thus, the following research questions are pursued: is the implementation of a co-disciplinarity approach possible in order to connect the chemical transformation and the global warming by using the carbon cycle? Which indications of this co-disciplinarity could be found in the teaching practices?

In contemporary societies citizens are increasingly confronted with pressing societal issues with connections to science, termed socioscientific issues, SSI (Ratcliffe & Grace, 2003). It is therefore argued that an important aim of science education is that all students acquire knowledge, skills and intellectual attitudes useful for dealing with SSI that they may encounter in daily life and for engaging in civic reasoning and discourse about such issues (OECD, 2018; Lee, White & Dong, 2021). This broad objective for science education is often referred to as scientific literacy (Roberts & Bybee, 2014). To foster students’ scientific literacy, it has been suggested that SSI be incorporated into science curricula, providing opportunities for students to explore both knowledge and values at stake in the context of current issues, by means of student-centred classroom practices involving discourse-based activities (Zeidler, 2014). However, the incorporation of SSI as contexts for teaching studying and learning may require a transformation of prevailing approaches to science teaching, typically characterized by transmissive pedagogy and a focus on students’ learning of content knowledge and training of practical skills (Lundqvist & Sund, 2018; Lyons, 2006), placing new demands on teachers and students. Teachers may have to expand their traditional role as conveyors of scientific knowledge, while students will have to learn to deal with the insecurity associated with value-laden issues that lack a single clear-cut answer. Despite calls for fostering students’ scientific literacy to deal with SSI, the products and methods of science is also still foregrounded in contemporary science curricula in many countries as well as in international standardized assessments (Marty et al., 2018; Roberts & Bybee, 2014). For teachers who aspire to incorporate SSI into their teaching, the process will thus be conditioned by their professional skills, traditions, national curricula, and diverse expectations.

Although there is an increasing interest in teachers’ professional development associated with incorporating SSI into science teaching, research in the field is still scarce. There is thus a need for more research that focuses on teachers’ considerations, decisions, and actions in relation to the incorporation of SSI to provide in-depth understanding of how teaching can be developed to foster students’ scientific literacy and how teachers can be supported in this process (Chen & Xiao, 2021; Friedrichsen et al., 2020).

This study explores the process by which two science teachers incorporate SSI into their teaching for the promotion of students’ scientific literacy, to identify how the teachers negotiate, reconsider, and develop teaching practices within the prevailing conditions. Through the framework of didactics, that enables reflection on educational questions concerning purpose, objective, content, and methods (Hudson, 2002), the study aims at providing knowledge about how teaching can be developed to incorporate SSI and the conditions for this development. Didactics understands teaching as framed by societal goals, the curriculum, teaching traditions, and teachers’ and students’ knowledge and intentions. In this respect, it contains a critical element which implies “reflection on relations between school and instruction on the one hand (their goals, contents, forms of organization and methods) and social conditions and processes on the other” (Klafki, 1995, p. 14).

In the analysis of teaching, the relations between teacher, student(s) and subject matter are essential to consider, as is also the context of the school and the wider society within which the situation is situated (Hudson & Meyer, 2011). Using these relations as a starting point, the study seeks to answer the following research questions:
What dimensions of teaching-studying-learning situations do the teachers strive to develop?
What conditions facilitate or impede this development?

In this study we report findings on how the development of taste for science among primary school students (Year 2, ages 7-8) can be supported by fine-tuned adjustments in teaching. The concept of taste for science was originally developed as a proxy for student interest, treating the aesthetic and normative aspects of science learning as intertwined and as constituted in action (author et al., 2015a). Distinctions of taste not only concern what the individual knows and feels about science, for example, what constitutes a beautiful observation chart in biology class or whether students consider themselves to be science persons or not, they are also open for others to evaluate and judge (author, 2006).

Taste in general (Bourdieu, 1984; Dewey, 1934/1980) and taste for science thus is socially constituted and learnt and strongly associated with home background (author et al., 2013). Students with an academic background have been shown to be more likely to enter school with a taste for science that will be recognized and therefore more likely to be further cultivated (ibid). It is also well established that some students feel alienated to science and claim that it is not for them, even if they perform well in science (e.g. Archer et al., 2010). Thus teaching has an important compensatory role in supporting students developing a taste for science as taught in school and ultimately making more students feel that they are included in, rather than excluded from, the practices of their science classes.

Regardless of home background, students' interest in and identification with science show a clear decline at the transition between primary and lower secondary school (Potvin & Hasni, 2014) and there is a call for studies exploring how continuity between different school stages can come about through teaching and so potentially establish a more enduring interest in science (Potvin & Hasni, 2014). This is also the aim of this study, namely, to explore the role of teaching for student learning and taste development in science. In previous studies at the lower secondary school level we have shown how teaching can support students in developing a taste, as evident by how they make and aesthetically evaluate distinctions regarding language use, procedures, and ways-to-be in the science classroom (author el al., 2015b). Here we are interested in the younger students, and we ask: How can teaching support primary school students’ taste for science?

The study is part of a larger project in which we, teachers and researchers, collaborate in developing teaching for supporting communicative processes in the science classroom. The aim of the project is to develop didactic models for classroom communication, making them useful for teaching primary science particularly for second-language learners with non-academic backgrounds. Author 3 and Author 5 are the teachers of the students participating in the project. The two schools are located in suburbs of Stockholm, Sweden, where the students mainly have non-academic backgrounds and are second-language learners.