COMPLEXITY SCIENCE AND CITIZENSHIP SKILLS: A PILOT STUDY WITH ADULT CITIZENS

The scientific citizenship issue has been debating, in the context of science education, for over two decades. The main goal of the studies in this research field is to find approaches that, focusing on scientific contents and methods, design innovative ways to turn scientific knowledge in citizenship skills. In the talk we present a preliminary study within a project just started. The study aims to investigate, in a concrete context, if, how and why the development of hard scientific skills grounded in the discipline of complex systems can result in the development of transversal citizenship skills that can impact on people's ways of facing problems and making decisions. The pilot study has been carried out with a group of 34 volunteer adult citizens and was articulated in three phases according to three types of goals: i) to investigate what scientific competences were held by the group of citizens; ii) to investigate if and how adult people could be guided, through activities designed ad hoc, to understand basic scientific concepts typical of complex systems science; iii) to investigate if citizens were able to turn the learnt scientific concepts into competences to analyse a problem of city planning. Along the three phases of the study, several data were collected and analysed. The data we gathered, with respect to the three phases above, suggest that: i) just few participants were comfortable in dealing with scientific and epistemological concepts, while a "good sense" approach was more common; ii) activities were useful to understand the concepts involved; iii) four different attitudes can be recognized, according to the various types of alignment between scientific competences and decision-making skills.