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…

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…

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…

The focus of this study is to examine to what extent and in what ways science teachers practice assessment during classroom interactions in everyday activities in an upper-secondary school in Sweden. We are science teachers working now with a larger research project on assessment in science education that seeks to examine teachers' assessment…

Cultural Historical Activity Theory served as the analytical framework for the study of a professional development event for a zoo's education department, specifically designed to build understandings of "Affective Transformation," an element pertinent to the organization's strategic plan. Three key products--an Affective…

In this forum we discuss three aspects designed to clarify and extend Kelly and Kassing's paper. These are the roles of improvable objects, contradiction and object/tool reciprocity. In each case we cite relevant literature and pose questions to the field. Our goal is to seed ideas for future discussions concerning the role of activity theory…

Reform in science education is a slow process. Current professional development experiences may slow the process even more if modeled after traditional top down approaches. The common practice of inviting "experts" to deal with specific local issues supports a covert message that classroom teachers are not capable of meeting the…

This paper presents a new approach to science education that takes a path through sociocultural theory and into the ideas of Gloria Anzaldúa. We apply Anzaldúan theory to science education by illustrating it in action through various examples which explore the multidimensionality of teaching science with Latin@ students in various contexts…

Teacher-researcher narrative accounts are essential and insightful for the science education field, yet they are few and far-between. In this forum, I engage in dialogue with Nicole Grimes's auto-ethnographic narrative on the affordances her femme-Caribbean identity allowed for some students to engage more deeply in science. While I agree with and…

A growing body of teacher identity-based research has begun to embrace that the development of self-understanding about being a teacher is critical to learning how to teach. Construction of a professional teacher identity requires much more beyond mere content, skills and a foundational pedagogy. It also includes an intersection of the personal…

In this three-part article we seek to establish connections between the emerging framework of "sustainability science" and the methodological basis of research and practice in science education in order to bring forth knowledge and competences for sustainability. The first and second parts deal with the implications of taking a sustainability view…

Culturally responsive science teaching is using knowledge about the culture and life experiences of students to structure learning that is conducive to their needs. Understanding what teachers need to prepare them to be culturally responsive is a matter of continuous debate. As the focus of multicultural education ventures farther away from its…

Through the examination of the experiences of a pre-service teacher participating in a field-based science methods course, we make evident the ways in which a combination of collaborative teaching experiences and reflexive dialogues allowed for the evolution and transformation of her identity. This teacher is Johaira Lara, the second author of…

An urgent goal for science teacher educators is to prepare teachers to teach science in meaningful ways to youth from nondominant backgrounds. This preparation is challenging, for it asks teachers to critically examine how their pedagogical practices might adaptively respond to students and to science. It asks, essentially, for new teachers to…

Teacher education programs have adopted preparing science teachers that teach science through inquiry as an important pedagogic agenda. However, their efforts have not met with much success. While traditional explanations for this failure focus largely on preservice science teachers' knowledge, beliefs and conceptions regarding science and science…