Current topics in science education are marked by the inevitable uncertainty of the consequences resulting from human actions. They encompass disasters, pandemics, and other events that have shaped our contemporary world. Understanding new risks—such as those resulting from human action, even when proposing a solution to a problem—is one of the central tenets of Risk Society theory. Given the challenges of teaching about uncertain scenarios, this paper addresses ways to handle science teaching situations in which unpredictable events are the norm. We report on the implementation of a teaching and learning sequence in the 9th grade of a Brazilian middle school, using a real-life disaster case to develop a didactic approach that takes human-induced risks into account. In this study, we sought to explore strategies to prepare teachers to deal with the uncertainty inherent in risk situations, combining semantic network analysis, the construction of risk matrices, and their collective evaluation through discussion rounds, while emphasizing the risk-trust paradigm over the traditional danger-safety perspective. Our results show evidence that students have internalized the concept of manufactured risk through the representation of complex causal relationships in unpredictable scenarios, a phenomenon also reflected in their expressions and decision-making patterns during the construction of the risk matrix.

Presenter: Maurício Pietrocola