The role of natural language in understanding the universe: A teaching-learning sequence for high school students

Introducing gravitational physics in high school provides educational means for bridging the gap between the image of science held by students and science itself. Natural language is fundamental in this learning. It engages students in constructing an understanding of a concept or a notion, establishing new relations between previous and new elements of knowledge. We present a teaching-learning sequence (TLS) aimed to contextualize gravitational physics along the lines of the Einstein Telescope educational program in Sardinia devoted to upper secondary school students. We focused on the role of debates and controversy in the evolution of science, proposing science-reflexive meta-discourses to present physics as a unified knowledge textbook. We discuss our design and present results by analyzing students’ semiotic registers to recap their learning during the activity. Finally, we discuss the potentiality of our TLS in orientating students towards STEM.