Science Education in Road Safety Education as a path toward citizenship

Physics in context fulfills the task of training and motivation for a basic science education as a right of citizenship. We therefore faced the challenge of designing curriculum materials for compulsory school teachers (non-physics teachers) for an action- research aimed to road safety education. The study of motion and of relative motions, grounding from a conceptual point of view the role of the frame of reference, of trajectory and of position, displacement and velocity vectors, in a bi and tri dimensional space of the real environment and its two-dimensional representation on a road map, was the prelude to the proposed analysis of the safety distance, based on human reaction time and dynamic parameters of the motion on the road, such as momentum and sliding and rolling friction on the road. Cameras and motion sensors, tape timer and paper and pencil or on the track games accompanied the planning of teachers, who through experimentation micro-steps proposed a more detailed analysis of the physics of collisions and of the involved energy, of the rigid body motion and of the conservation of angular momentum. The curricular proposal and the teacher training model in the perspective of an embedding of activities related to road safety education into the curricular activity of non-physics teachers are proposed as an example of educational innovation development process based on inquiry learning regarding physics in context, made possible by institutional collaboration.