This article takes its point of departure from the younger generation's problematic relationship with time and the future. A general sense of changeability and directionlessness in society compromises young people's confidence in themselves to make a difference as individuals in important global issues affecting their futures, such as climate change. Given recent aims and commitments of science education to promote sustainable development and student agency, this study explores how science teaching can help students imagine and face possible future scenarios and develop agency in the present to influence them. This article presents a science education approach to equip secondary school students with skills of futures thinking and agency that we call “future‐scaffolding skills.” It also shows the process of building an operational definition for recognizing those skills in students' discourse and actions. For this purpose, an empirical study was carried out in the context of a teaching–learning module on climate change, consisting of activities inspired by the field of futures studies. Essays, individual and group interviews, questionnaires, and video recordings of students' final projects were collected from 24 students (16–19‐years old) from three European countries. The results contribute to operationally defining “future‐scaffolding skills,” consisting of “structural skills” (the ability to recognize temporal, logical and causal relationships and build systemic views) and “dynamical skills” (the ability to navigate scenarios, relating local details to global views, past to present and future, and individual to collective actions).

Can science teaching contribute to developing skills for managing uncertainty towards the future and projecting imagination forwards? If so, how? In this paper, we outline an approach to 'teach the future' through science education. In the first part, we describe a framework that has been constructed to orient the design of teaching modules comprised of future-oriented educational activities. Then, a teaching module on climate change is described. The module was tested in a class of upper secondary school in Italy (grade12) and the main results are reported. They concern a change in perception of the future, as revealed by students: from far and unimaginable, the future became conceivable as a set of possibilities, addressable through concrete actions and within their reach, in the sense that they became able to view themselves as agents of their own future. The results lead us to argue that the approach appears promising in developing 'futurescaffolding skills', skills that enable people to construct visions of the future that support possible ways of acting in the present with one's eye on the horizon.

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Pursuing both disciplinary authenticity and personal relevance in the teaching and learning of science in school generates tensions that should be acknowledged and resolved. This paper problematizes and explores the conceptualizations of these tensions by considering personal relevance, disciplinary authenticity, and common school science as three perspectives that entail different educational goals. Based on an analysis of the literature, we identify five facets of the tensions: content fidelity, content coverage, language and discursive norms, epistemic structure and standards, and significance. We then explore the manifestations of these facets in two different examples of the instruction and learning of physics at the advanced high school level in Israel and Italy. Our analysis suggests that (1) the manifestations of these tensions and their resolution are highly contextual. (2) While maintaining personal relevance and disciplinary authenticity requires some negotiation, the main tension that needs to be resolved is between personal relevance and common school science. (3) Disciplinary authenticity, when considered in terms of its full depth and scope, can be equipped to resolve this tension within the discipline. (4) To achieve resolution, teachers’ expertise should include not only pedagogical expertise but also a deep and broad disciplinary understanding.