The glacial landscape in the educational programs of high secondary schools

Marina Porta (1,2), Silvia Esposto (1*) & Eleonora Paris (2)
(1) (1*) Università degli Studi di Milano, Dipartimento di Scienze della Terra "A. Desio", Via Mangiagalli n.34, 20133, Milano, Italy. (2) UNICAMearth - School of Science and Technology, Geology Division, University of Camerino, via Gentile III da Varano - 62032 Camerino. (*) già c/o Corresponding author e-mail: marina.porta@unicam.it

Changes introduced by the last school reform (2010) deeply modified the Science teaching in the Italian High school while textbooks have been progressively revisited. In this work, we propose an analysis of textbook approaches, teachers’ approaches and student responses, considering both the whole textbooks and single chapters regarding one of the most current topic: changes in the glacial environment under changing climatic conditions. Twelve chapters extracted from the most used textbooks have been analyzed for what concerns their structure, geographical location of pictures and kind and detail of figure captions. Moreover we investigated perceptions and opinions of the scholastic environment (teachers and students) about the different editorial offers. Results from a questionnaire show how the interviewed teachers prefer chapters with rich contents, thus allowing for a selection of topics, whereas students demonstrated to be more favorable to a chapter structure that drives them through a logic itinerary, with summary and guided tests.

textbooks, chapters structure, educational choices, glacial landscape.