SCIENCE TEACHERS’ PERCEPTIONS OF THE EMERGENCE OF RESPONSIBLE RESEARCH AND INNOVATION IN SCHOOL

Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) has recently gained wider importance in the European Union (EU) as an emergent framework informing the governance of science. While a growing body of literature describing RRI and its main conceptual dimensions has appeared in the last seven years or so and in several policy documents, the European Commission has emphasized the need to promote science education in the RRI context, there is no theoretical elaboration of how RRI can be meaningfully integrated into the practice of science education. In order to address this problem, the present research aimed at inquiring into the way in which science teachers make sense of RRI in school. Data were gathered with individual semi-structured interviews from 29 science teachers working in comprehensive schools and hobby schools. Abductive content analysis combining data and conceptual dimensions of RRI was used. In the light of how the science teachers in our sample have made sense of RRI, four theoretical categories have emerged: (1) meaning making; (2) taking action; (3) exploring; and (4) inclusion. These findings have important implications for developing a theory of RRI which can be beneficial for researchers as well as teachers for meaningfully integrating RRI into science education.