Abstract
The science education curriculum has become increasingly focused on the study of
complex systems and on the development of agency so that students make decisions
on relevant issues. The current pandemic has underlined the need to look at health
from a systemic “One Health” approach, but little is known about the knowledge, skills,
attitudes, and actions necessary for individuals to successfully contribute to One Health.
This study seeks to contribute to this knowledge, and explores preservice elementary
teachers’ agency and systems thinking competencies to propose actions for preventing
future pandemics from the One Health approach. The participants were 47 preservice
elementary teachers working on a set of activities about the COVID-19 pandemic, in
which they were asked about ways to prevent future pandemics. Content analysis of
individual written responses was applied for addressing the level of systems thinking
and the sense of personal and collective responsibility toward the action proposed.
Results show that the preservice teachers initially referred mainly to actions in the human
health dimension, and that the systems thinking showed a higher level when they made
the activity in groups after reading information. Collectively proposed actions showed a
lack of agency or individual responsibility compared to individually proposed ones. The
implications of the results for science teaching are discussed.