On 2 July, Christine Knippels (coordinator COSMOS) together with Laurence Simonneaux gave the opening lecture of the 14th edition of the ERIDOB conference. Every other year, this conference brings together 250 researchers in didactics of biology from all over Europe. The theme of this latest edition was 'Biology education: bridging the gap between science and society'.
In her keynote, Christine discussed the importance of socio-scientific inquiry-based learning (SSIBL) to build bridges to societal issues. She drew on her rich research career to inspire participants on how biology education can go beyond conveying facts. And, also beyond fueling interest and perceived relevance. Christine made a plea for the cross-fertilization between science and citizenship education, with the goal of strengthening pupils' action competence. Leading questions were: What do such didactics look like? What do teachers need to bring this into practice? What do pupils learn from it? And how do we shape our research to study all that? Of course, her keynote also highlighted the COSMOS project on Open schooling in science education.
