Nations worldwide consider education an important tool of economic and social development and currently time advocate the use of innovative strategies to prepare students for knowledge and skills acquisition. Especially in the last decade European countries have promoted a series of revisions in theirs curriculum and the way teachers are trained to put them into practice. Updated curriculum contents, pedagogical facilities (for example, computers in a school) and new teaching and learning strategies could be seen as a routine task since social needs change over time. Nevertheless, educational institutions and actors (educational departments, schools, teachers and even students) are normally committed to traditional practices. As a result educational innovation is a big challenge due to educational systems’ resistance to change. From 2007 to 2010 I was involved with the group in charge of updating the curriculum of São Paulo State. This was an opportunity to revise a 15 year old curriculum from kindergarten to high school. Most of my talk will be centered on a case study concerning the teaching and learning of XXth century Physics content at the high school level (a new requirement of the science curriculum). My ongoing research is focused on understanding the pedagogical issues of this innovation. This is done by analyzing the limits and possibilities of teachers’ actions. For those of you not familiar with the conceptual approach in educational research, I am attaching a paper about another case study where the history of science was used for teaching and learning science. This gives an idea of how we conceptualized the process of pedagogical/educational innovation.

Mauricio Pietrocola Pinto de Oliveira holds an MD in science education at the University of São Paulo and PhD in History of Science and Epistemology at the University Paris VII – Denis Diderot. He is a Full Professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of São Paulo. He is member of the international research team RESHEIS (Epistemological and Historical Research on Natural Sciences and Scientific Institutions) and has been member of ICPE (International Commission on Physics Education). His research activity is focused on innovative strategies in science teaching and teacher education.