This study reports findings from an interview study with eleven teacher educators from a physics teacher training program in Finland. They represented the four training environments that students encounter during their education, i.e. the Department of Physics, the Department of Mathematics and Science Education, the Department of General Pedagogy, and the Training School. Drawing on Gee’s theory of figured worlds, our analysis shows that the educators across the four training environments largely maintain the same vision of what the attributes of a “good” physics teacher are. Although working in different settings, the eleven educators appear to be working in concert, each contributing to the development of an agreed professional physics teacher identity for their trainees. The ideal physics teacher was found to be envisioned in terms of a subject expert and a research-based educationalist, whilst at the same time being psychologically fully matured and willing to develop as both a person and a teacher. We identify a number of factors in the Finnish teacher training program that are suggested to contribute to the coherence found. Some of the factors we identify are specific to the Finnish situation, such as teacher status in society, whilst others could potentially be implemented elsewhere, such as dedicated training schools and direct teacher influence in the design of the curriculum.

In this chapter, I suggest three distinct aspects of disciplinary literacy that require consideration when embarking on EMI. The first of these aspects is the type of discipline at hand. Here, I explain how a discipline’s knowledge structure affects disciplinary attitudes to language use. The sciences generally have the least objection to EMI, whilst humanities often have much stronger preferences for local languages. The second aspect of disciplinary literacy for consideration is the importance of semiotic resource systems other than language (such as mathematics, diagrams, graphs, hands-on work with physical tools, etc.) in the creation of disciplinary knowledge. The degree of reliance on these other semiotic systems necessarily affects the role played by language in the discipline. Finally, I suggest that disciplinary literacy is developed to function within three specific sites: the academy, society and the workplace. Different disciplines place different emphasis on these three sites, and I demonstrate how this can be problematized using a disciplinary literacy triangle. I finish the chapter by proposing a disciplinary literacy discussion matrix as a heuristic tool for disciplinary needs analysis in EMI.

Researchers generally agree that physics experts use mathematics in a way that blends mathematical knowledge with physics intuition. However, the use of mathematics in physics education has traditionally tended to focus more on the computational aspect (manipulating mathematical operations to get numerical solutions) to the detriment of building conceptual understanding and physics intuition. Several solutions to this problem have been suggested; some authors have suggested building conceptual understanding before mathematics is introduced, while others have argued for the inseparability of the two, claiming instead that mathematics and conceptual physics need to be taught simultaneously. Although there is a body of work looking into how students employ mathematical reasoning when working with equations, the specifics of how physics experts use mathematics blended with physics intuition remain relatively underexplored. In this presentation, we describe some components of this blending, by analyzing how physicists perform the rearrangement of a specific equation in cosmology. Our data consist of five consecutive forms of rearrangement of the equation, as observed in three separate higher education cosmology courses. This rearrangement was analyzed from a conceptual reasoning perspective using Sherin’s framework of symbolic forms. Our analysis demonstrates how the number of potential symbolic forms associated with each subsequent rearrangement of the equation decreases as we move from line to line. Drawing on this result, we suggest an underlying mechanism for how physicists reason with equations. This mechanism seems to consist of three components: narrowing down meaning potential, moving aspects between the background and the foreground and purposefully transforming the equation according to the discipline’s questions of interest. Finally, we discuss how being aware of the components of this underlying mechanism can potentially affect physics teachers’ practice when using mathematics in the physics classroom and demonstrate a proposed teaching sequence, based on our findings.

Researchers generally agree that physics experts use mathematics in a way that blends mathematical knowledge with physics intuition. However, the use of mathematics in physics education has traditionally tended to focus more on the computational aspect (manipulating mathematical operations to get numerical solutions) to the detriment of building conceptual understanding and physics intuition. Several solutions to this problem have been suggested; some authors have suggested building conceptual understanding before mathematics is introduced, while others have argued for the inseparability of the two, claiming instead that mathematics and conceptual physics need to be taught simultaneously. Although there is a body of work looking into how students employ mathematical reasoning when working with equations, the specifics of how physics experts use mathematics blended with physics intuition remain relatively underexplored. In this paper, we describe some components of this blending, by analyzing how physicists perform the rearrangement of a specific equation in cosmology. Our data consist of five consecutive forms of rearrangement of the equation, as observed in three separate higher education cosmology courses. This rearrangement was analyzed from a conceptual reasoning perspective using Sherin's framework of symbolic forms. Our analysis clearly demonstrates how the number of potential symbolic forms associated with each subsequent rearrangement of the equation decreases as we move from line to line. Drawing on this result, we suggest an underlying mechanism for how physicists reason with equations. This mechanism seems to consist of three components: narrowing down meaning potential, moving aspects between the background and the foreground and purposefully transforming the equation according to the discipline's questions of interest. In the discussion section we highlight the potential that our work has for generalizability and how being aware of the components of this underlying mechanism can potentially affect physics teachers' practice when using mathematics in the physics classroom.

Astronomy utilizes a wide range of semiotic resources (graphs, language, images, mathematics, etc.) in its processes of creating and communicating disciplinary knowledge (Kress et al., 2001). These semiotic resources usually work together to give holistic access to disciplinary meanings, in a multifaceted way. Building on this idea, Airey & Linder (2009) have proposed the concept of a critical constellation of semiotic resources or modes (figure 1). The concept of critical constellations describes the idea that semiotic resources that represent knowledge in various ways, give access to different aspects of disciplinary knowledge. Consequently, this means that it is impossible to experience disciplinary knowledge holistically by becoming fluent in one semiotic system alone (Airey & Linder, 2009). Therefore, for someone to become an expert astronomer, it is necessary to become fluent across different semiotic systems: from handling mathematical expressions to writing and understanding code and visually inspecting and interpreting complex astronomical images (figure 2). In this paper, we aim to analyze how different semiotic resources in astronomy can be used in orchestration (Kress & Van Leeuwen, 2001), so that their individual affordances complement each other to create a collective affordance (Linder, 2013) that makes disciplinary meaning accessible – what Lemke (2005) has described as multiplying meaning. We will do so by presenting examples of critical constellations of different resources (galaxy images, galaxy rotation curves and the Cosmic Microwave Background map) that occurred in our data collection for our project regarding knowledge creation and mediation with different representations in higher education astronomy. 

I sessionen presenteras en studie där elva lärarutbildare vid en finsk fysiklärarutbildning intervjuats. Lärarutbildarna representerar de fyra kontexter som fysiklärarstudenten möter under sin utbildning: Fysikinstitutionen, Institutionen för naturvetenskapernas och matematikämnets didaktik, Pedagogiska institutionen och Övningsskolan. Studien är en del av ett VR-projekt där de olika föreställningar av “den gode fysikläraren” som kommuniceras till fysiklärarstudenter i fyra olika länder - Sverige, England, Singapore och Finland - kommer att jämföras.

Resultaten visar att de fyra utbildningskontexterna i stort sett förmedlar samma idealbild av ”en god fysiklärare” till sina lärarstudenter. Inom ramen för Furuhagen, Holmén & Sänttis (2019) konceptualisering ”Visions of the ideal teacher” visar studien att lärarutbildarna leds av företällningen om “den goda fysikläraren" som “a research-based educationalist” men också som “a psychologically fully matured professional" och “a subject expert.Resultaten visar att lärarutbildarna vid de fyra olika utbildningskontexterna i samstämmighet strävar mot samma idealbild av den goda fysikläraren där var och en bidrar med sin specifika del av studentens kompetens, och med ömsesidig tillit till att de andra utbildningskontexterna bidrar med sin specifika del.

Resultatet står i motsättning till fynden i projektets studie av en svensk fysiklärarutbildning, där man istället fann fyra konkurrerande idealbilder av den gode fysikläraren (Larsson, Airey, Danielsson & Lundqvist, 2018).

The field of astronomy is in many ways unique. In most other sciences, experimental investigation has been a major source of knowledge. Astronomy, however, is observational rather than experimental. Astronomers cannot carry out controlled experiments with their objects of interest—they are too big and too far away. We are stuck here on our small, insignificant planet and forced to simply observe. This observational nature of the discipline affects the ways in which astronomical knowledge is created, and this, in turn, affects the ways in which astronomy is taught and learned. 

This project aims to examine how astronomy knowledge is created and mediated through the use of representations (semiotic resources) and the role these representations then play in student learning. Following a social semiotic approach (Airey & Linder, 2017), we carry out a semiotic audit (Airey & Erikson, 2019) in order to determine the disciplinary and pedagogical affordances (Airey, 2015) of the representations used in the observation and visualization of large-scale structures in the Universe The ultimate goal is a better understanding of how these representations can be used and potentially adapted for educational purposes.  Our research questions are as follows:

RQ1       What is the ecosystem of representations presented to students of astronomy?

RQ2       What are the disciplinary and pedagogical affordances of these representations?

RQ3       In what ways do the individual representations work together to mediate astronomy knowledge?

In order to answer RQ1, we carried out an audit of the range of representations in three courses at Stockholm University (Cosmology, Introduction to Astrophysics and Observational Astronomy). We observed lectures, analysed lecture notes and textbooks and interviewed university lecturers. From the data collected, our analysis followed two steps: first, we categorised the representations we found using the framework developed by Salimpour et al. (2021) for the topic of cosmology. Thereafter, for RQ 2 we chose to focus our analysis on three specific representations that are highly relevant for the discipline and therefore have high disciplinary affordance—namely the Cosmic Microwave Background Temperature Fluctuations Map, the Galaxy Density & Redshift Distribution and the Properties of the Universe Graph. We analysed these three central representations with a focus on identifying their disciplinary affordance, comparing this with those aspects of disciplinary knowledge that are present (noticeable) in each representation and those that are appresent: i.e., aspects that are obvious to disciplinary experts, but strictly speaking not directly observable for a novice (Marton & Booth, 2013).

Our audit shows a wide variety of different representational forms are presented to students, from graphs and mathematics to computer coding and 3D animations. However, despite this range, there is no indication that the coordination of these representations in the educational setting is performed in such a way that focuses on making the appresent aspects of disciplinary knowledge more accessible for students. The pedagogical affordance of the individual representations used was generally low and it was usual for the representational products of observations to be used in an unmodified form. The results point out to further conclusions regarding the underdevelopment of teaching methods and explanatory mechanisms when it comes to teaching subjects of modern science using the latest research findings.

Science disciplines utilize a wide range of semiotic resources such as graphs, diagrams, language, mathematics, hands-on work with laboratory equipment, gesture, etc. (Kress et al. 2001). Here, transduction (that is movement between semiotic systems) has been put forward as a powerful teaching and learning tool because this movement between representational systems brings different aspects of a disciplinary concept into focus (Volkwyn et al., 2019). By the same token, transformation (that is making changes within the same semiotic system) has been viewed as less important educationally. In this presentation, we discuss what we call purposeful transformation, where rearrangement of an equation fills an important function. One interesting aspect of purposeful transformation is that it simultaneously raises both the disciplinary and pedagogical affordance of the equation (Airey, 2015; Airey & Linder, 2017). Similar transformations have been documented in other semiotic systems such as graphs (Rodriguez et al., 2020).

This qualitative, questionnaire and interview-based study explores how pre-service physics teachers think about the role that mathematics plays in the teaching and learning of physics at university and school level and whether these views change during their pre-service teacher education. Many of the pre-service teachers were aware of the complex relationship between these two subjects at university level, noting that success in mathematics can often mask a lack of conceptual understanding in physics and that there can be a disconnect between the physics and mathematical aspects of undergraduate courses. At school level, many stressed the importance of a focus on conceptual understanding and that technical competence in mathematics lessons does not always transfer to physics lessons. Almost all the pre-service physics teachers changed their views during the year, often in response to their classroom experiences. As they became more attuned to the difficulties students faced with respect to the mathematical challenges involved in learning physics, many took a more pragmatic position that balanced the role of mathematics in physics with acceptance that they must respond to student needs. We suggest that these changing views can be framed in terms of two re-orientations. A disciplinary re-orientation where the role that mathematics plays in order to be successful in physics is reassessed, and a pedagogical re-orientation that attends to pragmatic, teaching considerations. We recommend that direct attention to the role of mathematics in school physics should be an integral part of pre-service physics teacher education in order to encourage these re-orientations.

In order to make disciplinary meanings, science students need to coordinate a large number of semiotic systems such as graphs, diagrams, spoken and written language, gesture, mathematics, etc. In this respect, it has been suggested that there is a critical constellation of semiotic resources that is necessary for holistic construction of each scientific concept (Airey, 2009). Other actors have discussed this problem in terms of building students' representational competence (Kozma & Russell 2005; Kohl & Finkelstein 2005; De Cock 2012; Linder et al. 2014). Combining this work, Volkwyn et al (2020:91) define representational competence as: “The ability to appropriately interpret and produce a set of disciplinary-accepted representations of real-world phenomena and link these to formalized scientific concepts”. In this paper we first put forward a theoretical proposal for how such student representational competence may be developed, before empirically demonstrating the usefulness of this proposal for a particular representational system (graphs) in a particular area of physics (1-D kinematics). By coordinating kinematics concepts, the three graphs, and real-world movement we show how the students begin to practice their representational competence. We also show the complexity of this apparently simple system in representational terms.