There is agreement in research about the need to find better ways of teaching chemistry to enhance students’ understanding. This thesis aims to contribute to the understanding of how we better support teaching and learning of undergraduate chemistry to make it meaningful and intelligible for students from the outset. The thesis is concerned with examining the interactions between student, specific content and teacher in the undergraduate chemistry classroom; that is, the processes making up the three relations of the didactic triangle. The data consists of observations of students and tutors during problem-solving activities in an introductory chemistry course and interviews with graduate students.

Systematic analyses of the different interactions between the student, the chemistry content, and the tutor are made using the analytical tool of practical epistemology analysis. The main findings of the thesis include detailed insights into how undergraduate chemistry students deal with newly encountered content together with didactic models and concrete suggestions for improved teaching and for supporting continuity and progression in the undergraduate chemistry classroom. Specifically, I show how students deal with the chemistry content through a complex interaction of knowledge, experiences, and purposes on different levels invoked by both students and tutors as they interact with each other. Whether these interactions have a positive or negative effect on students’ learning depends on the nature of knowledge, experiences and purposes that were invoked. Moreover, the tutor sometimes invoked other purposes than the ones related to the task at hand for connecting the activity to the subject matter in general. These purposes were not always made continuous with the activity which resulting in confusion among students. The results from these analyses were used for producing hypotheses and models that could support continuity and progression during the activity. The suggested models aim to make the content more manageable and meaningful to students, enabling connections to other experiences and purposes, and helping teachers and tutors to analyze and reflect on their teaching. Moreover, a purpose- and activity-based progression is suggested that gives attention to purposes in chemistry education other than providing explanations of chemical phenomena. The aim of this ‘progression in action’ is to engage students in activities were they can see the meaning of chemical concepts and ideas through their use to accomplish different chemical tasks. A general conclusion is that detailed knowledge about the processes of teaching and learning is important for providing adequate support to both undergraduate students and university teachers in the chemistry classroom.

In this paper, we discuss the well-known teaching challenge of how to provide undergraduate students with basic chemistry knowledge without making them experience these basics as meaningless and unintelligible. First, we situate the challenge in a classic dilemma: should we teach the necessary basic facts before the chemical explanations or should the explanations be taught before or in parallel to these facts? Here we draw on examples from interviews with graduate students reflecting on their experiences regarding their studies at the undergraduate level. Second, we suggest a way out of the dilemma, through a shift in perspective from the typical progression of facts and explanations towards a purpose and activity-based progression. We conclude with a discussion of implications of such a shift for university chemistry education together with suggestions for future research.

Anthropomorphisms are widespread at all levels of the educational system even among science experts. This has led to a shift in how anthropomorphisms are viewed in science education, from a discussion of whether they should be allowed or avoided towards an interest in their role in supporting students’ understanding of science. In this study we examine the role of anthropomorphisms in supporting students’ understanding of chemistry. We analyze examples from undergraduate students’ discussions during problem-solving classes through the use of practical epistemology analysis (PEA). Findings suggest that students invoked anthropomorphisms alongside technical relations which together produced more or less chemically appropriate explanations. Also, anthropomorphisms constitute potentially productive points of departure for rendering students’ explanations more chemically appropriate. The implications of this study refer to the need to deal with anthropomorphisms explicitly and repeatedly as well as to encourage explicit connections between different parts of the explanation - teleological as well as causal.

In this study, we explore the issues and challenges involved in supporting students’ learning to discern relevant and critical aspects of determining oxidation states of atoms in complex molecules. We present a detailed case of an interaction between three students and a tutor during a problem-solving class, using the analytical tool of practical epistemology analysis (PEA). The results show that the ability to make relevant distinctions between the different parts of a molecule for solving the problem, even with the guidance of the tutor, seemed to be challenging for students. These shifts were connected to both purposes that were specific for solving the problem at hand, and additional purposes for general learning of the subject matter, in this case how to assign oxidation states in molecules. The students sometimes could not follow the additional purposes introduced by the tutor, which made the related distinctions more confusing. Our results indicate that in order to provide adequate support and guidance for students the tutor needs to consider how to sequence, move between, and productively connect the different purposes introduced in a tutor-student interaction. One way of doing that is by first pursuing the purposes for solving the problem and then successively introduce additional, more general purposes for developing students’ learning of the subject matter studied. Further recommendations drawn from this study are discussed as well.

Syftet med denna studie är att undersöka vilka matematiska och språkliga svårigheter nyanlända gymnasieelever har när de arbetar med algebra, både deras uppfattningar om undervisning i algebra och hur de löser textuppgifter inom algebra. Samtliga elever i studien är nyanlända och går ett introduktionsprogram och de har ett annat modersmål än svenska.

Flera studier visar på att elever som har ett annat modersmålspråk än svenska har svårare att klara matematik i skolan och därmed presterar sämre i matematikundervisningen än andra elever som har svenska som modersmål (Malmer, 2002). I denna studie undersöks vad detta beror på och hur undervisningen kan anpassas för att bättre gynna den berörda elevgruppen.

För att besvara frågeställningarna gjordes elevintervjuer med åtta elever samt ett test i algebra med eleverna som deltog i intervjuerna. Resultaten i denna studie visar på att eleverna hade språkliga svårigheter som påverkade deras problemlösningsförmåga i algebra. En orsak till detta är språkliga svårigheter och detta kan delvis bero på bristfälliga svenskkunskaper som leder till svårigheter att förstå textuppgifter och svårigheter att uttrycka sig när man kommunicerar inom matematik.

Genomförandet av systematiska undersökningar är ett kunskapskrav och utgör en central del av kursinnehållet i de naturvetenskapliga ämnena, flertalet lärare väljer dock bort arbete med systematisk undersökning. Det finns mycket tidigare forskning kring systematiska undersökningar i hög-och lågstadiet, dock är mellanstadiet dessvärre inte lika utforskat. Syftet med studien är således att undersöka vilka lärandemål och utmaningar NO-lärare i åk 4-6 har vid arbete med systematiska undersökningar samt hur de hanterar dem. Studien baseras på en enkätstudie där datan bearbetades via jämförelse för att finna liknelser, skillnader och samband mellan svaren. Genom att dela in svaren utefter tema undersöks huruvida informantsvaren tyder på att utmaningarna i mellanstadiet i någon grad samstämmer med dem som framkommer i tidigare forskning för andra årskurser. Resultatdelen visade på att lärare har liknande lärandemål vid arbete med systematiska undersökningar men att deras formulering kan vara olika. Vidare visade resultaten på att NO-lärare upplever begränsningar och svårigheter vid val av och arbete med systematiska undersökningar. NO-lärare i mellanstadiet utsätts för utmaningar som liknar dem som framkommit i tidigare forskning, bland annat är de mest framkommande utmaningarna dem av tids-, ekonomi-, resurs- och materialbrist. Studien tillförser således läsaren med kunskap kring vilka lärandemål lärare har vid genomförande av systematiska undersökningar, vilka utmaningar som kan stötas på samt olika förslag på hur utmaningarna kan hanteras. Det finns ett fortsatt behov av mer forskning kring årskurserna 4-6, speciellt av den form där lärar- och elevperspektiv lyfts.

Denna litteraturstudie ämnar behandla syftet med att undervisa systematisk undersökning i årskurserna 4–6 i de naturvetenskapliga ämnena samt att lyfta potentiella utmaningar som läraren kan ställas inför vid undervisningen. Systematisk undersökning är en positiv arbetsmetod som leder till att eleverna utvecklar sin förståelse för naturvetenskap samt ökar elevernas intresse och motivation för ämnet. I läroplanen framkommer det tydligt att en av de förmågorna eleverna ska utveckla är att genomföra systematiska undersökningar. Däremot undviker många NO-lärare att arbeta med systematiska undersökningar fastän det är ett krav i läroplanen på grund av brist på kunskap om användandet av laborationer. Därför var det intressant att undersöka potentiella syften och utmaningar som läraren stöter på vid undervisningen av systematiska undersökningar för att underlätta deras arbete. Metodens urval av artiklar har skett målstyrt, artiklarna har även bearbetats och analyserats utifrån den tematiska analysen. I resultatdelen framkom de viktiga syftena som ligger bakom arbetet med systematiska undersökningar såsom; att utveckla elevernas begrepp och fenomen. Vidare framkom det även några utmaningar som läraren ska vara medveten om när hen undervisar i systematiska undersökningar såsom; att få tiden att räcka till.  Studien hjälper läsarna att få en helhetsbild och förståelse för viktiga syften och utmaningar som framkommer vid undervisningen av systematiska undersökningar, för att öka intresse och motivation att undervisa mer i ämnet.

Recent efforts to design and study Pre-service Science Teacher Education have focused on engaging future teachers in teaching practices. This focus on practices comes with an explicit intention to blend aspects of knowledge and doing that has been historically separate in other efforts to teach novice learners practical aspects of their profession. This intention brings particular challenges to EU preservice teacher preparation programs that need to reconsider how to incorporate aspects of practices into their science education courses. These challenges not only emerge from the novelty and interrelated nature of these practices, but also from lack of clear ways of articulating what these practices are and look like across international teacher educational contexts. This paper brings together four EU studies and an international discussant that explore possibilities to embrace and respond to these challenges and being a cross-contextual conversation about science teacher education. 

Abstract: The results of the improvement in Math between school year 3-4, 5-6-7 and 8-9 in the Swedish school system is analysed using the effect-size estimator. The result shows that the yearly improvement decreases in particular when the pupils reach school year 7-9. The estimate is based on the Swedish version of the international kangaroo competition. A few points on reliability are discussed. The validity of using this particular data is also discussed.

In the beginning there was techne and episteme. Today we have difficulties with finding technology in the implementations of the curriculum in, at least, Swedish schools. So where did it go? I will give arguments that it is all there but it suffers from specialisation. If we think of techne appearing before the different natural science subjects it is a very natural thought that technology today is what is left "between" the more specialized subjects. However I believe that technology is created also in the meeting between two specialized subjects. When a physicist work with a chemist to solve a problem, than this work will very easy appear as technology from one or both parts view. Also not a revolutionary thought this may explain why the Swedish higher education is organized as it is and why we have diffculties to make a working curriculum for the lower grades.

In the Swedish Prison Education Program only two out of ten reach a passing grade in their mathematics courses. Large variation in prior knowledge makes it difficult to meet the students at their level. This paper reports on a project aiming to enhance students’ possibilities to access mathematics through individualization. Research findings on the development of the pervasive mathematical idea of proportional reasoning are used to construct a test on proportional reasoning, designed to work specifically with students with large variation in prior knowledge. The test presented here, combined with a follow-up clinical interview, can be used in adult education in general as a basis for individualizing instruction. 

Individualized instruction tailors content, instructional technology, and pace to the abilities and interests of each student. Carrying out individualized instruction for adults returning to mathematics after some years away from schooling entail special challenges. Adults have, to a greater extent than children and adolescents, various prior knowledge from former schooling. Their rationales for learning mathematics differ from children and adolescents. The main triggers for adults to study mathematics are to get qualification for further studies; to prove that they can succeed in a subject where they have previously experienced failure; to help their children and to experience understanding and enjoyment. Adults also struggle with negative affective feelings against mathematics as a subject and with mathematics anxiety to a greater extent than children and adolescent learners. 

Much is known about the special challenges in teaching adults but less is known of how to adapt this knowledge into teaching practice. This thesis addresses the aim of how to organize individual mathematics instruction for adult students without an upper secondary diploma, so that they are given opportunities to succeed with their studies and reach their individual goals. 

In the context of the Swedish prison education program four case studies were conducted to address the aim. The methods used were: development and evaluation of a student test of prior knowledge on proportional reasoning combined with clinical interviews; interviews focusing on a student’s rationales for learning; a retrospective analysis of events in relation to feedback situations; an analysis of a common student error in relation to the role of language representation as a signifier for triggering students’ schemes.

The results showed, first, that the test together with the clinical interview elicited students’ prior knowledge on proportional reasoning well and that different students could be classified in qualitatively different ways. Second, that the theoretical construct of instrumental- and social rationales for learning was useful for understanding a student’s initial and changing motivation in relation to the teaching and to the practice of mathematics the teaching entails. Third, that a delay between written and oral feedback worked as a mechanism that gave the receiver time and space to reflect on the feedback, which led to circumventing situations where the student ended up in affect that hindered him from receiving the teacher’s message. Forth, that a linguistic representation in the problem formulation led to a common error, triggering two separate schemes. As a result of the analysis, a theoretical extension of Vergnaud’s theory was suggested by detailing the relationship between schemes and semiotics.

The results are transformed into a model for individualized mathematics instruction of adults, MIMIA, in the Swedish prison education program. MIMIA consist of a flowchart for using practical- and thinking tools for individualizing instruction. The practical tools are used to elicit students’ prior knowledge and organize feedback situations for adults with negative affective feelings towards mathematics. The thinking tools are used to understand and classify adult students’ rationales for learning and to analyze students’ solution schemes in relation to language representations in the problem statements.

This paper reports on a case study of a student’s rationales for learning mathematics. We operationalize Stieg Mellin-Olsen’s educational concept of rationales for learning and apply the concept on data consisting of three semi-structured interviews with a student in the Swedish prison education program. Our analysis shows that the student’s rationales vary in character over time as a reaction to his educational contexts. We conclude that Mellin-Olsen’s construct of rationales is useful for understanding students’ changing motivation in relation to the teaching and to the practice of mathematics the teaching entails. Teachers may use the concepts from our analysis as cognitive tools, related to students’ rationales for learning. By identifying students’ different rationales, opportunities arise for an individualized instructional design.

Schemes were Piaget’s most important concept. Through work of Vergnaud, schemes were connected to representations and theoretical models from Piaget were connected to principal insights from Vygotsky. We suggest that the scheme concept can be elaborated further by detailing the relationship between schemes and semiotics. We consider a case of an adult student’s work on a situation involving average speed. Linguistic representations in the problem formulation triggers two separate schemes for the student, one associated to the speed concept and one to the arithmetic average. By identifying exemplary phenomena in the presented case, we show how previous theory connecting schemes and representations can be extended to allow alternative explanations for a well-known class of students’ errors.

While distance education (DE) is often considered as a means to provide mathematical education to students in remote locations or to promote the professional development of mathematics teachers, this article reports a case showing that DE may also be useful in providing mathematical instruction to individuals who are marginalized or disadvantaged due to their psychological or social conditions. In particular, we present the case of a young male convict with impulse control disorder (ICD) to whom DE made it possible to follow mathematical instruction adapted to a prison environment, which again helped him to modify his attitude towards the study of mathematics. Furthermore, the DE-setting provided him with an environment in which he could control his ICD-related outbursts originally triggered by the mathematics lessons and the associated feedback processes. We argue that DE has unforeseen potentials in terms of mathematical education for learners who are disadvantaged due to their psychological and social conditions.

Since autumn 2018, teachers throughout Sweden are obliged to relate to programming in one way or another in the teaching, especially in the subject of mathematics and technology education. Although teachers should formally work with programming teaching from the autumn of 2018, programming has been taught in primary school for several years. While there is some research on younger students, most of the research has almost exclusively focused on didactic approaches and strategies used by teachers, educational values and practices that accompany programming teaching, and views of teachers regarding programming teaching. What is still missing is research that highlights how younger students experience these new practices and how they primarily perceive programming in traditional school subjects, such as mathematics. Thus, this paper reports on a thematic analysis of younger students' (n=44) perceptions of programming; students who have been introduced to and been taught programming in mathematics in grade 5.

The association between mathematics and programming in an educational context is not new. Today, programming has been introduced into curricula worldwide for younger children. In the Swedish case, primary school teachers are expected to integrate programming in mathematics education from autumn 2018. However, Swedish teachers' knowledge of programming and programming didactics is limited. Meanwhile, there is little research on K-9 programming education. This has led to the dilemma that the mathematics teachers have limited support in didactic knowledge and good examples. This study reports on a teacher professional development project in programming. More specifically, teachers used Lesson Study to plan, execute, and evaluate lessons that integrated programming into various school subjects in elementary school. This study analyzed the didactic strategies developed in 10 lesson studies, as well as mapped the opportunities and challenges of pupils' learning in the mathematics subject. The result was the identification of three didactic strategies, which were analog programming, robot programming and block programming, as well as 11 didactic methods applied within these strategies. The paper contributes with examples of the didactic methods that teachers have developed and evaluated using lesson study. The paper further provides insights on how teachers can take progression into account by applying the three didactic strategies. At last but not least, the study shows a great need for teachers to develop computational thinking abilities.

Syftet med examensarbetet är att fördjupa vår kunskap om och förståelse för formativ bedömning i matematik. Vidare vill vi undersöka om den formativa bedömningen kan förbättra eleverna i klassens kunskapsutveckling i matematik. Vi har gjort en fallstudie i en klass som arbetar formativt för att undersöka hur det kan se ut i praktiken. Underlaget för det samlade materialet består av observation och intervju för att besvara våra två frågeställningar som följer. Hur kan en formativ bedömning se ut i praktiken? Hur kan en koppling mellan lärares och elevers uppfattningar om den pedagogiska verksamheten se ut? Vi har kommit fram till att den formativa bedömningen kan förbättra eleverna i klassens kunskapsutveckling i matematik. I den formativa bedömningen har vi sett vikten av mötet mellan lärare och elev. Att arbeta formativt är tidskrävande.

In this presentation I will discuss the application of social semiotics to the teaching and learning of university science. Science disciplines leverage a wide range of semiotic resources such as graphs, diagrams, mathematical representations, hands on work with apparatus, language, gestures etc. In my work I study how students learn to integrate these resources to do physics and what teachers can do to help them in this process. Over the years, a number of theoretical constructs have been developed within the Physics Education Research Group in Uppsala to help us to better understand the different roles semiotic resources play in learning university physics. In this presentation I will explain some of these terms and give examples of their usefulness for teasing out how learning is taking place.

The natural sciences have been extremely successful in modeling some specific aspects of the world around us. This success is in no small part due to the creation of generally accepted, paradigmatic ways of representing the world through a range of semiotic resources. The discourse of science is of necessity multimodal (see for example Lemke, 1998) and it is therefore important for undergraduate science students to learn to master this multimodal discourse (Airey & Linder, 2009). In this paper, I approach the teaching of multimodal science discourse via the concept of affordance. Since its introduction by Gibson (1979) the concept of affordance has been debated by a number of researchers. Most famous, perhaps is the disagreement between Gibson and Norman (1988) about whether affordances are inherent properties of objects or are only present when perceived by an organism. More recently, affordance has been drawn on in the educational arena, particularly with respect to multimodality (see Fredlund, 2015 for a recent example). Here, Kress et al (2001) have claimed that different modes have different specialized affordances. In the presentation the interrelated concepts of disciplinary affordance and pedagogical affordance will be presented. Both concepts make a radical break with the views of both Gibson and Norman in that rather than focusing on the perception of an individual, they refer to the disciplinary community as a whole. Disciplinary affordance is "the agreed meaning making functions that a semiotic resource fulfills for a disciplinary community". Similarly, pedagogical affordance is "the aptness of a semiotic resource for the teaching and learning of some particular educational content" (Airey, 2015). As such, in a teaching situation the question of whether these affordances are inherent or perceived becomes moot. Rather, the issue is the process through which students come to use semiotic resources in a way that is accepted within the discipline. In this characterization then, learning can be framed in terms of coming to perceive and leverage the disciplinary affordances of semiotic resources. In this paper, I will discuss: the disciplinary affordances of individual semiotic resources, how these affordances can be made “visible” to students and how the disciplinary affordances of semiotic resources are ultimately leveraged and coordinated in order to make science meanings.

In this presentation I use the work of Basil Bernstein (Bernstein, 1990, 1999, 2000) to discuss the role of disciplinary differences in university teaching and learning.  Drawing from my own work on the theme of disciplinary literacy (Airey, 2012, 2013; Airey & Linder, 2008, 2011) I argue that all university lecturers are teachers of disciplinary literacy—even in monolingual settings. 

I define disciplinary literacy as appropriate participation in the communicative practices of the discipline (Airey, 2011a, 2011b)and suggest that disciplinary literacy is developed for three specific sites (academy, workplace and society). I will illustrate the multilingual and multimodal nature of disciplinary literacy with empirical evidence from a comparative study of the disciplinary literacy goals of Swedish and South African physics lecturers (Linder, Airey, Mayaba, & Webb, 2014). 

Finally, I will conclude by demonstrating how two of Bernstein’s dichotomies: disciplinary knowledge structures (hierarchical vs horizontal) and disciplinary classification (singular vs region) can be used together with the disciplinary literacy triangle to better understand the literacy goals of particular disciplines.

In this presentation I will examine the differences between the terms EMI (English Medium Instruction, CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning and EAP (English for Academic Purposes). I will also discuss what it means to become disciplinary literate in a first, second and third language.

In recent years there has been a large amount of interest in the roles that different representations (graphs, algebra, diagrams, sketches, physical models, gesture, etc.) play in student learning. In the literature two distinct but interrelated ways of thinking about such representations can be identified. The first tradition draws on the principles of constructivism emphasizing that students need to build knowledge for themselves. Here students are encouraged to create their own representations by working with materials of various kinds and it is in this hands-on representational process that students come to develop their understanding.

The second tradition holds that there are a number of paradigmatic ways of representing disciplinary knowledge that have been created and refined over time. These paradigmatic disciplinary representations need to be mastered in order for students to be able to both understand and effectively communicate knowledge within a given discipline.

In this session I would like to open up a discussion about how these two ways of viewing representations might be brought together. To do this I will first present some of the theoretical and empirical work we have been doing in Sweden over the last fifteen years. In particular there are three concepts that I would like to introduce for our discussion: critical constellations of representations, the disciplinary affordance of representations and the pedagogical affordance of representations.

This project compares the affordances and constraints for physics teachers’ professional identity building across four countries. The results of the study will be related to the potential consequences of this identity building for pupils’ science performance in school. The training of future physics teachers typically occurs across three environments, the physics department, the education department and school (during teaching practice). As they move through these three environments, trainees are in the process of building their professional identity. However, what is signalled as valuable for a future physics teacher differs considerably in different parts of the education. In educational research, professional identity has been used in a variety of ways (See for example overviews of the concept in Beauchamp & Thomas, 2009; and Beijaard, Meijer, & Verloop, 2004). In this project we draw on the work of Sfard and Pruzak (2005) who have defined identity as an analytical category for use in educational research. The project leverages this concept of identity as an analytical tool to understand how the value-systems present in teacher training environments and society as a whole potentially affect the future practice of trainee physics teachers. For identities to be recognized as professional they must fit into accepted discourses. Thus the project endeavours to identify discourse models that tacitly steer the professional identity formation of future physics teachers. Interviews will be carried out with trainee physics teachers and the various training staff that they meet during their education (physics lecturers, education lecturers, school mentors). It has been suggested that the perceived status of the teaching profession in society has a major bearing on the type of professional identity teachers can enact. Thus, in this project research interviews will be carried out in parallel across four countries with varying teacher status and PISA science scores: Sweden, Finland, Singapore and England. These interviews will be analysed following the design developed in a pilot study that has already carried out by the project group in Sweden. The research questions for the project are as follows: In four countries where the societal status of the teaching profession differs widely: What discourse models are enacted in the educational environments trainee physics teachers meet? What are the potential affordances and constraints of these discourse models for the constitution of physics teacher professional identities? In what ways do perceptions of the status assigned by society to the teaching profession potentially affect this professional identity building? What are the potential consequences of the answers to the above questions for the view of science communicated to pupils in school? In an extensive Swedish pilot study, four potentially competing discourse models were identified: these are: the critically reflective teacher, the practically well-equipped teacher, the syllabus implementer and the physics expert. Of these, the physics expert discourse model was found to dominate in both the physics department and amongst mentors in schools. In the physics expert discourse model the values of the discipline of physics dominate. Thus, the overarching goal of physics teaching is to create future physicists. In this model, the latest research in physics is seen as interesting and motivating, whereas secondary school subject matter is viewed as inherently unsophisticated and boring—something that needs to be made interesting. The model co-exists with the three other discourse models, which were more likely to be enacted in the education department. These other models value quite different goals such as the development of practical skills, reflective practice, critical thinking and citizenship. We claim that knowledge of the different discourse models at work in four countries with quite different outcomes on PISA science will useful in a number of ways. For teacher trainers, a better understanding of these models would allow informed decisions to be taken about the coordination of teacher education. For prospective teachers, knowledge of the discourse models at work during their education empowers them to question the kind of teacher they want to become.

In this research project we focused on the different semiotic resources used in physics (e.g. graphs, diagrams, language, mathematics, apparatus, etc.). We were interested in the ways in which undergraduate physics students learn to combine the different resources used in physics in order to become “disciplinary literate” and what university lecturers do to help their students in this process. Comparative data on the disciplinary literacy goals of physics lecturers for their students was collected at five universities in South Africa and four universities in Sweden.

One of the main contributions of the project concerned what we termed the disciplinary affordance of a semiotic resource, that is, the specific meaning-making functions a particular resource plays for the discipline. We contrasted these meaning-making functions with the way that students initially viewed the same resource.

We proposed two ways that lecturers can direct their students’ attention towards the disciplinary affordances of a given resource. The first involves unpacking the disciplinary affordance in order to create a new resource with higher pedagogical affordance. Our second proposal involved the use of systematic variation in order to help students notice the disciplinary relevant aspects of a given resource. A total of 19 articles/book chapters were published as a direct result of this funding.

In the creation and dissemination of knowledge, science disciplines use a wide range of disciplinary-specific resources such as graphs, diagrams, mathematical representations, hands on work with apparatus, technical language, etc. In my work I study how students experience such specialized resources and come to view them in the same way as experts in the field. In particular, I am interested in what we as university teachers can do to help students in this process. 

In this presentation will use some examples from astronomy to illustrate a number of educational issues that can arise when teaching undergraduates using disciplinary-specific resources and discuss potential ways in which these issues can be addressed.

Since its introduction by Gibson (1979) the concept of affordance has been debated by a number of researchers. Most famous, perhaps is the disagreement between Gibson and Norman(1988) about whether affordances are inherent properties of objects or are only present when perceived by an organism. More recently, affordance has been drawn on in the educational arena, particularly with respect to multimodality (see Fredlund, 2015 for a recent example). 

In the presentation the interrelated concepts of disciplinary affordance and pedagogical affordance will be presented. Both concepts make a radical break with the views of both Gibson and Norman in that rather than focusing on the perception of an individual, they refer to the disciplinary community as a whole. Disciplinary affordance is "the agreed meaning making functions that a semiotic resource fulfills for a disciplinary community". Similarly, pedagogical affordance is "the aptness of a semiotic resource for the teaching and learning of some particular educational content" (Airey, 2015). As such, in a teaching situation the question of whether these affordances are inherent or perceived becomes moot. Rather, the issue is the process through which students come to use semiotic resources in a way that is accepted within the discipline. In this characterization then, learning can be framed in terms of coming to perceive and leverage the disciplinary affordances of semiotic resources. 

In this presentation I will describe a social semiotic approach (Halliday 1978; van Leeuwen 2005) to the multimodal teaching and learning of a discipline that takes variation theory (Marton & Booth 1997; Runesson 2005) as its theoretical framing. Following Airey and Linder (2017:95) I define social semiotics as “the study of the development and reproduction of specialized systems of meaning making in particular sections of society”. 

Learning at university level involves coming to understand the ways in which disciplinary-specific semiotic resources can be coordinated to make appropriate disciplinary meanings (Airey & Linder 2009). Nowhere is this more true than in undergraduate physics where a particularly wide range of semiotic resources such as graphs, diagrams, mathematics and language are essential for meaning making.  In order to learn to make these disciplinary meanings, students need to discover the disciplinary affordances(Fredlund et al. 2012, 2014; Airey & Linder 2017) of the semiotic resources used in their discipline. 

Fredlund et al. (2015) propose a three-stage process that lecturers can use to help their students:  

1. Identify the disciplinary relevant aspects needed for a particular task. 

2. Select semiotic resources that showcase these aspects. 

3. Create structured variation within these semiotic resources to help students notice the disciplinary relevant aspects and their relationships to each other.

However, many disciplinary specific semiotic resources have been rationalized to create a kind of disciplinary shorthand(Airey 2009). In such cases the disciplinary relevant aspects needed may no longer be present in resources used, but are rather implied. In such cases the resources will need to be unpacked for students (Fredlund et al. 2014).  Such unpacking increases the pedagogical affordance of semiotic resources but simultaneously decreases their disciplinary affordance. 

In this paper we are interested in how undergraduate students in the US, Australia and Sweden experience the physics equations they meet in their education. We asked over 350 students the same simple question: How do you know when you understand a physics equation? Students wrote free-text answers to this question and these were transcribed and coded. The analysis resulted in eight themes (significance, origin, describe, predict, parts, relationships, calculate and explain). Each of these themes represents a different disciplinary aspect of student understanding of physics equations. We argue that together the different aspects we find represent a more holistic view of physics equations that we would like all our students to experience. Based on this work we wondered how best to highlight this more holistic view of equations. This prompted us to write a set of questions that reflect the original data with respect to the eight themes. We suggest that when students are working with problem solving they may ask themselves these questions in order to check their holistic understanding of what the physics equations they are using represent. In continuing work we are asking the same question to a cohort of physics lecturers. We are also trialling the themes and related questions that we generated in teaching situations. Here we are interested in whether students perceive the questions as helpful in their learning.

As a discipline, physics is concerned with describing the world by constructing models, the end product of this modelling process often being an equation. As such, physics equations represent much more than a finalized, ready-to-use calculation package – to physicists they are the culmination of a whole range of actions, assump- tions, approximations and historical discoveries. Moreover, physics equations are not simply stand-alone entities, rather they are intimately bound up with other equa- tions. Together, this web of equations represents an integrated, coherent whole that signals the way the community of physicists view the world.

Clearly, such a nuanced, expert-like understanding of physics equations is not spontaneously available to undergraduate physics students when they meet an equa- tion for the first time. In this respect, research suggests that we should not expect students to display conceptually coherent understanding across settings. Rather it has been suggested that understanding is built up from context-dependent knowl- edge in pieces (diSessa 1993, 2018). In this characterization, different aspects, or ways of viewing the same phenomenon, are leveraged in different settings. Students gradually develop their understanding in two ways: by forging links between these separate ‘pieces of knowledge’ and by coming to appreciate the usefulness of a given ‘piece of knowledge’ for a given task. Educationally then, we are interested in identifying these pieces of knowledge – in our case the range of ways that students understand equations. What are students’ default positions with respect to equa- tions? Which aspects of equations do students tend to focus on and which aspects tend to go unnoticed? Once we have documented the range of ways of understand- ing, the next task concerns how to help students discern other aspects of equations than those they may initially notice. Do the tasks that students are presented with in their undergraduate education encourage them to move towards a more nuanced, coherent, holistic understanding of physics equations?

In this paper we present findings from an interview study with eleven educators from a Finnish physics teacher training programme. The educators represent the four environments where the education takes place: the Department of Physics, the Department of Mathematics and Science Education, the Department of General Pedagogy, and the Training School. The study is part of a larger Swedish Research Council project comparing the different disciplinary values that are communicated to future physics teachers across four countries (Sweden, England, Singapore and Finland).

Interviews were coded in TRANSANA software, and analysed using Gee’s (2014, p. 95) theory of figured worlds which he describes as “taken-for-granted theories that are guided, shaped, and normed though social and cultural interactions”. In our study we apply Gee’s concept to descriptions of a ‘good’ physics teacher. Our analysis shows that the educators across the four training environments largely communicate the same figured world. Although working in different settings, the eleven educators appear to be working in concert, each contributing to a shared vision of what is needed to develop the professional physics teacher identities of their trainees.

The figured world we identify characterizes a ‘good ‘physics teacher in terms of a range of competencies, such as: student centredness, inclusive teaching, pedagogical content knowledge, physics for society, assessment skills, relationships and leadership and teacher professionalism.

Taken together, the four departments appear to cover all the expressed competencies of a ‘good’ physics teacher and there is mutual trust across the four environments. The training school was seen as the place where all of the desired competencies are brought together, applied and evaluated.

These findings are in stark contrast to parallel findings for Sweden where four competing models of the goals of the educational programme were identified.

In this chapter we use the concept of disciplinary literacy (Airey, 2011a, 2013) to analyze the goals of university physics lecturers. Disciplinary literacy refers to a particular mix of disciplinary-specific communicative practices developed for three specific sites: the academy, the workplace and society. It has been suggested that the development of disciplinary literacy may be seen as one of the primary goals of university studies (Airey, 2011a).

The main data set used in this chapter comes from a comparative study of physics lecturers in Sweden and South Africa (Airey, 2012, 2013; Linder, Airey, Mayaba, & Webb, 2014). Semi-structured interviews were carried out using a disciplinary literacy discussion matrix (Airey, 2011b), which enabled us to probe the lecturers’ disciplinary literacy goals in the various semiotic resource systems used in undergraduate physics (i.e. graphs, diagrams, mathematics, language).

The findings suggest that whilst physics lecturers have strikingly similar disciplinary literacy goals for their students, regardless of setting, they have very different ideas about whether they themselves should teach students to handle these disciplinary-specific semiotic resources. It is suggested that the similarity in physics lecturers’ disciplinary literacy goals across highly disparate settings may be related to the hierarchical, singular nature of the discipline of physics (Bernstein, 1999, 2000).

In the final section of the chapter some preliminary evidence about the disciplinary literacy goals of those involved in physics teacher training is presented. Using Bernstein’s constructs, a potential conflict between the hierarchical singular of physics and the horizontal region of teacher training is noticeable.

Going forward it would be interesting to apply the concept of disciplinary literacy to the analysis of other disciplines—particularly those with different combinations of Bernstein’s classifications of hierarchical/horizontal and singular/region.

In this presentation we use the concept of disciplinary literacy (Airey, 2011a; 2013) to analyse the expressed learning goals of university physics lecturers for their students. We define disciplinary literacy in terms of learning to control a particular set of multimodal communicative practices. We believe it is important to document the expressed intentions of lecturers in this way, since it has previously been suggested that the development of such disciplinary literacy may be seen as one of the primary goals of university studies (Airey, 2011a).

The main data set used in this presentation comes from a comparative study of 30 physics lecturers from Sweden and South Africa. (Airey, 2012, 2013; Linder et al, 2014). Semi-structured interviews were carried out using a disciplinary literacy discussion matrix (Airey, 2011b), which enabled us to probe the lecturers’ disciplinary literacy goals in the various semiotic resource systems used in undergraduate physics (e.g. graphs, diagrams, mathematics, spoken and written languages, etc.).

The findings suggest that physics lecturers in both countries have strikingly similar disciplinary literacy goals for their students and hold similar beliefs about disciplinary semiotic resources. The lecturers also agree that teaching disciplinary literacy ought not to be their job. Here though, there were differences in whether the lecturers teach students to handle disciplinary-specific semiotic resources. These differences appear to be based on individual decisions, rather than being specific to a particular country or institution.

In this chapter we discuss the application of social semiotics to the teaching and learning of university physics. Social semiotics is a broad construct where all communication in a particular social group is realized through the use of semiotic resources. In the discipline of physics, examples of such semiotic resources are graphs, diagrams, mathematics, spoken and written language, and laboratory apparatus. In physics education research it is usual to refer to most of these semiotic resources as representations. In social semiotics, then, disciplinary learning can be viewed as coming to interpret and use the meaning potential of disciplinary-specific semiotic resources (representations) that has been assigned by the discipline. We use this complementary depiction of representations to build theory with respect to the construction and sharing of disciplinary knowledge in the teaching and learning of university physics. To facilitate both scholarly discussion and future research in the area, a number of theoretical constructs have been developed. These constructs take their point of departure in empirical studies of teaching and learning in undergraduate physics. In the chapter we present each of these constructs in turn and examine their usefulness for problematizing teaching and learning with multiple representations in university physics.

The previous international conference on multimodality – 8ICOM – featured two sessions devoted to multimodal, social semiotic approaches to science teaching and learning (c.f. Halliday1978; van Leeuwen 2005, Airey & Linder 2017). What the papers in these sessions shared was the argument that such perspectives on science, and science teaching, can, at least in part, respond to calls to ‘democratize’ science education by recognising diverse sets of semiotic resources and, in so doing, seeking to address impediments to equal participation (Burke et al., 2017). 

The 8ICOM science sessions were particularly noteworthy given the backdrop against which 8ICOM had been organised. In the months leading up to the conference, South Africa (and Cape Town, in particular) had experienced campus unrest aimed at ‘decolonizing’ higher education in that country. As part of this movement, the phrase #ScienceMustFall briefly trended on social media. This emanated from the claim that ‘science’ is a western, colonial construct that needs to be dismantled and replaced with the teaching of indigenous, African knowledge. Although the #ScienceMustFall slogan has since departed from the wider public consciousness, the questions it raises nonetheless remain: why, and how, should science be taught?  Is science more than just a western colonial construction and, if so, why? And, what can the concept of multimodality offer by way of answering these questions? 

In this paper, we offer an overview of the multimodal science papers presented in the two sessions at 8ICOM in the light of these questions. This is done with a view to assessing where the multimodality community finds itself regarding science education, and how it might address questions of the legitimacy of western science in the future. It is thus an attempt, as the conference theme suggests, to ‘move the theory forward’.      

In order to make disciplinary meanings, science students need to coordinate a large number of semiotic systems such as graphs, diagrams, spoken and written language, gesture, mathematics, etc. In this respect, it has been suggested that there is a critical constellation of semiotic resources that is necessary for holistic construction of each scientific concept (Airey, 2009). Other actors have discussed this problem in terms of building students' representational competence (Kozma & Russell 2005; Kohl & Finkelstein 2005; De Cock 2012; Linder et al. 2014). Combining this work, Volkwyn et al (2020:91) define representational competence as: “The ability to appropriately interpret and produce a set of disciplinary-accepted representations of real-world phenomena and link these to formalized scientific concepts”. In this paper we first put forward a theoretical proposal for how such student representational competence may be developed, before empirically demonstrating the usefulness of this proposal for a particular representational system (graphs) in a particular area of physics (1-D kinematics). By coordinating kinematics concepts, the three graphs, and real-world movement we show how the students begin to practice their representational competence. We also show the complexity of this apparently simple system in representational terms.

Att lyfta fram språket i matematiken kan stötta många elever i sin förståelse, både elever med svenska som modersmål och flerspråkiga elever. Forskning kring matematik och flerspråkighet visar att elever gynnas av tvåspråkig undervisning tillsammans med exempelvis modersmålslärare eller jämnåriga, såväl som av en matematikundervisning som bedrivs språkutvecklande.

Elever är olika och har olika behov av anpassning för att utvecklas och lära sig, därför är det väsentligt att undervisningen anpassas efter elevers olika utvecklingsbehov. Studien syftade till att undersöka hur man kan utforma anpassningar i matematikundervisningen efter olika utvecklingsbehov för elever i årskurs F-3 på ett sätt som är både fördelaktigt och genomförbart för såväl som lärare och elever. Studien var baserad på sex semistruktuerade intervjuer av fyra verksamma lärare och två lärarstudenter i olika städer. Insamlade data transkriberades och analyserades tematiskt med utgångspunkt i forskningsfrågorna för att utreda hur intervjudeltagarna organiserar och utför olika individuella anpassningar i matematikundervisningen för att stödja sina elevers matematiska inlärning. Resultatet visade att ett tätt samarbete mellan två lärare i en och samma klass är ett bra sätt för att stärka anpassningsarbetet samt avlasta lärare, det pekade också på att väl fungerande anpassningar byggs på ett systematiskt arbete som består av förarbete, genomförande och utvärdering. Utmaningar med tids- och kompetensbrist inom anpassningsarbetet var också tydliga i studien. Anpassning är en komplex fråga som kräver ämneskunskap, ledarskap och organisation. Denna studie ger lärare och lärarstudenter inblick i att en hållbar matematikundervisning är till stor del baserad på ett utförligt förarbete och genomtänkta genomgångar.

Informella lärmiljöer såsom museer, djurparker och science centers kännetecknas av att de är öppna för allmänheten och att de inte behöver ha en formell koppling till skolväsendet. Denna artikel syftar till att ge en översiktlig beskrivning av forskning om informella lärmiljöers effekter på elevers lärande och intresse för naturvetenskap. Forskningen visar att informella lärmiljöer kan påverka elevers lärande och intresse positivt. Samtidigt är kunskapen begränsad om hur detta går till och vilken betydelse besök har för ett mer beständigt intresse. Studierna lyfter särskilt (1) det sociala sammanhang som miljöerna erbjuder, (2) möjligheten till alternativa ingångar till naturvetenskap, samt (3) kopplingen till den reguljära skolverksamheten som viktiga aspekter för informella lärmiljöers möjlighet att påverka elevernas lärande och intresse. Utifrån detta diskuterar artikeln möjliga sätt som informella lärmiljöer kan kopplas till skolans formella undervisning i naturvetenskap.

The objective of the thesis is to describe and analyse aspects of home background and teaching that may be important for students’ capability and will to participate in science. The purpose is to make explicit how teaching can support students in developing an interest in science and so counter-balance the restricted opportunities some students may have due to upbringing. In study 1 population data is used to make evident what associations there are between home background variables and the students’ choice of applying for the Swedish post-compulsory Natural Science Programme (NSP). The findings show that home background is important for Swedish students’ choice of the NSP but also that some lower secondary schools can make a difference. Students’ interest in science has usually been examined through questionnaires and rarely studied as constituted in classroom action as a result of teaching. In study 2 therefore an action-oriented methodology is developed based on the concept of taste to study what difference a teacher can make for the constitution of interest in the science classroom. The concept of taste is grounded in pragmatism and the works of Pierre Bourdieu and acknowledges the affective, normative, and cognitive dimensions of situated science learning. In study 3 this methodology is used to examine how a teacher located through Study 1 supports his students in developing an interest in science. The results of study 3 suggest how teaching can make the object of science the focus of students’ interest and so showing that science, with its aims, norms, and values, can be enjoyed in itself. Study 4 draws on the findings of studies 1-3 to discuss the possibility of an overlooked field in studying interest in science; namely whether primary, secondary, tertiary students in effect have different objects of interest. The findings of studies 1-4 are used to discuss how teaching may make a difference to a continued student interest in science.