In this paper, I explore the need for particular types of interdisciplinarity, which I refer to as technical heteroglossia, in the face of neoliberal political and economic disenfranchisement. I examine the case of a group of medics (EMTs, nurses, and lay medical practitioners) known as street medics and their efforts to provide a working set of…

This paper approaches mindfulness, an awareness of internal and external realities, as a culturally-shaped habit of mind. Findings of a cross-cultural study and popular sayings that reflect America's cultural orientation to consumption and competition are contrasted with findings from Hawaiian language newspapers, traditional cultural…

This study draws from cultural historical activity theory (CHAT) to analyze preservice teachers' reflections on a microteaching activity. Microteaching activities involved preservice educators teaching middle school students from local schools. The study was conducted with 23 preservice teachers enrolled in a large university's teacher…

With environmental awareness in the societies of today, political steering documents emphasize that all education should include sustainable development. But it seems to be others competing ideals for teaching physics, or why do the physics teachers teach as they do? Physics teachers in secondary school in Sweden have generally, been focused on…

Learning science interpreted in existing theoretical frameworks often means that students are assimilated, accommodated or enculturated from the entity of the vernacular world to the entity of the scientific world. However, there are some unsolved questions as to how students can best learn purely a new language or new knowledge of science. The…

The paper presents results from a longitudinal study of students' decisions to enrol on a higher education science programme and their experiences of it. The aim is to give insights into students' transition process and negotiation of identity. This is done by following a cohort of 38 students in a series of qualitative interviews during…

This article describes a study which explored the social interaction and the reproduction and challenge of gendered discourses in small group discussions in physics. Data for the study consisted of video recordings of eight upper secondary school groups solving physics problems and 15 audiotaped individual interviews with participating students.…

This article explores how the doing of social class and gender can intersect with the learning of science, through case studies of two male, working-class university students' constitutions of identities as physics students. In doing so, I challenge the taken-for-granted notion that male physics students have an unproblematic relation to…

In this text we compare children's expressions in drawings to their statements during interviews, for the purpose of understanding how different situations afford children to make meaning. In specific we study how two different activities interact and afford children to make meaning differently about the human body. The analytic attention is…

In the literature on the situated and distributed nature of cognition, the coordination of spatial organization and the structure of human practices and relations is accepted as a fact. To date, science educators have yet to build on such research. Drawing on an ethnographic study of high school students during an internship in a scientific…

In the public discussion of genetically modified (GM) food the representations of science as a social good, conducted in the public interest to solve major problems are being subjected to intense scrutiny and questioning. Scientists working in these areas have been seen to struggle for the position of science in society. However few in situ…

Classrooms across the United States increasingly find immigrant science teachers paired with urban minority students, but few of these teachers are prepared for the challenges such cultural assimilation presents. This is particularly true in secondary science education. Identifying potential prospects for culturally adaptive pedagogy in science…

Science education has been pointed out as fact-based and built on reliable knowledge. Nevertheless, there are areas that include other aspects. Sexual education is, according to the Swedish syllabus, such an example and it involves aspects as love, sexuality and relations. These aspects suggest a possible tension between the biological and…

This paper explores what happens in the encounters between presentations of "basic facts" about the human genitals and 15-year-old students during a biology lesson in a Swedish secondary school. In this paper, meaning making was approached as relational, context-dependent and continually transacted. For this reason the analysis was…

In this article we problematize the purpose of teaching science in preschool and the competences preschool teachers need in order to conduct science activities in the classroom. The empirical data were collected through an action research project with five preschool and primary school teachers (K-6). In the first section of this paper we use one…