History of Science Teaching to Teachers. The Italian experience of the SSIS Liborio Dibattista and Francesca Morgese Inter Department Centre of Research Seminar of History of Science. University of Bari “Aldo Moro”, Italy liborio.dibattista@gmail.com INTRODUCTION The ministerial decree of 26 March 1998 instituted in Italy the SSIS, teacher training specializing school for secondary education. It was a two-year post-graduate training course required to become high school qualified teacher. This experience was interrupted after nine cycles: as in 2009 the activity of the SSIS was brought to a temporary stop and only recently new regulations to set the standards and modalities of the training process for the teachers have been introduced (M.D. 10 September 2010 n.249). The SSIS experience, through the years has been an issue of strong debate with its lights and shades, nevertheless it has contributed to enhance, through concrete experiences, the theoretical and methodological planning which structure today’s basic training of the Italian teachers (Anceschi and Scaglioni, 2010). In this paper we wish to cut out a specific space, concerning the implementation of the history of science among the subjects in the SSIS curriculum, in particular in the teacher training school of Apulia (University of Bari, Lecce and Foggia) where, compared to all the other Italian teacher training schools, the introduction of the history of science was a peculiar case. Since, for all other Italian training schools the teaching of the history of science, or better, of the history of every single science, was supposed to be part of each scientific specialization (e.g. the History of Biology for the trainees in Natural science, the History of Mathematics and Physics for the trainees in those disciplines and so on). In the Apulian case, the history of science was a cross-disciplinary teaching modality, with subjects such as the History of School, the Laboratory of science of education, General Pedagogy, Docimology, which were taught to all the trainees in all disciplinary specializations, whichever was the subject they were training in. This happened for nine years, therefore more than four thousand future teachers had the chance to taste the philosophy and history of science as a didactic instrument. It was indeed a strong decision, motivated by the belief that the subject is not limited to a mere recapitulation of a form of philosophical thought addressed to the humanists, or better, it doesn’t have only an introductive value for the single sciences, instead it is a bridge discipline, that can hold together the “two cultures”, especially in their didactic aim. AIMS AND GOALS Our main objective was to face the two foremost prejudices that affect the graduates who wish become teachers, concerning scientific disciplines teaching: 1. The first prejudice is that the two areas of knowledge are incompatible, think of the well known controversy of the “two cultures” (Snow, 1960). This leads to doubt about the possibilities of an interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary approach. As a matter of fact, scientists and humanists come from different training processes, different academies and different theoretical and methodological modalities. This division is strongly founded in the Italian students who have been accustomed to choose between the options of a “classical” or “scientific” diploma in their teens. As a consequence, the fundamental question asked by the SSIS trainees, in their first history of science class was: a) for the humanities teachers, why should I be interested in learning about science? b) for the science teachers, why should I be interested in the history and the remote past of my science? 2. The second is the conviction that science is a complete, apodictic, paradigmatic knowledge that should be take for granted, without a “genetic” approach.