by Shu-Nu Chang Rundgren & Carl-Johan Rundgren (Stockholm University, Sweden)

PARRISE has been introduced in pre-service primary science teachers’ education at Stockholm University (SU) from 2015 to 2016 with two rounds (three cohorts) of teacher professional development courses, focusing on  the socioscientific inquiry based learning (SSIBL) framework.

In addition to the introduction of the SSIBL framework focusing on Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI), Citizenship Education (CE), Inquiry Based Science Education (IBSE) and socioscientific issues (SSI), our aim was to present SSIBL as a concrete model for teaching and learning. A 3-step model (Figure 1) was used in our SSIBL course, initially developed by us in the context of the PROFILES European  FP7 project  (2010-2014).

After the introduction of the 3-step model, we also used the ‘Post it!’ activity to let the participating pre-service teachers experience the 3-step model (Figure 2). This activity was followed up by group discussions, in the context of teachers’ development of their own SSIBL teaching and learning modules.

Seventy-six pre-service science teachers participated in our TPD (Figure 3) and provided feedback  using a Likert scale questionnaire. The details of their participation is shown in Table 1.  The teachers’ feedback was positive with an average score of 4.3 out of 6. A pre-post evaluation  of the participating pre-service teachers’ confidence on, and need for further education in the areas of SSI, IBSE and SSIBL teaching, indicated that the teachers had higher confidence on SSI, IBSE and SSIBL teaching, but they still needed more professional development on teaching with these ideas. Our  experiences from the SSIBL course revealed the importance of introducing SSIBL to school  teachers at both the pre- and in-service level. Our concluding remark is that time and space for SSIBL teaching and learning  in schools and teacher  education programs are both necessary for the ultimate goal of responsible citizenship education.

Table 1. The participants of the SSIBL TPD courses at the SU
TPD courses	Terms	Activities	# of participants
First round	Autumn 2015	10 hours of face-to-face lectures/activities during three days	28
Second round (Cohort 1)	Spring 2016	10 hours of distance lectures during three days	24
Second round (Cohort 2)	Autumn 2016	6 hours face-to-face lectures/activities during one day	24