Session 3 – ORALS

Prior work in astronomy education research over the last three decades has mainly concerned the eleciting of students’ misconceptions about a variety of topics, from day/night cycle, seasonal changes and Moon phases to topics such as light spectra, stars and cosmology. Far less efforts have been devoted so far to research about students’ attitudes towards astronomy. To address this issue, we present a new theoretical framework, the astronomy identity, which aims at describing how students situate themselves with respect to astronomy. In general, the construct of disciplinary identity (e.g., the physics identity) basically frames the students’ perceptions about a given discipline in terms of social relationships and self-processes. The proposed astronomy identity framework features four dimensions: interest, utility value, confidence, and conceptual knowledge. Differently from prior studies about disciplinary identity, which focused only on the relationship between the targeted identity and the perceived competency (confidence), our study included in the hypothesised model also the actual performance. About 900 Italian primary and lower secondary students (9-14 years old) were involved in the study. A survey consisting in four parts (interest, identy, confidence, knowledge) was used as instrument. Confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modelling were used to validate the hypothesized model. Gender differences and longitudinal effects across school levels were also investigated. Results show that interest has a direct effect on astronomy identity. An indirect effect mediated by utility value was also detected. Differently, we found that interest has only an indirect effect on conceptual knowledge, mediated by confidence. Moreover, both confidence and conceptual knowledge seem to not affect astronomy identity. Concerning gender differences, we found that the effect of interest on identity is greater for females than for males and that utility value mediates the effect of interest on identity for males but not for girls. Finally, we also found that girls’ interest in astronomy and confidence in their performance decreases with age, with a potential negative impact on conceptual knowledge, astronomy identity, and future career choice. The proposed astronomy identity framework can be employed not only to examine the role of affective variables on performance and persistence in astronomy but also to improve the design of teaching-learning activities more responsive of students’ attitudes toward and perceived utility of astronomy and that can potentially sustain the interest in astronomy over a longer time. In particular, during the communication, we will present possible ways in which extra-curricular activities carried out at science centres and planetariums may be designed in order to develop a sustainable astronomy identity. Moreover, during the communication, we will also launch, as possible extension of this study, a first call to participate to a validation study of the identity framework at international level, starting from a revised version of the survey instrument used in this study to be translated in different languages.

Astronomy education has the capacity for expanding the perspective beyond specific racial, cultural, and socio-religious paradigms while fostering respect and reverence for the diversity, totality and integrity of all life. It facilitates comprehension of the radical interdependence of ecosystems across scales from quantum through biological and socio-cultural to cosmological. Astronomy and astrobiology education play roles in facilitating understanding of ecological diversity, appreciating with clarity the vital role of each aspect of life. The psycho-biological healing effects of focus on the vaster astronomical perspective may be proposed by the case of a young boy in bone marrow cancer recovery in the hospital who became involved in the Galaxy Zoo Citizen Science platform on a daily basis during a period of six month extreme isolation. Though isolated his recovery and lack of excessive emotional and psychological stress were noteworthy. Research on brain and bio physiological effects of concentration on astronomical scales and phenomenology are yet to be undertaken. This deeply parallels and is similar to mindfulness practices, where extensive research has and is being pursued. These practices, noted for outstanding benefits to subjects involved, and now both prescribed by the medical field, and used widely in schools internationally, focus on the vastness of the sky and space as a domain of mindful pure awareness, the space-time substrate parallel to the substrate of the consciousness. As an example of astronomy as a stress reduction methodology, it was stated by an astronomer, that “a night observing on the mountain is like a two week vacation”. Literally the mind and consciousness are moving outward into participation in the vaster time-space scale beyond the Earthly confines and normative stress factors. Deep silence of such spatial focus has been experienced as remedial for the nervous system. Astronomical immersion, beyond human authoritarian constraints, facilitates a sense of participation in and connectedness to far greater reality. Further research at this nexus is required. It calms random thought flux, promoting Einstein’s ‘cosmological feeling’, related to the expansion of the personal identity into the cosmological tension and intention. It facilitates that which is at the core of the leading edge of remedial stress reduction techniques in our modern anthropocentric society and culture as one becomes ontologically integral to and with universal cosmic intent. From the cosmological and astronomical encounter the universality of life moving through, within and as everything may be both deduced, as well as experienced. Fundamentally healing at the ontological scale, meaning is experienced as inseparable from being. There is the sense of human beings as witness, co-creators and inseparable participants in cosmos. The sense of meaning and belonging – as one of the primary healthy human psychosocial intentions is encountered with the unbound expanse of spacetime – relatively innumerable stars and clusters of galaxies strewn across potentially limitless space, including the observer and all planetary life.

“Science teachers, even more than others if that is possible, don’t understand that one doesn’t understand.” (G. Bachelard, 1938) When the students begin to study astrophysics they have previous preconceptions that impede the understanding of new scientific notions. So the teacher needs first to break down these obstacles, that come from the student’s previous ideas or observations, in order to efficiently teach the new concepts. Too much effort is spend to add new concepts on a «weak basis», so it is the duty of any teacher to spend more time to carefully remove preconceptions from students’ minds. I will review some of the most common preconceptions of students when learning astrophysics and discuss what are the right solutions to remove them. I will list here some of them: Usually the students consider that the planets move around the Sun, but the Sun is at rest; even when the students know that there is no celestial body at rest, they cannot imagine how the entire Solar System moves. There are many models in 3D. The students don’t know that the stars have different colors. If you ask the students which stars are warmer: the red ones or the blue ones, the answer is the red ones. They associate the red color with the fire but they don’t think that the flame of methane gas is blue. Here it follows an explanation of Wien law. Students believe that the Sun has a mass about as large as the entire mass of the rest of the Solar System. They knows also that the Universe is in expansion but it’s difficult to understand that The galaxies don’t move through the space: it is the space which expands, dragging the galaxies. There are very simple models to destroy this preconceptions. The existence of gravitational lenses involves the direction’s changing of the light propagation due to gravitational attraction. Does the light has mass?

For over 30 years, The MCE Sky Pedagogy Research Group has been offering teachers and educators paths, training and teaching/learning practices that have the sky and the study of the multiple relationships of humans with it as a focus of research, and the teaching of Astronomy as a research object.
Over the years, we have developed methods, based on direct experience, cooperation, the exchange of experiences, and we have proposed, in the city or in nature, residential training workshops as well, in which teachers and school educators, of all levels and various disciplines from different continents and countries of the world, participate.
The suspension of all meeting activities during the months of the pandemic forced us to suspend the in-person meetings and in particular the residential courses at the center of our research.
We then asked ourselves what positive answer we could try to give … by subjecting some of our «historical» proposals to the test of physical distancing.
We decided to react constructively and creatively, helping us to «travel and meet» under the skies of different countries of the world, asking ourselves how we could transform ourselves into a resource that seemed to be the exact opposite of our customary practice, which was based on in-person contact, on direct experience, on acting and reasoning together. For decades, our courses have been adult workshops, in which the participants are involved on a personal level, and experience and understand the material as it impacts themselves as individuals, before it impacts them as teachers and educators.
So, the course «Meet the skies of the world» was born, proposed by the italian Group and organized in collaboration with friends and colleagues from Argentina, Colombia and Brazil, open to participants from other countries. This «experiment» was possible, and had a great pedagogical coherence, thanks to the multi-year collaboration between the 6 coordinators/teachers.
Key items of our proposal for this course are: our peculiar and essential activities of observation of the sky by naked eye; high presence of cultural links; to invite everyone to share and make the heavens available to all; to practice a multicultural opening in the teaching of disciplines also: how different it is to live in the South or in the North of the world!
We work in contrast to the standardization (of a single exchange language imposed on everyone in the world and of unique methods of explanation based on texts, without objects, with the word given only to those who «teach») for a conscious scientific citizenship. So, all the work, the meetings and the chats, were developed in Latin languages: Italian, Spanish and Portuguese.
We have therefore built a series of 3 meetings in which to bring together activities and personal observation efforts, including looking for and drawing the Moon with respect to a fixed reference that is one’s horizon, and the construction of some instruments and materials, such as the astrolabe, which help to see how the same «object» takes on a partially different conformation, depending on the place of observation, which leads us, each time, to question ourselves about variables and constants. One more meeting served as an instance of discussion and evaluation of what was experienced
The interest of the first course carried out in June for our common research, led us to organize a second edition of the course «Meet the skies of the world» in the period of the September 2020 Equinox, to verify its approach and content with a new group, and at a different time of the astronomical year. More than 100 teachers from Italia, Brasil, Colombia, Argentina have been participating in this course. In this presentation we will show some of the results and comments about this significant experience.