Sara Satanassi

Recent educational trends highlight the need to develop multi-, inter-, and transdisciplinary competencies among science teachers to foster innovation in secondary education. However, the debate on which interdisciplinary competences are most relevant—and still lacking—in teacher education remains open, and little is known about how teachers with strong disciplinary backgrounds experience encounters with interdisciplinary forms of knowledge organisation. This study proposes a theoretical approach to interdisciplinarity that informed both the design of pre-service teacher education modules and the analysis of how pre-service teachers positioned themselves in relation to its main challenges. Specifically, Akkerman and Bakker’s (2011) boundary framework was adapted to the context of interdisciplinary teacher education. The framework was implemented in two modules addressing different forms of interdisciplinarity: one on a curricular theme (parabola and parabolic motion) and one on an emergent STEM topic (nanotechnology). Data collected within a European project were analysed through a theoretically oriented thematic analysis grounded in the boundary framework. Across both modules, pre-service teachers displayed a range of reactions—from deep engagement to discomfort that led them to adopt small strategies for restoring epistemic comfort. This discomfort stemmed less from boundaries themselves than from the ambiguity of boundary objects, which challenged their sense of disciplinary security. Multi- and trans-disciplinarity were therefore perceived as more manageable than full interdisciplinarity. Yet these moments of uncertainty also sparked meta-disciplinary reflection on the nature and interrelation of disciplinary knowledge.

As quantum technologies gain importance across scientific and societal domains, understanding the foundational principles driving their development is increasingly crucial. While much work has been devoted to defining essential knowledge and curriculum content for quantum technologies at various educational levels, less attention has been paid to how the Second Quantum Revolution is shaping the nature of quantum computation in terms of its foundational epistemic aims and values. The paper presents a conceptual account of the nature of quantum computation through document analysis of foundational research papers. Using the lens of the Family Resemblance Approach to the nature of science, it uncovers the core epistemic aims and values characterizing the domain of quantum computation. By applying this analytical framework, the study identifies both predetermined epistemic aims and values (e.g., objectivity and accuracy) and emergent subcategories (e.g., materiality of information and efficiency) relevant to quantum computation. The document analysis contributes to the literature on the nature of science in general and to the characterization of quantum computation as a domain in particular. Furthermore, the analysis brings to light implicit epistemic aims and values that guide practitioners in a scientific domain to the foreground, which often remain unarticulated in educational contexts. The findings include 17 instances of epistemic aims and values of quantum computation generated from an analysis of significant research papers in the field. By systematically generating these epistemic aims and values, the study provides a nuanced and explicit approach to characterizing the nature of quantum computation, enabling educators to incorporate these themes into curriculum design, teaching, and learning. Some implications for quantum technologies education are discussed.

[This paper is part of the Focused Collection in Investigating and Improving Quantum Education through Research.] Quantum information science and technology is a growing field. Programs like Quantum Flagship in the EU and the National Quantum Initiative Act in the U.S. have called for science education and science education research to provide efforts and competencies for preparing the workforce and the next generations of quantum experts and promoting quantum literacy. The second quantum revolution is similar to the Newtonian one in that it has the potential to question worldviews in our society. We present our approach to design a teaching module for secondary school students that aims to value the cultural scope of the second quantum revolution. The model of educational reconstruction was used as a theoretical reference to reconstruct content for educational and cultural purposes. Renn’s elaborated historical analysis of knowledge evolution provided the criteria for characterizing the cultural scope in content reconstruction. The module has been iteratively refined following a design-based approach involving back-and-forth dynamics between educational hypotheses and empirical results. The process started in 2018, and the module was refined through 5 rounds of implementation in extracurricular courses with secondary school students (for almost 130 students). The main finding underscores the importance of finding a balance between a process of simplification or elementarization of the content and its enrichment to foster learners to develop a deep understanding of quantum technologies, their conceptual intricacies, and their cultural scope.

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.

Stimulated by the European project “QTEdu CSA”, within the flagship “Quantum Technologies”, a community of researchers active in the fields of quantum technologies and physics education has designed and implemented an extracurricular course on quantum physics concepts and quantum technologies applications for high school. The course, which featured eight interactive lectures, was organized online between March and May 2021 and attended by about 250 students from all over Italy. In this paper, we describe the main tenets and activities of the course. Moreover, we report on the effectiveness of the course on students’ knowledge of the basic concepts of quantum physics and students’ views about epistemic aspects and applications of quantum technologies. Results show that the designed activities were effective in improving students’ knowledge about fundamental aspects of quantum mechanics and familiarizing them with quantum technology applications.

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, technical-experimental) and generate meaningful descriptions of the phenomenon.