Teacher training for professional education through a course of extension on emerging Technologies with open schooling

Abstract

This article explores the "open schooling" promoted by the European Union, whose focus is formal, non-formal and informal co-learning through cooperation between students, scientists and communities to solve real-life problems aiming at professional socio-scientific education, and responsible citizenship. The aim of this study was to understand the practices, strategies and needs of teachers interested in educational innovation with emerging technologiesand open schooling. The mixed methods methodology was supported by a semi-structured reflexive instrument of the open schooling project CONNECT. Its aim is to empower youth supported by responsible research and innovation science-action and ‘emancipatory fun’ – intrinsic enjoyment for learning. Participants were 34 teachers of secondary schools including professional, technical and vocational education in Brazil who completed an extension course on the use of emerging technologies. The results highlight several challenges for teachers still focused on traditional transmissive teaching. These include teaching research skills with real-life problems; help students generate questions with evidence-based insights; assess how well students use evidence to form an argument and craft scientific narratives and promote discussion of science in society in the classroom. In addition, four teachers' teaching and learning strategies need to become more frequent so that students can: raise scientific questions about the topic addressed; develop collaborative research project; use collaborative role-playing games and dialogue on current scientific issues.