CURRICULUM REFORM BASED ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF SCIENTIFIC COMPETENCES: CONTROVERSIES IN TEACHERS’ OPINIONS Teresa Lupión-Cobos¹ and Ángel Blanco-López¹ 1 Department for the Teaching of Experimental Sciences, University of Malaga, Spain Abstract. This paper examines certain controversies among a group of secondary education science teachers with regard to the teacher’s role and his/her professional environment, their views being gathered following a training programme aimed at introducing a key competences approach into the Spanish science curriculum. During the programme they were required to design, implement, and assess their own teaching unit for developing students’ scientific competences by means of context-based learning. At the end of the programme a representative group of teachers were selected to take part in a focus group in which they discussed the training received and its transferability to the classroom. Their statements were then analysed and categorised in order to identify factors associated with their professional environment (at the level of both school and the wider education system) and the implications they had for classroom practice. The present study focuses on those aspects which generated controversy among the teachers, specifically as regards whether they were seen as facilitating or as an obstacle to the teaching of science via a competence- based approach. The issues of controversy related to the following topics: the approach to teaching, the content to be taught, the views of and coordination with colleagues, the utility of contexts and the need for reflection on one’s own practice. The paper concludes by considering potential reasons for these issues of controversy and the implications they have for a competence-based approach to teaching. Keywords: Curriculum reform; Scientific competences; Controversies in teachers’ opinions. INTRODUCTION The current education system in Spain (MEC, 2013) follows the recommendation of the European Parliament and Council regarding the role of key competences in lifelong learning (EU, 2006), this being seen as a way of promoting active learning and scientific and technological literacy among citizens. However, designing common approaches to science education based on the development of competences, and especially scientific competences, poses a number of challenges related to the conception of the teaching/learning process, the organisation and culture of schools, working practices and the development of teaching materials, among others. In relation to these challenges, a wide range of professional factors influence the extent to which the required changes may be taken on board by teachers (Ryder, 2015); these include personal teacher factors, as well as factors that are internal to schools or linked to the wider education system. In order to meet these challenges, teachers need to be adequately trained. The present study forms part of a broader piece of research (Authors, 2016) that sought to identify the main aspects which teachers believed either facilitated or acted as an obstacle to the development of scientific competences through context-based learning (Fensham, 2009), and also to consider the implications of this for science education. The specific aim here was to identify the aspects of the required educational reform which teachers regarded as a posing a challenge to their professional identity (Ryder & Banner, 2013). The study was carried out following a wide-ranging training programme (Authors, 2015) in which teachers had to develop a classroom-based teaching unit for a problem of everyday interest. This approach enabled us to consider the following questions: a) What elements of the teacher’s professional environment generate controversy in terms of their impact on the use of a context-based approach to the development of scientific competences? and b) What might be the reasons for these points of controversy? METHOD The sample comprised four teachers who participated in the aforementioned training programme, and who were selected so as to provide a diversity of backgrounds (i.e. in terms of how long they had been teaching, their previous experience in the design of teaching materials, and any prior involvement in educational