In this era of ecological transition, responding to the challenges posed by the Anthropocene requires the collective and coordinated efforts of researchers and experts from academic and professional communities. However, it also requires the commitment of ordinary citizens to think and act responsibly when making decisions on complex and controversial socio-scientific issues, such as climate change and biodiversity loss. To this end, the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2025 Science Framework (https://pisa-framework.oecd.org/science-2025/) identifies three key competencies that underpin the concept of 'Agency in the Anthropocene' to assess 15-year-olds' knowledge, engagement, and capacity to act on environmental and sustainability issues as they complete their compulsory education. Drawing on the document, the following working definition is formulated: a citizen with agency in the Anthropocene is an individual who masters content, procedural, and epistemic knowledge, and demonstrates an epistemological and ethical commitment to using it properly to achieve environmental and sustainability goals and advance social-ecological justice. Since this is a matter of acquiring a special habitus, which involves the formation of stable, long-lasting dispositions to think and act in a certain way under certain conditions, it is argued that all three types of knowledge should be taught from primary school onwards. However, this proposal opens up the problem of updating in-service and prospective teachers' training.

The article is divided into three sections. The first section provides an overview of the image of science and the concept of scientific learning that emerges from the PISA 2025 theoretical framework. The second section discusses the types of competencies that teachers should possess to promote the PISA 2025 ideal of science education, focusing particularly on the Italian context. The third section outlines a vertical spiral curriculum model based on principles of procedure to support teachers at different school levels in designing learning activities that foster a deeper understanding of the means and ends of scientific practice and encourage rational confidence in its findings and recommendations. The hypothesis envisages formulating these principles consistently with the constraints to which the process of didactic transposition must be subjected in order to transform scholarly knowledge into teaching-learning experiences that enable students to develop, collaterally to domain-specific learning, the epistemic virtues necessary to behave consciously and responsibly in this epoch of human influences on the planet. These constraints are identified from an epistemological conception of the discipline as a 'community of scholars sharing a field of enquiry' and from a conception of learning categorized into a hierarchy of logical levels as described by Gregory Bateson in his theory. This choice ensures greater adherence to the image of science and the idea of scientific learning underlying the Pisa 2025 theoretical framework. Finally, the limitations of the conceptual analysis behind the vertical spiral curriculum model are highlighted, and directions are suggested for future empirical research on this topic to enhance teacher professional development programs.

Keywords: Curriculum design, science education, education for sustainability, teacher education, principles of procedure.