Responsible Research, Innovation, and Socioscientific Inquiry Approaches in a European Teacher Education Project

Abstract

Despite some decades of advocacy for the teaching of socioscientific issues in school science, science educators have struggled to establish these ideas as central to either curricula or teacher education. This chapter describes the experience of teacher educators in the EU-funded PARRISE project, working with pre- and in-service teachers to represent responsible research and innovation (RRI) through the development of a socioscientific inquiry-based learning approach to teacher education. The data for the research came from interviews with key players in the project, from 10 countries, describing their experience of the PARRISE process and of working with teachers to establish an inquiry-based learning approach to both scientific content and socioscientific issues (SSI). The chapter describes the challenges teacher educators faced in establishing SSI approaches in their courses, with constraints imposed by different curriculum framings and teacher education system factors that affected innovation. We describe the way in which the project framing developed over time in response to a variety of innovative approaches developed by members, with project meetings focusing on relations between inquiry science teaching, SSI teaching, the RRI construct, citizenship, and action. We describe the key aspects of the approaches to pre- and in-service education that proved successful in engaging teachers with this work, and particularly the value of co-design processes around local issues carried out with in-service teachers over time.