We present a study on teacher education and, in particular, on Physics. Our assumption is that General Didactics and Disciplinary Didactic constitute two fundamental components of teachers’ professional development and therefore both must be used to interpret didactic phenomena adequately. This research involves a sample of 274 prospective teachers, enrolled in the Primary Education Sciences degrees in three Italian Universities (Milano Bicocca, Udine, Urbino,). It concerns the study of the spontaneous representations produced by students to foster understanding of the force concept and on the reasons given to motivate their effectiveness on an educational level and disciplinary one. The research tools and methods were developed by crossing the literature of General Didactics and Physics Education, identifying analytical categories that emerge from two different and complementary perspectives. In the broad spectrum of students’ conceptions, given by this double perspective, some aspects stand out: most of the representations do not include the representation of the forces at play, but rather imply a precise didactic approach inherent to the concept of force. This is confirmed by the analysis of the didactic and disciplinary motivations, in which a frequent identification of the two types of motivations emerges.

We reflect specifically on the curriculum for bachelor’s level program in communication design. We propose a model of education which we define as “metadisciplinary” and which is grounded on the acquisition of competences rather than the acquisition of specific contents. Our objective is to show how a metadisciplinary didactic model can benefit from the weak epistemological status of the knowledge base of communication design. According to the idea that didactics can be treated as a science of design, we propose a model of educational design based on a metadisciplinary stance. First we describe two fundamental aspects of the model proposed: (1) the development of habitus of thought and action and (2) the distributed and collective nature of expert knowledge. Next, we discuss the notion of curriculum architecture. Finally, we describe a basic set of metadisciplinary competences that we have identified for students in the field of communication design.

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Introduction. The inclusion of students with disabilities in higher education is a fundamental right recognised by the legal system since its recognition in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. However, the measures adopted by European countries to promote their incorporation are not always accompanied by parallel training actions that provide university professors with the necessary knowledge to incorporate people with intellectual disabilities into the classroom with the same guarantees and opportunities as people without intellectual disabilities. Objective. This paper aims to provide specific data on the self-perceived training needs of university teaching staff and thus lay the foundations for a specific training programme. Methods. A cross-sectional study was carried out by means of a survey designed to collect the teachers' perceptions of their own competences and the effectiveness of their knowledge, as well as the importance they attached to some aspects of intellectual disability. The survey was administered to teachers in Serbia, the Netherlands, Portugal, Italy and Spain, with a total sample of 1009 teachers. Results. The results obtained showed that the perception of self-perceived competence in educational skills is dependent on three main factors: previous specific training, teaching experience with people with intellectual disabilities and own personal experiences. Conclusion. The present study demonstrated the concern and need of the teaching staff to obtain specific training on people with intellectual disabilities in higher education.

"In our Knowledge Society, the division of cognitive labor, the specialization of knowledge and the brisk growth of new information and communication technologies provide a complex challenge for those tasked with selecting what is worth teaching and how to do it. The ease of access to information due to advanced and user-friendly technologies often gives us the illusion to know more than we actually do. This “epistemic disease” is a danger to both democracy and public health. The educational system must therefore encourage good epistemic habits consistent with responsible citizenship. From a didactic perspective, this requires updating the curriculum in the light of the educational challenge of the 21st century: making students aware of what knowledge is and what knowing means by fostering their epistemic cognition. Since epistemic cognition is concerned with the acquisition of a habitus, that is, a durable disposition to act in a certain way under certain circumstances (second-level curriculum objective), curriculum updating should not be reduced to a mere quantitative increase in the knowledge to be taught. On the contrary, this revision should address, on a qualitative level, how the selected disciplinary content is didactically transpose. In this contribution, we intend to propose some procedural principles – conceived as pragmatic patterns of behavior – that can help teachers design instructional activities consistent with the goal of promoting students’ epistemic cognition. These procedural principles will be formulated based on a conception of discipline as a correlated system of epistemic products and expert practices of knowledge construction, validation, evaluation and justification."