Entrenched compartmentalisation of curriculum subjects and 'teaching to the test' can leave students with limited understanding of the nature and interaction of disciplines. The necessity of developing future teachers' epistemic insight (EI) and equipping them with strategies to address the gaps between subjects has been pushed to the fore by challenges that emerged during the pandemic. This article examines the extent to which epistemic insight is understood by Initial Teacher Education tutors and features in their programmes as well as their recommendations for increasing the inclusion of multidisciplinary approaches in education, based on qualitative and quantitative research. While initial findings revealed a poor understanding of EI, its importance was broadly acknowledged, and the follow-up survey revealed progress in the form of greater engagement with and inclusion of EI by tutors in teacher education. This research was done in the context of a new inspection framework distinguishing substantive and disciplinary knowledge.

There is a systemic shortage in the number of graduates entering the STEM workforce. To address the current graduate shortage (HM Govt, 2017), the widening gap between industry demand, the available skilled workforce (ASE, 2020), and the underrepresentation of key groups within STEM industries and academia requires overhauling the STEM education `pipeline´. However, there is a lack of consensus on how to increase the diversity of students pursuing STEM post-16 and how to tackle the dual challenges of engagement and science capital for the most underrepresented groups. This paper discusses the development of a research-engaged sustained STEM outreach programme working with students from rural and coastal schools in South-East England. Whilst there are numerous STEM programmes that aim to provide academic support, build science capital or improve diversity in post-16 STEM studies, this paper describes how two areas of innovative practice came together in a university-led pre-entry STEM widening participation programme: Inspiring Minds. The first relates to its foundation in a research-engaged pedagogy (the epistemic insight curriculum) that underpinned the programme content and design, and the second to the embedded approach to rigorous evaluation and impact monitoring tracking shifts in both aspirational and attainment measures of participating students.

In the period following a global pandemic, the promotion of health and wellbeing is a priority area for schools. This accompanies growing calls for health and wellbeing education to be delivered through a whole-child/whole-school approach that connects across subject areas. While it may be clear to most people that a purely scientific sexuality education is undesirable, it is also clear that biology plays a vital role in developing students' understanding about a variety of health and wellbeing topics, including those around sex, sexuality and sexual health. In this article, we explore the contribution of the biology teacher to an integrated health and wellbeing education in schools through a case study comparison of the English Relationships, Sex and Health Education curriculum and the English biology curriculum. Biology teachers in England and many other national and regional jurisdictions operate in a compartmentalised system which can create frustration and anxiety for both students and teachers when navigating the complexities of how sensitive topics are delivered in different disciplinary siloes. Epistemically insightful approaches, conceptualised at the macro-, meso- and micro-level of school organisational structures, may provide a way for biology teachers and educational leaders to address and overcome some of these challenges.

Helping students to become more resilient to online misinformation is widely recognised as an essential task for education in a rapidly digitalising world. Students need both scientific knowledge and epistemic insight to navigate online spaces containing sensationalised reports of scientific and technological developments. Epistemic insight involves epistemic curiosity and the ability to think critically about the nature, application and communication of knowledge. This includes developing an understanding of the power and limitations of science and a curiosity regarding its relationship with other disciplines. We present a workshop designed for school students aged 16-18 titled 'Can science and technology cure loneliness?', designed to develop students' epistemic insight through investigating loneliness through a multidisciplinary perspective. We discuss how the design and pedagogy of this workshop might help students to build epistemic humility-the recognition that no single disciplinary perspective can complete our knowledge about a given topic. As part of a broader programme, epistemic insight-based pedagogies have the potential to develop students' resistance to science- and technology-related misinformation and prepare them for their potential role in shaping our scientific and technological future.

If teachers have the opportunity to prepare and teach a lesson (or series of lessons) on science and religion, it is likely that perspectives on the origins of life and the universe will be involved – and whether science and religion disagree. This chapter explains the value of creating a different approach and learning journey in classrooms. This chapter will explore three questions: (1) How do young people view the relationships between science and religion? (2) What are the pressures and barriers that affect how young people view these relationships? (3)How would we like young people to view the relationships? If teachers have the opportunity to prepare and teach a lesson (or series of lessons) on science and religion, it is likely that perspectives on the origins of life and the universe will be involved – and whether science and religion disagree. This chapter explains the value of creating a different approach and learning journey in classrooms.

Artificial intelligence is transforming the practice of science worldwide. Breakthroughs in machine learning are enabling, for example, the discovery of potentially habitable exoplanets beyond our solar system. The growing role of artificial intelligence (AI) in science raises questions for scientists, philosophers, computer scientists … and educators. How will the scholarship and practice of science education respond to the growing role of artificial intelligence in science? Questions like ‘Can a robot be a scientist?’ can help stimulate students’ epistemic curiosity, about the nature of scientific knowledge, including the value and importance of apparently uniquely human attributes such as creativity. In this article we explain the development and delivery of a science lesson using the question ‘can a robot be a scientist?’ to explore the role of human creativity in scientific observation and classification, using resources and activities created for the citizen scientist project ‘Galaxy Zoo’.

The contributions of science and scientists to combatting Covid-19 have been at the forefront of media attention throughout 2020 and early 2021, exposing the public to the processes of science in an unprecedented manner. The pandemic has highlighted the necessity of scientists working collaboratively with other disciplines in informing thinking about a complex, evolving real-world problem. This draws attention to recent efforts, both in the UK and internationally, towards curriculum reform integrating epistemic insight (knowledge about knowledge, including about what disciplines are and how they interact), with significant implications for the teaching of science in schools. We present findings from two exploratory workshops with 15–17-year-old students in England on the role of science during the pandemic. We found that the workshops provided space for students to begin to develop epistemic insight regarding how science informs decision-making in dialogue with other disciplines. We make recommendations proposing pedagogical approaches using live, complex, real-world problems to address issues around understandings of the nature of science, misinformation, trust and participation in science.

There has been concern about the attractiveness of science-based careers to many adolescent learners, and it has been suggested that school science may not always recognise or engage personal values that are important to young people in making life choices. The present study discusses interview comments made by upper secondary level students in England when 15 young people were asked to give their personal responses to brief vignettes describing scientific careers. Using an interview-about-scenarios approach, the students were asked about whether they would feel comfortable working in the scientific careers represented. The career areas were purposefully selected because they might be considered to potentially raise issues in relation to personal values or commitments that some students might hold. A range of student perceptions relating to the mooted careers were elicited (positive, negative and indifferent), but all of the participants raised issues that impacted on the acceptability or attractiveness of at least one of the mooted scientific careers, in terms of aspects of their own personal beliefs and values systems. It is recommended that teachers and career advisors should be aware of the range of value-related considerations that influence student views of science-related careers and should consider exploring aspects of science-based careers that link to values commonly shared by young people. This exploratory study also offers indications for directions for further research exploring how learners' value systems impact upon their perceptions of science and scientific work.

Scientific advances, particularly in evolutionary biology, genetics, neuroscience and artificial intelligence, present many challenges to religious and popular notions of personhood. This paper reports the first large-scale study on students' beliefs about the interactions between science and widely held beliefs about personhood. The paper presents findings from a questionnaire survey (n = 530) administered to English secondary school students (age 15-16) in which their beliefs and concepts regarding personhood and the position of science were investigated. The survey was motivated in part by an interview study and a previous, smaller survey which revealed that many students struggle to reconcile their beliefs with what they suppose science to say and also that some have reluctantly dismissed the soul as a 'nice story' which is incompatible with scientific facts. The results from this larger-scale survey indicate that a majority of the students believe in some form of soul. Even so, and regardless of whether or not they identified themselves as religious, most students expressed a belief that human persons cannot be fully explained scientifically, a position that some students perceived as a partial rejection of what it means to hold a scientific worldview.

Entrenched compartmentalisation of subjects in secondary school means that students lack opportunities for learning how disciplines relate to each other and how knowledge can be applied in real-world contexts. This article examines what it means to ‘think like a scientist in a multidisciplinary arena’ and why this is (and should be) an integral part of secondary school science education. To this end, the article outlines a workshop, ‘Renoir’s painting’, for key stages 3 and 4 (ages 11–16), which aims to develop students’ understanding of the power and limitations of science and how science relates to other disciplines.

Secondary-age students were asked about some science-related careers, using an “interviews-about-scenarios” technique. This article reflects on students’ comments relating to the nature of scientific knowledge. Some comments reflected the aim of science as a means to better understand the world and our place in it. Other comments reflected perceptions of the possibility of applying scientific knowledge to engineer change – something that had great benefits, but also risks. There was also evidence that some students might hold misleadingly positivistic notions about scientific knowledge that may distort perceptions of some area s of scientific work.

This article describes a workshop to develop students’ understanding of how to investigate a cross-disciplinary question that bridges science and history. The question ‘Why did the Titanic sink?’ is interpreted scientifically and then historically to help students to better appreciate the strengths and limitations of each discipline’s methods, language and norms of thought. Finally, students are encouraged to consider how this question could be further informed by additional disciplinary perspectives to provide a deeper and fuller answer. The results of the intervention, although in the early stages, have been encouraging, working towards the learning outcomes of the Epistemic Insight Curriculum Framework.