In an interview, Professor Olivia Levrini discusses the complex future of science education

Interview conducted on February 6, 2026.

April 22th,  2026 | 19:00

To reflect on the future of science education, Marcos, a reporter for Balbúrdia Magazine, spoke with Professor Olivia Levrini of the University of Bologna in Italy, a world-renowned scholar when it comes to thinking about the future and its connections to science education.

 

Marcos: Thank you very much for speaking with us, Professor. To start, how did you become interested in the topic of the future of science education?

Olivia: Yes! For me, this is a really interesting story. In our research group, we collaborate a lot with teachers, and for us, it’s very important to listen to them to understand what’s happening in the classroom, what their needs are, and also those of the students.

About 10 years ago, a very special incident occurred in a physics class. A team from the university visited a school to conduct a survey to understand the students’ plans after high school. This is a common survey, and the questionnaire could be completed in 10 minutes.

But, surprisingly, this turned out to be a very difficult task! The students became anxious, entering a very peculiar emotional state. And the task took much longer than it should have.

After that, Professor Paola Fantini, an excellent colleague of mine, came up to me and said, “Olivia, we have a problem: the new generation of students is very different from the previous one because they relate to time differently. When faced with a choice about the future, they enter a completely different emotional state than what happened in the past. We need to study this; we need to study the relationship between young people and the future.”

But we’re physics teachers, not psychologists. So, we needed to find a way to think about how physics could contribute to this. When we searched the literature, we found only one study conducted in Australia by Paige e Lloyd.

It was a very pioneering work on the future, on how to bring the future into science education. So, we began to explore fields far removed from science education, such as the sociology of time and future studies. And from there, after stepping out of our comfort zone, we discovered the work of Hartmut Rosa and realized there was plenty of room in physics education and physics itself to do something about the future.

That was the beginning of the story. And so, we developed the I SEE project, approved in 2016—10 years ago! I believe that I SEE was one of the first European projects to address the concept of futurizing science education.

 

Marcos: What an interesting story!

From the perspective of “futurizing” that you mentioned, how can we move from the linear way of thinking we all learned in school to a more complex way of thinking that accounts for uncertainty? And what are the implications of this shift when it comes to making decisions? Because if the future isn’t as linear as we were taught, how does that change the decision-making process?

Olivia: That was exactly what we needed to address. What can physics education do to develop students’ future literacy? To develop future competencies—skills for thinking about the future? To expand their ways of imagining futures? And to act in the present with their eyes on the horizon?

In fact, we began analyzing the history of science and physics to investigate how physics conceptualizes time and temporality. Moving away from the mechanistic Newtonian/Laplacian way of thinking about time and the future as something deterministic. Linear. Already decided from the past to the present. Something that is necessary, inevitable, and determined.

Instead, the science of complex systems can offer the epistemological and conceptual basis for conceiving of time and the future as an open reality. And also the past as an open reality, because the evolution of the system is also due to contingencies. Thus, the past can be seen as a kind of reproduction of contingencies that can slightly alter the possibilities of the future.

The science of complex systems introduces concepts such as scenario-building. By using very simple complex systems, such as a Bénard cell in a physics laboratory, it is possible to analyze their contingency, since a bifurcation occurs: the molecules in the oil can choose to move clockwise or counterclockwise. And if this microscopic phenomenon exists due to contingency, this is also an amplification that manifests at the macroscopic level, in this different order.

The science of complex systems introduced the concept of the space of possibilities, open futures, the role of contingencies, and the idea that there is an internal time due to the system’s internal dynamics, not something imposed from the outside. It has also introduced the feedback loop and circular causality.

It is a very rich field, where the world of scenarios, possibilities, probabilities, plausibilities, contingencies, feedback loops, and circular causalities provides an epistemological and conceptual alternative to the linear causality and determinism inherent in the Newtonian mechanistic view of time.

 

Marcos: In fact, all these concepts are rarely explored in science classes in elementary school.

This brings me to another point. If the idea of modernizing science education is to foster action and agency in students, this way of viewing time seems to me more appropriate for encouraging action; otherwise, in a deterministic mindset, our fate would be predetermined and our actions would not really matter.

Olivia: Yes, exactly! In that sense, the science of complex systems fosters a mindset in which the decision-making process is much more dynamic, since different activities can be influential in some way. Now, we’re using this metaphorically, but it can provide a kind of epistemological foundation for creating a mindset in which the decision itself can also have agency. And furthermore, as one of the possible futures may be more likely to be realized. Of course, it would be better if that future could be your desirable future.

 

Marcos: Shifting slightly to an example you’ve explored in your publications, how are climate changes related to the act of futurizing science education?

Olivia: We’ve been very critical of certain approaches to climate change that employ the same Newtonian mechanistic mindset, which is inadequate for analyzing the complexity of the problem.

Addressing climate change requires an epistemological shift in perspective, attitude, and skills, in order to recognize that climate change is a complex, interdisciplinary, and multifaceted system. It requires context, concepts such as possible scenarios, multiple stakeholders, and multiple scales.

I mean, to address climate change, we must hold together local and global issues, different time scales, the scale of urgency, and the dynamics; we must make decisions now and be prepared to see their impacts in the distant future.

It is necessary to think in terms of complexity, but also in terms of future literacy, because to decide today, you also need to expand your imagination beyond the immediate effect.

It is very complex, and there are many tensions that require literacy about futures and acceptance of complexity; envisioning futures requires a shift in epistemic and social values, and it is also essential to think about the implications of actions within a chronotope, within a space-time.

All of this is relevant not only to climate change, but also to artificial intelligence (AI), quantum technologies, and all of today’s major socio-scientific issues. All of them require us to take action and make decisions in the present. Therefore, long-term thinking is important for making decisions now.

 

Marcos: You mentioned artificial intelligence. This is a recent theme in some of your work. So, could you tell us: how is AI changing the current landscape of science education?

Olivia: That’s another very complex topic. What I meant to say with Sibel Erduran was simply to try to frame the problem and the relationship between AI and science education. So, now that we have AI, do we need to teach AI, or do we need to think about how these tools might impact education? This approach doesn’t take into account how AI is changing science and its very nature. There are epistemological, ontological, and axiological changes within science itself.

So, as we teach science, we ask ourselves: what is science today? How is science impacted by AI?

Traditional views of science are based on very strong Cartesian dichotomies between what is natural and artificial, man and nature, tools and technology.

AI is challenging all these dichotomies. Therefore, the concept of hybridization between the natural, virtual, artificial, human, machine, and technology represents a major shift in the way we used to think. AI is having a profound impact on scientific methods and practices. Therefore, I believe the science education community should reflect on how science has changed.

 

Marcos: In several of your works, you describe projects with students who lack the ability to envision their future. Could you talk a little about these experiences and how they are influenced by a future-oriented approach to science education?

Olivia: I don’t want to generalize too much, but this is a trend we’ve observed in our work. For example, we asked students to write about a typical day in 2040, and there are patterns—not just because of the students. It’s a common cultural vision! There’s a kind of stereotypical image of the future. Typically, you imagine a megalopolis with more technology, rapid transit, robotic systems, and automated homes. That has been the stereotypical vision of the future since the 1970s.

Studies of the future generally describe this as a form of propaganda. We are immersed in narratives—in science fiction—that are de-futurizing the imagination. They are imposing a hegemonic vision of the future, also known as “de-imagination,” because there is an impoverishment of the imagination. We are unable to imagine alternatives to this technocratic vision of the future.

This is a sociopolitical issue because, in a way, it serves the agenda of big tech companies very well. Following this logic, even though we are facing climate change and inequality, even though we are now at a moment when we are experiencing the failures of the modernity project, it seems that there is only one path forward, not just for our students, but for all of us. It is very difficult to imagine other futures.

However, by observing other cultures, we can see things differently. Therefore, in our work with students, we try to convey to them the idea that this is not the only future, but just one of the possible futures.

At the moment, I am very interested in Brazil and in the work of Ailton Krenak on the ancestral future. There are ancestral futures, possible models of development that differ from the current one. We are trying to seek out other narratives, other stories, and use the science of complex systems to see that even small changes can produce major impacts, to try to offer hope and recognize that other possibilities exist.

I believe that the younger generation is much better equipped than we are to recognize alternatives. I want to be optimistic because, as teachers, we need to be.

We are living in a kind of propaganda, in the sense that there is a dominant narrative that limits our imagination. Therefore, cultivating a broad imagination is a political and social act.

 

Marcos: And how does that relate to the shift from disciplinary approaches in science education to a more open and interdisciplinary approach?

Olivia: Regarding interdisciplinarity, it’s something we’ve worked on extensively in the Fedora project, but also in a previous project, Identities. It’s called Identities because disciplines are epistemic identities.

I love the concept of interdisciplinarity because specific disciplines and epistemologies are very important for creating an identity and grounding one’s thinking in something more solid and robust.

The challenge is how not to use specific disciplines and epistemologies to create a silo, to create a bubble. But epistemologies are a kind of important identity tool for giving depth to your thinking and being able to recognize your world.

Furthermore, interdisciplinarity resonates deeply with Krenak’s concept of confluences. The idea is not to create a sea where identities disappear, but to imagine confluences where different identities coexist and enrich one another.

I like the idea of envisioning interdisciplinarity as a border zone, and also of being able to hold together different identities and a multiplicity of epistemologies, to define the limits of validity and the roles of each. This can provide, as Krenak says, new ideas to postpone the end of the world.

 

Marcos: And what would you say to a reader of this interview who wants to start futurizing science education in their practice? What are the necessary skills to be developed? What are, as you call them, future-scaffolding skills? And why are they different from the traditional skills we already have in science education?

Olivia: Future-scaffolding skills provide auxiliary support to interpret the present, to spark your imagination, to return from the future to the present, and to take action. We define them through a bottom-up approach.

Future-scaffolding skills are not just about imagination, but also about systems thinking. To imagine the future, you need to understand the present. Therefore, the skills needed to build a scaffold for the future include: systems thinking and dynamic skills.

Dynamic skills are always in tension, to drive imagination, but also to keep it connected to action, in terms of local and global impact, holding individual and collective futures together. Therefore, future-scaffolding skills are systemic, but also collective.

Based on research findings, there are two typical types of students. When we ask them to imagine the future, they feel comfortable envisioning their individual careers, but not the future of society. For this reason, the challenge of developing future-building skills is also to develop the skills that hold individuality and collectivity together. Imagination and action. The different scales of time and space.

We are now working on how to assess these skills and developing tools. This is a new challenge for us in this new project called Fedoras, in collaboration with teachers interested in developing future-scaffolding skills in their classrooms. At Fedoras, we are beginning to publish new activities on our website, along with teaching materials, to bring a future-oriented approach to science education.

 

Marcos: Lastly, as a leading scholar in our field of research who not only studies science education but also the very concept of the future, what would you say are the future directions for science education, and why are these likely to be desirable futures?

Olivia: Together with Maurício Pietrocola and Antti Laherto, we have created a space to discuss future paths in science education within this Special Interest Group number eight (ESERA SIG 8 Future-Oriented Science Education).

According to futures studies, we need collective discussions and deliberations to jointly construct possible future scenarios to be negotiated, to discuss together with the science education research community.

We believe it is important to collectively introduce tools for future-oriented (not future-focused) thinking into science education research, to imagine desirable futures and collectively discuss possible paths. We must also implement the methods of futures studies in our concrete research. For example, we are currently trying to implement a participatory model within ESERA SIG 8 that is influenced by future-oriented science education.

This means collectively discussing the epistemological, ontological, and axiological foundations of science, because we need to overcome the Laplacian tendencies that are ingrained in our minds.

The future is now a very trendy word. This concerns me because it can be understood as what futures studies call future-washing. But in reality, future-oriented thinking is transformative, because it requires a profound shift in mindset and in the foundations of our scientific research and science education. That is why we are very committed to the idea of thinking about the future—not just to follow a trend, but to try to implement it at every level of our professional lives. And not only that, this way of thinking is very useful for navigating the complexities of this world.

 

Marcos: Thank you very much, Professor Olivia!