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In this study we address the need to promote student engagement with school science and the need to measure a more comprehensive conception of engagement considering three dimensions of engagement: emotional, behavioural, and cognitive. We address the first issue by designing and implementing a model-based inquiry instructional sequence focused on fostering students’ engagement with science. The second issue is addressed by developing and testing a heuristic that measures student engagement holistically by focusing on all three dimensions mentioned. The results report that our short MBI instructional sequence develop students’ emotional engagement because most of them recognize to having felt interest, concentration, and satisfaction and few students reported boredom, shame, or rejection during the teaching. They spent most of the time working in small groups and sharing-discussing their hypothesis, planning and evaluating their experimental designs, and building models to explain acid-base phenomena together which highlight behavioural and cognitive dimension of students’ engagement in our instructional sequence about chewing gum and pH of the mouth. The heuristic is designed to gather data continuously during instruction with minimal disruption to the learning and teaching sequence. The heuristic can be used by teachers, researchers, and also by students, to gain multi-level understandings about engagement by focusing on individual, group-level, or class-level analysis of responses.

Scholars studying emotions in social life typically work mono-logically, within a paradigmatic camp, drawing on distinct theories of emotion. In isolation, each offers a singular conceptualisation of emotions in social life. Working multi-logically, in contrast, offers richer, comparative insight into the layered meanings of emotion relevant to a social context. Rather than treating them as incommensurate, we not only argue for the benefits of drawing on multiple paradigms, methods and theories of emotions in social life, we offer a worked example of a post-paradigmatic methodology for analysing emotions in social life that values multi-logicality and epistemic flexibility. Setting aside debates about what emotions are, we work from the premise that different conceptualisations of emotions do things: shape what we see and ignore, and discursively position people. We show how multiple theories and concordant methods can – and should – be applied to studying emotions in social life in the same study. In this empirical illustration of a methodological innovation, we map theories and methodologies of emotions in social life against four research paradigms and against four phases of a study into the emotional dimensions of interprofessional practice, depicting the realisations afforded through a post-paradigmatic methodology for analysing emotions in social life.

The teaching profession offers meaningful, stimulating work that accords with teachers’ sense of professional pride and identity, but is also synonymous with high levels of stress, conflict (and associated emotions such as anger and shame) and ultimately, attrition. The degree to which teachers within a national population ‘up-manage’ the former or ‘down-manage’ the latter emotions is unknown. This study utilises new data from the Australian Survey of Emotions and Emotion Management (SEEM) to examine emotions and emotion management among teachers, and workers in comparable service roles, such as health care and customer service, in contemporary Australian society. It finds that teachers exhibit great natural happiness, but also experience and hide (through surface-acting) high levels of stress. Teachers also experience high levels of anger compared to other professions, though they usually manage this successfully through deep acting strategies. These findings imply that teachers are generally happy and professionally committed to (and proud of) their work, but at the cost of managing significant levels of stress and conflict. We discuss the implications for teacher professional development, initial teacher education and policy, and the need to investigate anger/shame dynamics and management in future research into pedagogy.

This study addresses the need for innovative research approaches in science education for understanding better the inter-relationships between emotion and cognition in learning, using a sociological perspective. Our perspective draws upon the concept of emotional energy that is described as an outcome from successful social interactions during micro-social situations. We apply an intensity model of emotional energy to school science contexts to explore the heterogeneity of emotional energy in terms of its dramatic features, evident through emphatic verbal and nonverbal actions. We also explore undramatic features evident in less obtrusive actions such as silences involving shared observation and glances, and evidence of fluctuations in intensity of emotional energy, and the interplay of emotional energy with discrete emotions over time. Drawing on empirical data from video recordings of classroom interactions in ninth- and tenth-grade science classes, we adopt an ethnomethodological orientation to develop a fine-grained description of classroom situations involving emotional energy. Subsequent application of the intensity model enables description of intensity variations in emotional energy across time, as a biological–social experience evident through feelings, ideas, and bodily movements. By emphasizing taken-for-granted undramatic emotional energy, the study contributes to science education by extending the previous research on emotions from sociocultural perspectives. The present study finds co-relatedness between intensity fluctuations in emotional energy and students achieving understanding of scientific ideas. Future research may focus on the refinement of the intensity model, with its evaluation and application in different science learning environments.

Amy Goods’s software review article V-Note: A video analysis tool for teacher | researchers stimulated our interest in adopting this software to understand social bonding dynamics in a group of 10th-grade science students’ during a science inquiry project. Three of us employed V-Note to analyze two video files for the same lesson in which the student group completed an inquiry about the effects of mass on speed using a marble and ramp. Subhashni provides her perspective as teacher | researcher, James offers an analysis as an independent researcher, and Alberto is the classroom researcher who designed a larger project investigating the interplay of social bonds with science learning of which this study is a part. Alberto also drew upon a more extensive set of data sources including social bond diaries completed by students, and reflective dialogs with the class. Rebecca interprets the three video analyses, as an independent researcher who did not access the video data. Our independent analyses and additional data sources produce diverse understandings about the impact of shifting social bond status on science learning and science inquiry. Outcomes include differentiation between social bonds and social roles adopted by students during the inquiry. Data analyses also reveal the researchers’s different ontologies and epistemologies. We also showcase V-Note’s capabilities, affordances, and constraints for social inquiry. Implications for further research on social bonds in science education are presented.

This systematic search and review of international literature (1979–2017) finds links between emotion management and gender (in 1/2 the studies), and teaching attrition outcomes (1/3). Results contextualise these connections, suggesting female teachers use deep acting strategies, though experience more emotional exhaustion and unpleasant emotions. Male teachers practice distancing and surface acting, and experience depersonalisation, but also success in controlling disruptions and stimulating subject interest. Studies are limited by self-reported data and omission of school context, but highlight important teacher organisational identifications, suggesting future research use observational methods for understanding emotion management as an embedded, interactionist phenomenon.

Research focusing on the management of emotion features prominently in studies of employee attrition, gender inequality and workplace satisfaction, but rarely in research on worker solidarity. Against a backdrop of increasing individualisation within late modern society, research about workplace management of emotion has become bifurcated along sociological or organisational psychology lines. Within the sociology literature, management of emotion is theorised as a commercialised, relational and (often) alienating experience. Within organisational psychology literature and research, the emphasis is on harnessing individual traits and skills (e.g. emotional intelligence) to regulate emotions for increased productivity and employee retention. In this article, the authors call for a new research agenda that prioritises the examination of solidarity between workers alongside the analysis of emotion management. This call is based in a critical reading of the sociological and organisational psychology scholarship addressing the management of emotions. Through the example of teaching work, the authors provide a critique of scholarship on workplace strategies that promote highly individualised understandings of managing emotions through resilience training and other simplified techniques. They argue that workplaces should recognise the dangers of uncritically adopting individualised strategies for managing emotions, and propose a research agenda that seeks to understand how emotion management can affect worker solidarity.

High demand for suitably qualified, high-quality science teachers is undermined by elevated teacher burnout/attrition rates within the early years of teaching. Effective emotion management can alleviate feelings of burnout and is also linked theoretically to sustaining positive social bonds. Scant attention has been directed at the importance of emotion management and social bonds in science education research. This study presents a methodology for studying emotion management and social bonds, delivering novel outcomes that elucidate how these two phenomena are interrelated. Video recordings of classroom interactions and reflective accounts in an early-career science teacher's ninth grade class were analyzed through a combination of ethnomethodology and interpretive techniques. Situated actions that constitute emotion management at the classroom level impacted the status of bonds between the teacher and one of his students, ultimately leading to a breakdown in their relationship. Results of the study detail how social actions of numerous students and the teacher led to the co-construction of emotion management and how this impacted social bonds. Theoretical and practical insights about the co-constructed nature of emotion management and social bonds present novel perspectives that can help to avoid pathologizing the actions of individual students and teachers for sustaining positive social bonds. Implications for science teaching and teacher education are offered. Study outcomes extend previous perspectives on emotion management in science education, which treat emotion management as an individual cognitive phenomenon.

Science inquiry is an important part of educational reform focusing on improvements to pedagogy. Developing students' capacities and understandings about the design and conceptualization of scientific research informs contemporary curriculum and teaching practices. Although objectivity is regarded as a fundamental aspect of scientific research, limited studies in school contexts have considered how students generate objectivity during situated classroom practices of science inquiry. A cognitive view of objectivity informs existing research, neglecting the localized production of objectivity during classroom practices and associated emotional experiences. To inform understandings about objectivity, we adopt an ethnomethodological orientation for understanding students' situated practices during science inquiry tasks. Transcripts produced from video recordings of group interactions are collected into salient episodes using ethnomethodological conventions. We extend beyond the fine‐grained ethnomethodological description to analyze transcript data by drawing on a theoretical perspective from the microsociology of emotion. Outcomes include an understanding of how objectivity came to exist through the dialectic relationship between objectivity and subjectivity that are linked via emotional experience. Suggestions are provided to inform future research investigating relationships between emotion, objectivity, student identity, and learning in different science inquiry contexts.

The aim of our study is to propose a gamification strategy for teaching SSI’s as a means for enhancing science literacy with a capacity for critical rationality. The theoretical framework that informs our teaching and research around SSI’s draws from a model of teaching objectives from techno-scientism to activist science education. We also draw upon gamification theory that influenced our thinking. In our study methods, we adopted an historical and reflective narrative methodology with elements of self-study to document and analyze the experience of engaging with preservice teachers, and developing the gamification framework over time. The study commences with Alberto’s experience as a science educator in a preservice teacher program where his prior gaming experiences grounded his interest in the gamification of SSIs in science teaching. At the same time, James was a preservice teacher in Alberto’s course, and it was from Alberto’s teaching that James’s interest in the gamification of SSIs emerged. This chapter models a practice-based approach to preservice teacher education that explicitly engages preservice teachers in critical rationality with respect to SSI’s by immersing them in a gamification strategy. Our narrative methodology enables us to explain what worked and what did not work along our journey. By synthesizing this experience with the literature we present a detailed analysis to advance understanding in this field.

The contradictory work environments of new economies in late modernity are associated with a range of emotional experiences, requiring diverse emotion management strategies. Late modernity offers the capacity to pursue happy, safe, rewarding, and meaningful work for the privileged few; a potential trade-off between stressful meaningful and boring precarious work for a greater number; and the prospect of non-meaningful, precarious work for many in the new economy characterised by short-term contracts, gig work, precarity, and anxiety. This study draws on data from the 2015–16 Australian Social Attitudes Survey to examine workers’ emotions in various combinations of meaningful and precarious employment, and the degree to which these emotions are managed. It finds that it is best to have secure meaningful work, worst to have highly precarious work, and slightly better to have safe but alienating than risky meaningful work, in terms of avoiding often hidden negative emotions.

Emotion research in teaching and education more generally is a well-developed field of inquiry, offering suggestions for initial teacher education course development and practical suggestions for improving the working lives of teachers and schoolchildren. In contrast, emotion research in teacher education is an emergent and expanding area of inquiry. Preservice teachers, or university teacher education students, have unique emotional demands given that their teacher identities may still be in formative stages and their school-based practicum may not present the full complement of emotional experiences that full-time teachers encounter daily and for extended periods of time. Some specific objectives of past research in teacher education include explorations of preservice teachers’ emotions; preparing preservice teachers for the emotional demands of the job; developing understandings about the interplay between teacher–student relationships or social bonds, emotions, and learning; and addressing the strong emotions associated with practicum for preservice teachers, school-based teacher educators, and university-based teacher educators. A diverse range of theories are available for investigating emotion in preservice teacher education. This range presents different ways of conceptualizing what emotions are considered to be, stemming from disciplines including sociology, philosophy, psychology, critical studies, cultural studies, anthropology, and neuroscience. In addition to canvassing theories and traditions, dominant approaches to the study of preservice teacher emotions are addressed including early investigations, which relied on single self-report research methods to the more complex and dynamic multimethod and multitheoretical studies that have emerged in recent years. Suggestions are made for fruitful future lines of inquiry of preservice teachers’ emotional experiences and needs. Teacher attrition and burnout, particularly in the early years, continue to be vexing international problems. Research into preservice teacher emotions and emotion management are two important areas of inquiry that could address the related problems of burnout and attrition. Emotion management is also linked to social bonds, and better understandings of these connections are needed in the context of preservice teachers’ experiences and learning during practicums and within university courses. A focus on enacted classroom and staffroom interactions offers great scope for novel research contributions. Better understandings of structural conditions affecting emotions and preservice teachers’ learning are needed that include the bridging of macrosocial structural factors influencing work conditions with microsocial interactions in classrooms, staffrooms, and during parent-teacher interactions. New research adopting contemporary theories of emotion and methods is needed to explore preservice teacher identities. Combining this focus with the aforementioned lines of investigation into burnout, attrition, social bonds, and connections between macrostructural and microinteractional aspects of teaching and learning presents a third line of novel research. Guiding questions to prompt these and other lines of investigation are offered.

Understandings of emotion in late modernity are described as increasingly complex, emphasising the individual and describing the centrality of emotions to reasoning. This chapter illustrates this increasing complexity by detailing a study of emotion that seeks to understand emotional experiences as an intertwined and inseparable individual-collective phenomenon. Our methodological approach emphasises the tension between sociality and individuality, as we study particular instances of experience involving bodily movements, ideas and internal feelings that are evident to us, in the micro-detail of social interactions. The outcome of our study is a sociological model that develops language and conceptualisations to better understand the complexity of emotions, reasoning and cognition in learning contexts. We highlight this model as an example of a shift in sociological thought about emotions that is redefining the way we understand emotional experience in late modernity.

Emotions and affect are typically conceptualized along a valence dichotomy, for example with anger labeled as negative and happiness as positive. What does it mean for emotions to be considered positive or negative? More generally, “What is emotional valence?” To address these questions, we review limitations of existing critiques of the valence construct, trace its origins in Western philosophy, before proposing alternative ways of conceptualizing emotional valence. These alternatives emphasize that the valence of emotions is very much affected by the interaction among the social context in which an emotion is first experienced, the salience of self and identities tied to self in this context, the appraisal of the initial emotional response, the attributions about the causes of these emotions, and the operation of defense mechanisms protecting self from negative self-evaluations. These dynamics are both biologically, psychologically, and socioculturally based; and thus, a theory of valence must operate at these three levels of social reality. This new conceptualization of the dynamics of valence formation can explain emotional fluctuations among individuals in all types of societies; and when applied to late modern societies, the theory offers a means for understanding the complexity of persons’ emotional responses to late modern conditions.

Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) each have distinct epistemological foundations for the production of knowledge, yet a recent international trend in education is to integrate these fields as an approach to teaching and learning. According to the literature, integrated STEM education involves concurrent teaching of two or more knowledge domains from the collection of traditional knowledge silos that constitute S.T.E.M.. The rationale for integrated STEM education is grounded in a perceived need to simulate the complexity of real-world situations, where examples of integrated STEM tend to evolve over time, through the need to solve problems in naturalistic contexts by teams of researchers with different disciplinary expertise. In educational settings, each school S.T.E.M. discipline has evolved with pedagogical responses to simulate real-world contexts such as science inquiry or mathematical problem solving, however, the notion of integrated STEM adds layers of complexity to pedagogical responses. Our aim in this chapter is to address this complexity from the perspective of integrated STEM in initial teacher education programs, based on critical reflections of our recent teaching experiences and learning experiences of our students. We explore the demands on initial teacher education STEM students in terms of the diversity of analytical epistemological orientations, and we consider possible strategies for understanding synthetic epistemological orientations that may inform better our understanding of learning through integrated STEM.

Historical and sociological accounts of events typically refer to abrupt macro-social changes that create discontinuity in social structures, thereby changing society. At a micro-social level of experience, events may also unfold that con-tribute to important localized change for the particular people involved. This study of a learning event is an original investigation using empirical data sourced from a secondary school science classroom. Our study adopts a micro-social perspective of events in the context of a school science lesson where emotional fluctuations form the basis for an event to be analyzed. In this sense we adopt the learning event as our unit of analysis to understand the lived experience of a student, the turning point in his learning, and the transformation of his understanding of scientific ideas, as localized structures. This study focuses on the experience of a year 9 science student during a lesson involving both online and face-to-face forms of social interaction. The learning event we analyze highlights the possible contribution of this type of analysis to understanding better, the interplay between emotion and cognition in science education contexts.

Our purpose in this chapter is to review a discerning selection of recent science education research on the topic of emotions. Within the theme of theoretical foundations, we firstly discuss the big ideas influencing this body of literature that we describe in terms of ontology, epistemology and time; emotion and embodied experience; mindfulness; expression of emotion; and, emotional energy and emotional climate. We then review the most recent of these studies to highlight the outcomes of these investigations as they relate to school classrooms or teacher education. The studies included in this overview offer a foundation for future research, and support the forthcoming chapters of this collection that document emotional events in a range of contexts and from complementary and new perspectives.

This study explored pre-service secondary science teachers’ perceptions of classroom emotional climate in the context of the Bhutanese macro-social policy of Gross National Happiness. Drawing upon sociological perspectives of human emotions and using Interaction Ritual Theory this study investigated how pre-service science teachers may be supported in their professional development. It was a multi-method study involving video and audio recordings of teaching episodes supported by interviews and the researcher’s diary. Students also registered their perceptions of the emotional climate of their classroom at 3-minute intervals using audience response technology. In this way, emotional events were identified for video analysis. The findings of this study highlighted that the activities pre-service teachers engaged in matter to them. Positive emotional climate was identified in activities involving students’ presentations using video clips and models, coteaching, and interactive whole class discussions. Decreases in emotional climate were identified during formal lectures and when unprepared presenters led presentations. Emotions such as frustration and disappointment characterized classes with negative emotional climate. The enabling conditions to sustain a positive emotional climate are identified. Implications for sustaining macro-social policy about Gross National Happiness are considered in light of the climate that develops in science teacher education classes.

The role that specific emotions, such as pride and triumph, play during instruction in science education is an underresearched field of study. Emotions are recognized as central to learning yet little is known about the way in which they are produced in naturalistic settings, how emotions relate to classroom learning during interactions, and what antecedent factors are associated with emotional experiences during instruction. Data sources for the study include emotion diaries, student written artifacts, video recordings of class interactions, and interviews. Emotions produced in the moment during classroom interactions are analyzed from video data and audio data through a novel theoretical framework related to the sociology of human emotions. These direct observations are compared with students’ recollected emotional experiences reported through emotion diaries and interviews. The study establishes links between pride and triumph within classroom interactions and instructional tasks during learning episodes in a naturalistic setting. We discuss particular classroom activities that are associated with justified feelings of pride and triumph. More specifically, classroom events associated with these emotions were related to understanding science concepts, social interactions, and achieving success on challenging tasks.

In this chapter, we present an original study of the flow of emotional energy that occurs during classroom practices associated with science demonstrations. We take the view that macro-social human practices, such as learning to teach science, are grounded in the micro-social processes that take shape in classroom interactions. Drawing on interaction ritual theory and a theory of eventful learning, the focus is to understand and illustrate the way in which subtle emotions, which bubble away beneath the surface of classroom life, are just as important for understanding how one learns to be a science teacher, as more dramatic counterparts like joy. Beginning with a first order ritual in our teacher education classes, we then follow the flow of emotional energy, a steady and durable form of emotional arousal, across time and space through second-order rituals when preservice and beginning teachers enact demonstrations in their high school science teaching. Implications for future research are considered for tackling the final frontier of interaction rituals research: third order rituals.

STEM education disciplines are facing a dilemma internationally. There is high demand for qualified high quality teachers in science, technology, and mathematics subjects in schools and a trend towards high attrition rates of teachers in the early years. Teacher attrition has been associated with, in part, the high demand for emotion work required on a daily basis in classrooms. Despite this fact, there is dearth of research on teachers’ emotion management in specific disciplinary fields such as science and mathematics education. In this chapter, we address the need for research on teacher emotion work in science and mathematics education through sociological analysis of the lived experiences of two authors. Using narrative vignettes of classroom experiences, we consider what the sociology of emotions can contribute to understanding the emotion work required in science and mathematics classrooms. Following an analysis of the two vignettes, we offer suggestions for research, policy, and practice for addressing STEM teachers’ emotional work through teacher education courses and professional learning.

Sociological approaches to inquiry on emotion in educational settings are growing. Despite a long tradition of research and theory in disciplines such as psychology and sociology, the methods and approaches for naturalistic investigation of emotion are in a developmental phase in educational settings. In this article, recent empirical studies on emotion in educational contexts are canvassed. The discussion focuses on the use of multiple methods within research conducted in high school and university classrooms highlighting recent methodological progress. The methods discussed include facial expression analysis, verbal and nonverbal conduct, and self-report methods. Analyses drawn from different studies, informed by perspectives from microsociology, highlight the strengths and limitations of any one method. The power and limitations of multimethod approaches is discussed.

The role of emotion during learning encounters in science teacher education is under-researched and under-theorized. In this case study we explore the emotional climates, that is, the collective states of emotional arousal, of a preservice secondary science education class to illuminate practice for producing and reproducing high quality learning experiences for preservice science teachers. Theories related to the sociology of emotions informed our analyses from data sources such as preservice teachers’ perceptions of the emotional climate of their class, emotional facial expressions, classroom conversations, and cogenerative dialogue. The major outcome from our analyses was that even though preservice teachers reported high positive emotional climate during the professor’s science demonstrations, they also valued the professor’s in the moment reflections on her teaching that were associated with low emotional climate ratings. We co-relate emotional climate data and preservice teachers’ comments during cogenerative dialogue to expand our understanding of high quality experiences and emotional climate in science teacher education. Our study also contributes refinements to research perspectives on emotional climate.

Higher-order thinking has featured persistently in the reform agenda for science education. The intended curriculum in various countries sets out aspirational statements for the levels of higher-order thinking to be attained by students. This study reports the extent to which chemistry examinations from four Australian states align and facilitate the intended higher-order thinking skills stipulated in curriculum documents. Through content analysis, the curriculum goals were identified for each state and compared to the nature of question items in the corresponding examinations. Categories of higher-order thinking were adapted from the OECD's PISA Science test to analyze question items. There was considerable variation in the extent to which the examinations from the states supported the curriculum intent of developing and assessing higher-order thinking. Generally, examinations that used a marks-based system tended to emphasize lower-order thinking, with a greater distribution of marks allocated for lower-order thinking questions. Examinations associated with a criterion-referenced examination tended to award greater credit for higher-order thinking questions. The level of complexity of chemistry was another factor that limited the extent to which examination questions supported higher-order thinking. Implications from these findings are drawn for the authorities responsible for designing curriculum and assessment procedures and for teachers.

Classroom emotional climates (ECs) are interrelated with students’ engagement with university courses. Despite growing interest in emotions and EC research, little is known about the ways in which social interactions and different subject matter mediate ECs in preservice science teacher education classes. In this study we investigated the EC and associated classroom interactions in a preservice science teacher education class. We were interested in the ways in which salient classroom interactions were related to the EC during lessons centered on debates about science-based issues (e.g., nuclear energy alternatives). Participants used audience response technology to indicate their perceptions of the EC. Analysis of conversation for salient video clips and analysis of non-verbal conduct (acoustic parameters, body movements, and facial expressions) supplemented EC data. One key contribution that this study makes to preservice science teacher education is to identify the micro-processes of successful and unsuccessful class interactions that were associated with positive and neutral EC. The structure of these interactions can inform the practice of other science educators who wish to produce positive ECs in their classes. The study also extends and explicates the construct of intensity of EC.

Learning science involves situated social practices that are inherently emotional. Despite this fact, research in science education has focused predominantly on learning as a cognitive process with scant attention directed at emotion in the past. There are now a growing number of studies of emotion and affect partly due to international concerns regarding student disaffection with school science. In this chapter, I discuss theoretical orientations to the sociology of emotion that have attracted increasing interest from science education researchers in recent years. In particular, interaction ritual theory has provided a way forward for understanding science learning as an emotional and situated social practice. Fruitful perspectives about emotional engagement have been developed from its application in empirical studies of school science and preservice teacher education classes. I begin with an overview of interaction ritual theory and by outlining the outcomes of selected empirical studies to illustrate the basic tenets of the theory. In the second part of the chapter, I consider what else we can learn about the interrelationships between emotion and cognition by taking up some of the roots of interaction ritual theory in Emile Durkheim’s social epistemology of knowledge. From this foundation, I propose in the third part of the chapter a microsociology of learning as a fruitful direction for research on learning experiences.

This internationally edited collection on emotions, aesthetics, and wellbeing emerged following an exploratory research workshop held in Luxembourg associated with the journal Cultural Studies of Science Education (CSSE). The workshop was entitled ‘Innovation and collaboration in cultural studies of science education: Towards an international research agenda.’ Authors were invited to articulate the theoretical and philosophical underpinnings of their research, offering empirical elaborations to illustrate applications of these conceptual and methodological foundations. An outcome of this international collaboration is the rich and diverse range of perspectives represented in this collection. This book will serve as a useful reference for those seeking to study emotions, aesthetics and wellbeing, and others who wish to develop deeper engagement with theoretical and philosophical traditions informing such research. Possibilities for future research are elaborated within the collection generating scope for further collaborative and international studies informed by perspectives represented in the collection. In the present chapter, we outline the origin of this edited collection against the background of existing research interest in the field of science education. We then provide an overview of each chapter in the collection.

Explanations of the role of analogies in learning science at a cognitive level are made in terms of creating bridges between new information and students’ prior knowledge. In this empirical study of learning with analogies in an 11th grade chemistry class, we explore an alternative explanation at the "social" level where analogy shapes classroom discourse. Students in the study developed analogies within small groups and with their teacher. These classroom interactions were monitored to identify changes in discourse that took place through these activities. Beginning from socio-cultural perspectives and hybridity, we investigated classroom discourse during analogical activities. From our analyses, we theorized a merged discourse that explains how the analog discourse becomes intertwined with the target discourse generating a transitional state where meanings, signs, symbols, and practices are in flux. Three categories were developed that capture how students intertwined the analog and target discourses—merged words, merged utterances/sentences, and merged practices.

The enactment of learning to become a science teacher in online mode is an emotionally charged experience. We attend to the formation, maintenance and disruption of social bonds experienced by online preservice science teachers as they shared their emotional online learning experiences through blogs, or e-motion diaries, in reaction to videos of face-to-face lessons. A multi-theoretic framework drawing on microsociological perspectives of emotion informed our hermeneutic interpretations of students’ first-person accounts reported through an e-motion diary. These accounts were analyzed through our own database of emotion labels constructed from the synthesis of existing literature on emotion across a range of fields of inquiry. Preservice science teachers felt included in the face-to-face group as they watched videos of classroom transactions. The strength of these feelings of social solidarity were dependent on the quality of the video recording. E-motion diaries provided a resource for interactions focused on shared emotional experiences leading to formation of social bonds and the alleviation of feelings of fear, trepidation and anxiety about becoming science teachers. We offer implications to inform practitioners who wish to improve feelings of inclusion amongst their online learners in science education.

We investigated the expression of emotions while teaching in relation to a teacher’s physiological changes. We used polyvagal theory (PVT) to frame the study of teaching in a teacher education program. Donna, a teacher-researcher, experienced high levels of stress and anxiety prior to beginning to teach and throughout the lesson we used her expressed emotions as a focus for this research. We adopted event-oriented inquiry in a study of heart rate, oxygenation of the blood, and expressed emotions. Five events were identified for multilevel analysis in which we used narrative, prosodic analysis, and hermeneutic-phenomenological methods to learn more about the expression of emotions when Donna had: high heart rate (before and while teaching); low blood oxygenation (before and while teaching); and high blood oxygenation (while teaching). What we learned was consistent with the body’s monitoring system recognizing social harm and switching to the control of the unmyelinated vagus nerve, thereby shutting down organs and muscles associated with social communication – leading to irregularities in prosody and expression of emotion. In events involving high heart rate and low blood oxygenation the physiological environment was associated with less effective and sometimes confusing patterns in prosody, including intonation, pace of speaking, and pausing. In a low blood oxygenation environment there was evidence of rapid speech and shallow, irregular breathing. In contrast, during an event in which 100% blood oxygenation occurred, prosody was perceived to be conducive to engagement and the teacher expressed positive emotions, such as satisfaction, while teaching. Becoming aware of the purposes of the research and the results we obtained provided the teacher with tools to enact changes to her teaching practice, especially prosody of the voice. We regard it as a high priority to create tools to allow teachers and students, if and as necessary, to ameliorate excess emotions, and change heart rate, oxygenation levels, and breathing patterns.

Emotion researchers have grappled with challenging methodological issues in capturing emotions of participants in naturalistic settings such as school or university classrooms. Self-reporting methods have been used frequently, yet these methods are inadequate when used alone. We argue that the self-reporting methods of emotion diaries and cogenerative dialogues can be helpful in identifying in-the-moment emotions when used in conjunction with the microanalysis of video recordings of classroom events. We trace the evolution of our use of innovative self-reporting methods through three cases from our research projects, and propose new directions for our ongoing development and application of these methods in both school and university classrooms.

Even though several studies have reported positive attitudinal outcomes from context-based chemistry programs, methodological obstacles have prevented researchers from comparing satisfactorily the chemistry-learning outcomes between students who experience a context-based program with those who experience a content-driven program. In this narrative inquiry we are able to address the question: how do the recalled experiences of a student and her teacher in context-based and concept-based chemistry programs compare? From the student’s unique perspective of experiencing both programs with the same teacher, we have constructed our collective account around four themes; namely, the extent to which the student makes connections between chemistry concepts and real-world contexts, developing research independence through engaging in extended experimental investigations related to contexts, learning chemistry concepts through contexts, and conceptual sequencing in a context-based program. The student reported real-world connections between chemistry concepts and contexts, found her engagement in the context-driven tasks interesting and productive, and identified connected sequences of concepts across the contexts studied. Despite difficulties for teachers who are required to shift pedagogies, the student’s lived experiences and outcomes from a context-based program provide some encouragement in working through these issues.

Billions of images are shared worldwide on the internet via social platforms like Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat and Twitter every few days. The social web and mobile devices make it quicker and easier than ever before for young people to communicate emotions through digital images. There is a need for greater knowledge of how to educate children and young people formally in the sophisticated, multimodal language of emotions. This includes semiotic choices in visual composition, such as gaze, facial expression, posture, framing, actor-goal relations, camera angles, backgrounds, props, lighting, shadows and colour. In particular, enabling Indigenous students to interpret and communicate emotions in contemporary ways is vital because multimodal language skills are central to academic, behavioural and social outcomes. This paper reports original research of urban, Indigenous, upper primary students' visual imagery at school. A series of full-day, digital imagery workshops were conducted over several weeks with 56 students. The photography workshops formed part of a three-year participatory community research project with an Indigenous school in Southeast Queensland, Australia. The archived student images were organised and analysed to identify attitudinal meanings from the appraisal framework, tracing types and subtypes of affect, and their positive and negative forms. The research has significant implications for teaching students how to design high-quality, visual and digital images to evoke a wide range of positive and negative emotions, with particular considerations for Australian Indigenous students.