Context- based physics: case-studies of teacher training and materials for Science education in road safety education

The role of context in learning (that is contextualized) and motivation (that arises in context) implies a need of designing, promoting, revising the physics learning integrated into social issues. Road safety education should be the ground to build conceptual knowledge as well as the context of meaning for the safety rules. Good examples of activities related to context-based physics pointed out a need to study how the conceptual knowledge of physics can be built in science & society contexts, thus grounding a new way of looking at the setting of both physics and science & society. This innovation in the way to look at contents to activate effective teaching-learning processes needs adequate teachers formation. Many dimensions are involved in this process: teacher professional development, ways to teach physics in different contexts, design-based research, proposals design. A research was planned to address these levels, founded in the methodology of Inquired Based Learning and in the Model of Educational Reconstruction as a framework for the re-structuration of the physics content in the proposals, the issue of the motion in its levels of both description and aspects relevant to active and passive safety in the mobility. Formative activities were offered to schools, involving in two years 40 kindergarten and primary/middle school teachers of different subject areas, interested in road safety education. We analyzed the process activated in teacher education and the teachers’ works during the formation and in their experimentation in school. The main value emerges from the integration of the competences of teachers in treating problems about traffic safety in different topics and the researcher competences in scientific education. The main results concern good practices as suggestions for curricula innovation, alternative proposal integrating learning of both scientific and safety aspects in new contexts and promoting student motivation, improvement in teachers’ PCK..