Comment Science and scientists in the drawings of European children

The SEDEC project (Science Education for the Development of European Citizenship) is a three-year Comenius 2.1 European project. It belongs to a set of projects funded by the Directorate-General for Culture of the European Commission to support the cooperation between European partners for the planning and the implementation of events providing training to teachers and school educators. In particular, its objectives were the following: to analyse the relations and the possible synergies between scientific education, citizenship and European identity to spur and to support schools to use resources outside the school (such as museums, research institutes, etc.) for a better scientific education, involving the entire European territory to produce didactic materials and protocols for activities that should stimulate the participation of teachers and children, as European citizens, in the science-society dialogue. The first step of the project (September 2005 June 2007) was a research on the perception of science in the children and the teachers of the 6 European countries involved in SEDEC: Czech Republic, France, Italy, Poland, Portugal, Romania. The objectives of the SEDEC research were the following: to base the didactic action on the knowledge of the emotions and images of the pupils to gather raw materials that can be later used to produce didactic instruments. Obviously, this research, stemming from a research-action project framework, has never claimed to be exemplary from an academic point of view. The universe for the survey were pupils and teachers in the home territories of the partners, and therefore it is comparable neither to a statistically-significant sample for Europe, nor to one for each single country involved. The research actions were frequently implemented by teachers or non-professional researchers and the control of the methodology has not been exempt from flaws. Yet the purpose was not to obtain a certain quantitative view, it was rather to identify the variety, to trace the issues and the trends that should guide the actions of the project. What view of science and of scientists do children and adolescents in the partner countries have? What the scientific themes they are interested to? What their hopes or fears regarding science? What do they expect science to do for Europe? Do they perceive a European dimension for research and/or for the historical-scientific heritage? These were the questions that have guided the research. Two age groups were chosen as targets: the 9 years old (henceforth referred to as group A) and the 14 years old (henceforth referred to as group B), considering that it is precisely in the time interval between the primary school and the lower secondary school that the orientation towards a scientific career may develop, that from a total creative opening in childhood trends and limitations start to emerge, and those were the subjects of the research. Besides this, it was decided that the survey should have been addressed to teachers too (group C), to better understand their influence on the pupils, if any. The following instruments have been used: 1. the “Draw a scientist” test as an individual activity (groups A and B) 2. an individual questionnaire for children and teens (groups A and B) 3. a concept map on the word “Europe” (groups A and B) as a collective activity for a class 4. an individual questionnaire (group C). Actions no. 1, 2 and 3 took place on the same occasion, whereas the teachers answered the questionnaire, manually or on-line, independently and in a moment they chose by themselves. This was the composition of the sample: