Science has never been more important, yet science education faces
serious challenges. At present, science education research only sees
half the picture, focusing on how students learn and their changing
conceptions. Both teaching practice and what is taught, science
knowledge itself, are missing. This book offers new, interdisciplinary
ways of thinking about science teaching that foreground the forms taken
by science knowledge and the language, imagery and gesture through which
they are expressed.
This book brings together leading international scholars from Systemic
Functional Linguistics, a long-established approach to language, and
Legitimation Code Theory, a rapidly growing sociological approach to
knowledge practices. It explores how to bring knowledge, language and
pedagogy back into the picture of science education but also offers
radical innovations that will shape future research.
Part I sets out new ways of understanding the role of knowledge in
integrating mathematics into science, teaching scientific explanations
and using multimedia resources such as animations. Part II provides new
concepts for showing the role of language in complex scientific
explanations, in how scientific taxonomies are built, and in combining
with mathematics and images to create science knowledge. Part III draws
on the approaches to explore how more students can access scientific
knowledge, how to teach professional reasoning, the role of body
language in science teaching, and making mathematics understandable to
all learners.
Teaching Science offers major leaps forward in understanding
knowledge, language and pedagogy that will shape the research agenda far
beyond science education.
