Abstract
Children demonstrate great interest in natural phenomena, including those usually studied in physical science, and want to learn more about them. How can teachers support and accompany such learning? Which methods and approaches are suitable for building children’s understanding of physical phenomena? Innovative approaches that are used in the tertiary education of kindergarten and elementary school teachers for early physical science education will be illustrated in this Special Issue.
Innovation in the education of student teachers of kindergarten and elementary school levels comes from a reflection on the nature of knowledge, of teaching and learning, and of the discipline itself. The discipline, in our case physics, will need to play the role of a primary science in the following dual sense. Primary means early in the sense of education addressed to children when they build their primary understanding of the world. It also refers to the understanding of concepts and practices of science that may rightly be called primary, i.e., those that form the roots of scientific thought and action. We want to emphasize approaches that help future teachers to become aware of not just the knowledge of a particular science but also of how a child experiences nature and how an understanding of such experience can be fostered and nourished.
In this Special Issue, we wish to address innovative developments that are mindful of this dual sense of primary. This means, in particular, that issues and themes related to the science itself will always be embedded in the lifeworld of a young learner. This places a burden on us as educators of student teachers to be mindful of the connections of physical science with other natural sciences, health science, engineering, social science, and the humanities in order to make physics part of a truly ecological science.