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There is a long tradition of teaching science through inquiry, with broad agreement about the form it should take. Students should investigate researchable questions; gather and analyse data; and develop and represent evidence-based claims. Authoritative teacher or textbook representations are generally used to guide this learning (Buckley & Boulter, 2000; Bybee, 1997; Furtak et al., 2012; Sell et al., 2006). Parallel to this approach, teachers have also guided students to construct, review and refine their own representations, leading to learning gains. However, this student representation construction approach poses new challenges for teachers. The teacher is expected to elicit and guide students' reasoning about their own represented claims as an orientation to understanding and learning scientific forms of reasoning and their representation. In this paper, drawing on our initial account of this pedagogy, we aim to clarify further this approach's rationale and teacher strategies and underlying purposes in key early stages of exploration in the topics of chemistry and mathematics with a Grade 5 class. An interdisciplinary focus was used to guide students' learning about the science concepts of states of matter, evaporation and the mathematical concepts of formal and informal measurement and data representation. Analysed data included video capture of the teacher's guidance of tasks and classroom discussion, student artefacts and teacher and student interviews. We identify how the teacher framed the task, oriented student inquiry and guided evaluation of students' representations through implicit and explicit instruction.

Growing research evidence indicates student learning gains from guided representation construction/invention in school science and mathematics. In this inquiry approach, students address challenges around what features of a phenomenon/problem to attend to, what data to collect, how and why, and make collective judgments about multimodal accounts of phenomena. However, researchers to date have tended to focus on student learning rather than on the teacher's role in guiding various phases of inquiry. In this paper we report on (a) analysis of Grade 1 students' engagement in interdisciplinary mathematics and science inquiry practices in a classroom sequence in ecology; (b) the teacher's role in guiding such inquiry; and (c) interpretation of these practices in terms of support of student transduction (connecting and remaking meanings across representations in different modes). Data from our study included video capture of two case study teachers' guidance of tasks and classroom discussion and student artefacts. We examine the classroom processes through which the teachers used students' invention and revision of data displays to teach the concepts of living things, diversity, distribution and adaptive features related to habitat in science. Mathematical processes included constructing and interpreting mapping, measurement and data modelling, sampling and using a scale. The analysis offers fresh insights into how teachers support student learning in these two subjects, through discrete stages of orienting, representation challenge, building consensus and applying and extending representational systems.

There is growing interest in the construct of "transduction", first introduced by (Kress, Cope and Kalantzis (eds), Multiliteracies: Literacy learning and the design of social futures pp.153-161, Routledge, 2000), p. 159) to name how meanings in one mode are remade in another. Science educators now broadly agree that students need to learn how to interpret, make, co-ordinate and integrate meanings in multimodal representations of scientific claims. The question of how exactly this transductive capability is enabled, constrained or theorised is receiving renewed attention. In this paper, following a pragmatist socio-cultural perspective, we propose that transduction in science entails creative reasoning enabled by both cognitive and semiotic resources. We claim that that this process entails students achieving both complementarity as well as coherence or consistency of meanings across modes, but is not reducible to mono-modal "translation" of a singular meaning. Because different modes do different work in meaning-making in science, we claim instead that transduction is the process of seeking and recognising both reiteration and complementarity of linguistic and non-linguistic meanings that constitute the nature of concepts and processes in science. While this "content" can be re-represented in verbal shorthand, science meaning-making and discourse are not reducible to this mode. We draw on relevant literature and two indicative examples of student representation construction to support our case. We focus on how students attend to correspondence and coherence requirements to transduce meanings across modes. In our micro-ethnographic analyses of students' collaborative reasoning on the topic of astronomy, we interpret data from multiple video and audio capture. Students use 3D models, 2D representations, gesture and talk as semiotic resources to reason about scientific concepts.

While the multimodal nature of the languages of science is now broadly recognised, the role of affect and aesthetics in these languages, and the potential for this aesthetic focus to add to these languages, has tended to be ignored. Research into these languages has mainly focused on a codification of their functions, an approach to which aesthetics study would seem not broadly suited because of its ephemeral, complex, relatively unpredictable and affective nature. However, there is a growing awareness of its importance in learning. In this paper, we analyse a case study of art-science integration on the topic of optics to (a) put a case for the value of an explicit focus on aesthetics in science learning and (b) to clarify how teachers might integrate conceptual learning and aesthetic experiences into a broadened account of the languages of science. We argue that this focus on aesthetic responses needs to be included in accounts of productive science classroom discourse because such responses (a) enhance student motivation to learn, (b) enact generative sign-making in this discourse, (c) enrich student habits of perception in inquiry-based-learning and (d) licence more creative learning processes and outcomes. These effects are consistent with widespread policy advocacy of the need for students to find learning in science more meaningful.

Despite many claimed benefits, teacher collaboration remains patchy, under-theorised, and resisted. At the same time, new large teaching spaces offer teachers opportunities to teach in teams within and across school subjects to enhance teacher and student learning. In this paper we aim to contribute to theorising the nature and means of this form of collaboration, drawing on both relevant literature and analyses of three case studies of team teaching. We found that team teaching (a) is enabled and constrained by multiple contextual factors, and (b) potentially changes and enhances the nature and scope of teacher professional learning.

There has been longstanding interest in students' aesthetic feelings in engaging with school science, but new multimodal accounts of meaning-making, and changing curricular goals where science is integrated with other subjects, pose new methodological challenges for researching these feelings. In this paper, we aim to synthesise relevant literature as the bases for proposing methodological practices to address these new research challenges. We draw on past and current pragmatist and semiotic perspectives to justify our methodological approach. We claim that research on aesthetic feelings needs to identify: (a) the complex nature of aesthetic meaning/feeling processes and multiple influences on these processes and (b) short-term and longer-term consequences on participants' taste for, and learning in, science. Building on a practical epistemology, we propose that these questions can be addressed through multimodal analyses of aesthetic intentions and responses when embedded in teacher and student inquiry purposes, discursive interactions, artefact-making, and evaluative feelings/judgements. To illustrate the scope and challenges of these methodological strategies, we draw on examples of analyses in companion papers in this special issue, both when science is taught alone and when integrated with other subjects.

In this paper, we analyse results from one classroom session within an 8-week program in which Year 10 students constructed 'trash' puppets of endangered Australian animals. In making the puppets and using them as part of a 'theatre in a suitcase' performance at Melbourne Zoo, students were expected to integrate both scientific and artistic goals to demonstrate knowledge of specific endangered species. In this process, students needed to learn how their more immediate, everyday positive and negative aesthetic responses could be made continuous with a scientific aesthetic to produce both a coherent puppet and an advocacy performance. Through micro-ethnographic practical epistemology analysis of video data of this session, we demonstrate how this mix of everyday and subject-specific aesthetic responses, judgements and intentions interacted to shape and promote students' learning in science. In addressing this multimodal and multi-purpose task, students learnt and applied science knowledge to a real-world issue of species endangerment.

Many factors are claimed to explain Australian students' declining participation rates in senior secondary science subjects. These include, for instance, the influences of SES, indigeneity, and gender. While acknowledging the compelling case for these factors affecting student pathways, in this study we explore associations between students' literacy achievement test scores in early secondary school and their senior secondary participation in science. Our analyses of Australian national literacy testing data indicated that students who subsequently studied physics, chemistry, and biology showed stronger foundational literacy competence than students not studying these subjects. Drawing on a Bourdieusian perspective, this research explores the conversion of cultural capital, in the form of language literacy achievement, into science capital. We consider that these findings (a) reconfirm the foundational role of literacy in all science learning, and (b) support a growing research agenda that focuses on how students can learn the particular literacies of science before senior secondary study. Our findings also have broader implications for policy and practices that support school student participation in science study.

While researchers broadly agree on what enables and constrains teacher professional learning, reconfigured large teaching spaces potentially create new processes and content for this learning. In this paper we draw on six years of study of teacher adaptation to these settings in 10 schools in regional Australia to identify the nature of, and key influences on, this learning. Our analyses are based on a theoretical framing of relational agency illustrated in two case studies of sustained teacher interventions. We found that teachers' professional learning (TPL) in these contexts entailed learning new roles, developing new practices, and understanding the warrants for these practices. TPL was enabled by (a) extensive improvisation and intensive collaboration; (b) opportunities for teachers to observe teacher practices in other schools, and customise them for their own schools; and (c) extended partnerships between teachers and researchers.

Despite growing advocacy of interdisciplinary approaches to science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), there are persistent concerns about the practical and principled epistemic bases on which this can be justified as a mainstream curricular practice. A major issue concerns the nature of interrelations between the STEM disciplines in interdisciplinary work. In the paper, we argue that the spatial metaphor prevalent in discussions of interdisciplinarity, and boundary crossing, while useful, has limitations in capturing the challenges and possibilities for interdisciplinary STEM in schools and in some respects misconstrues the cultural and historical nature of disciplinary epistemic practices. We argue, as a contribution to a theory of interdisciplinary curricular practice, that key issues for such practice can be productively seen through a temporal metaphor and that a temporal model can usefully inform schools and teachers in framing and supporting student learning in interdisciplinary settings. To illustrate this, we use indicative cases from two major Australian STEM initiatives to examine temporal relations between mathematics, science and technology, at the micro-, meso- and macro-levels, and the implications of this for disciplinary integrity. Finally, we argue that contemporary interdisciplinary advocacy amounts to a challenge to renew epistemic traditions in the STEM subjects.

There is a growing interest in the value of teachers guiding students to generate their own representations to support conceptual learning in science and across complementary subjects such as mathematics. However, this approach to an interdisciplinary focus poses challenges for programme design and learning assessment. In this paper, we report on a 10-week study with a class of Year 5 students designed to (a) facilitate learning of key concepts in the topic of optics (e.g. reflection), and (b) make meaningful links between these concepts and relevant mathematical ones (e.g. symmetry and angles). Students were expected to construct, evaluate and refine representations to explain various experienced phenomena. We report on an assessment framework developed and applied to student work. Our findings indicate (a) some subject and interdisciplinary learning gains, and (b) specific challenges around designing this kind of programme, student learning assessment and teacher understanding to support this learning.

Against a backdrop of advocacy for interdisciplinary STEM curricula, this paper explores the design principles underpinning a three-year longitudinal research project that develops and evaluates interdisciplinary mathematics and science learning sequences involving multiple teachers and student cohorts across the primary school years. The research uses design-based methodology and deploys a pedagogical cycle based on representation construction and model-based reasoning, reflecting core disciplinary processes, and aimed at foundational concepts. The interdisciplinary structure of sequences in different topics, teacher pedagogy, and student reasoning and learning are illustrated through analysis of three learning sequence vignettes. In these topics both mathematical learning (measure, data modelling and spatial reasoning) and science learning (concepts and practices), were reinforced and enriched through the interdisciplinary framing. Drawing on notes of teacher planning and review meetings, coupled with classroom data, we identify (a) the conceptual and curricular design features through which mathematics and science can synergistically interweave, (b) the epistemological design challenges involved in working with teachers to achieve this interdisciplinary alignment, and (c) the key pedagogical design features that emerged to support this integration. The research contributes to conceptualising how interdisciplinary processes that enable synergistic interweaving of mathematics and science content and processes can be effectively framed and enacted.

Teaching practices respond to the prompts, resources and inherent potential of a school's physical, social and cultural landscape. This study involved how teachers adapt their practice in response to contemporary flexible learning environments. An Australian case study focused on how teachers framed and enacted changes in practice by perceiving action possibilities of the flexible environment and (re)configuring the classroom environment over time through their professional agency. An enactment model of teacher adaptation is proposed, based on the case study and the relevant literature. The model suggests that the phases in the adaptation process are awareness, experimentation and coherence.

Despite mixed results in research on student learning from drawing in science, there is growing interest in the potential for this visual mode, in tandem with other modes, to enact and enable student reasoning in this subject. Building on current research in this field, and using a micro-ethnographic approach informed by socio-semiotic perspectives, we aimed to identify how and why student drawing can contribute to student reasoning and learning. In our study, secondary school students were challenged to explore and collaboratively create explanatory representations of phenomena including through drawing. Data were generated using multiple wall- and ceiling-mounted cameras capable of continuously tracking groups of students negotiating these representational challenges. Our analysis proceeded through active and iterative viewing of the extensive video record, and the identification of themes to establish possible relationships between drawing and reasoning. Through this process, we (a) identify multiple necessary conditions and varied opportunities for student drawing to enact and enable reasoning, and (b) extend current understandings of how the particular affordances of this mode interact with these conditions to contribute to student learning in science.

Peirce made repeated attempts to clarify what he understood as abduction or creative reasoning in scientific discoveries. In this article, we draw on past and recent scholarship on Peirce's later accounts of abduction to put a case for how teachers can apply his ideas productively to elicit and guide student creative reasoning in the science classroom. We focus on (a) his rationale for abduction, (b) conditions he recognised as necessary to support this speculative reasoning, (c) pragmatic strategies to guide inquiry and test conjectural hypotheses, and (d) his growing recognition of creative dimensions to reasoning beyond abductive inference-making. We illustrate this case through examples of a guided inquiry approach to student claim-making in the science classroom.

Despite an intense focus on improving Australian students' writing performance in recent years, and comprehensive instructional advice to English teachers, researchers have noted a lack of gains in standardised writing tests and negative effects on student engagement and learning. In this paper we claim that these outcomes are partly attributable to current orthodoxies around how writing is conceptualised, taught and tested. In reviewing relevant literature and drawing on a case study with low SES students, we propose the need for more diversity in the 'what', 'how' and 'why' of students' writing experiences. In putting this case, we are not arguing that the current intense focus on technical and rhetorical competence (the 'how' of writing) should be abandoned, but rather that students can benefit from more focus on and say in the 'what' and 'why' of this activity.

Australian students' performance on national and international literacy assessments has declined since 2000, while teachers in contemporary classrooms contend with conditions of increased complexity and uncertainty. In July 2017, the Australian Government commissioned a panel of experts to provide advice on how to improve Australian students' achievement and school performance. The panel concluded that Australian schools must support every student to realise their full learning potential through an increased emphasis on personalised student learning and collaborative teacher practices. This paper outlines a case study of complexities and influences in enabling and constraining a local curriculum innovation in literacy that sought to personalise learning and promote teacher collaboration in conditions of constant change and disruption. Named "Literacy Toolbox," this initiative was developed by Year 7 and 8 literacy leaders at a Tasmanian secondary school to increase student agency and enhance teaching around a model of deprivatised or shared practice. The findings provide insight for education researchers and schools regarding the challenges and opportunities of attempts to enact personalised learning and co-teaching in the current context.

Creative reasoning and problem-solving are crucial to how scientists work and how students learn in school science. However, developing guided inquiry that develops these capabilities within a prescriptive curriculum has proven difficult. In this paper, we report on a study of a teaching sequence that aimed to develop these capabilities through structured inquiry where students responded to representational challenges on the topic of respiration in senior secondary biology. We found that this activity engaged students and improved conceptual understanding. Students had many opportunities to practise reasoning skills in negotiating, integrating, refining, defending and translating their ideas across representations. Key conditions supporting this learning included (a) students having some prior relevant understandings that enabled them to engage with the demands of the challenge, and (b) effective teacher guidance of student sign-making.

There is a recent advocacy for students to experience their learning as personalised, but this expectation poses challenges for teachers tasked with addressing prescribed curricula. In this article, we draw on relevant literature and our analyses of three case studies to propose a framework within which teachers can achieve both goals. We first clarify what we mean by personalising learning, noting problems in how it is currently conceptualised and enacted. We suggest that any attempt to support students to personalise their learning needs to be contextualised within broader curricular goals, and that its developmental nature entails progressions in specific learner capabilities, and therefore the need for students to be supported in this process. In proposing a framework for this support, we focus on general principles around the what and how of this process rather than on particular discipline areas.

Given current extensive expectations of how teachers should excel, any attempt to summarize teacher expertise in action in the second decade of this century may seem at best misguided. However, this has not stopped teacher educators offering diverse metaphoric encapsulations that aim both to distil and prescribe quality teacher practice. In this paper, we attempt to make sense of this diversity, and contribute to a richer dialog about this expertise. We draw on Anna Sfard's influential metaphoric map of competing views of learning as a starting point. We claim that this metaphoric divide is evident in current divergent theories of desirable teaching practices and their metaphoric badging, although there is evidence in current curricular documents of attempts to acknowledge and engage with these accounts. In analyzing these metaphors and their warrants, in a context of intensified accountability, rapid changes to technological affordances, and divided views about how student agency should serve learning processes, we aim to tease out core issues. We draw on recent curricular and policy prescriptions about teacher expertise in the Australian context to illustrate our case. On the basis of our analysis, we propose a bridging metaphor to encapsulate the richness of applied teacher expertise.

In this paper, we report on a case study of how three teachers personalised learning in science through supporting a group of Year 8 students to engage in individual inquiry projects. The case study demonstrated how heavily transmissive teaching can be avoided by restructuring classes to optimise student group and individual work and timely teacher coaching opportunities as required. This approach can act as a catalyst to enable/prompt teachers to devise a rich developmental science curriculum that (a) enables tasks to be differentiated so as to address diverse student capabilities and interests, (b) can be team-taught drawing on the particular expertise/iRenterest of teachers in the team, and (c) enables students to connect science learning with their everyday worlds. Reasoning in science can be made personally meaningful to learners when they experience how and why it enables knowledge to be produced, both for themselves and for the wider community.

Student engagement in learning science is both a desirable goal and a long-standing teacher challenge. Moving beyond engagement understood as transient topic interest, we argue that cognitive engagement entails sustained interaction in the processes of how knowledge claims are generated, judged, and shared in this subject. In this paper, we particularly focus on the initial claim-building aspect of this reasoning as a crucial phase in student engagement. In reviewing the literature on student reasoning and argumentation, we note that the well-established frameworks for claim-judging are not matched by accounts of creative reasoning in claim-building. We develop an exploratory framework to characterise and enact this reasoning to enhance engagement. We then apply this framework to interpret two lessons by two science teachers where they aimed to develop students' reasoning capabilities to support learning.