MULTIMODAL REPRESENTATIONS FOR DEVELOPING PRESERVICE TEACHERS´ SYSTEMS THINKING FOR ADDRESSING COMPLEX HEALTH ISSUES

Science educators highlight the importance and difficulty of developing systems thinking (ST) for addressing complex health problems such as antimicrobial resistance (AMR). Thus, it is necessary to study which strategies can facilitate this development. This study addressed how modelling activities fostered the ST developed by pre-service teachers (PSTs) in the context of AMR. The identification of components and relationships, the proposal of actions, and taking an ‘inside the system’ perspective were considered as ST dimensions. The research data consisted of explanations about AMR written individually at the beginning and at the end of the sequence, as well as group activities, performed by a group of 56 PSTs. The results show that after completing the activities, most participants explained AMR including ‘One Health’ vision, saw themselves as victims of AMR but less as causes or agents of change, and articulated complex cause-effect relationships in their retrospective reasoning. Moreover, the performance of retrospective reasoning in intermediate activities that implied diverse representations stood out. It was concluded that using multimodal representations might be a useful strategy in science education to facilitate the development of PSTs´ ST for understanding and acting on systems. Keywords: antimicrobial resistance, mixed methods, model representation, preservice teachers, systems thinking