Socioscientific inquiry-based learning for community engagement in the UK context: supporting school openness through science education

In this talk, Andri will be discussing work conducted within the COSMOS project, which aimed to use socioscientific inquiry-based learning (SSIBL) as an action-oriented pedagogical framework that combines citizenship education, inquiry-based learning and the use of socioscientific issues education. SSIBL, in combination with Communities of Practice was used as a pedagogical means of supporting school transformation from more inwards to more outwards modes of engagement with within and out-of-school communities. Drawing on focus group and interview data with science teachers from two primary and two secondary schools, she will discuss tensions identified between dimensions of the ecological model of school openness (Sarid et al., 2024), which has been used as a methodological and reflective tool in this study, and factors that facilitate or impede overcoming these tensions and challenges.

About the speaker

Andri Christodoulou is an Associate Professor of Science Education at the University of Southampton. Andri joined the Southampton Education School in 2011 after completing her masters and PhD in Science Education at King’s College London. Andri’s research focuses on how productive classroom discourse using frameworks like dialogic argumentation and socioscientific issues can be developed and used in science education. More recently, Andri’s work has focused on the use of socioscientific inquiry-based learning, She is currently involved in the EU-funded Horizon 2020 project, COSMOS, focusing on using socio-scientific inquiry-based learning (SSIBL) in communities of practice as a means of opening schools to their communities.