It has been argued that for any given physics task there is a critical constellation of resources that students need to become proficient in handling in order for physics learning to take place. This is because different resources offer access to different information i.e. they have different pedagogical and disciplinary affordances. A laboratory exercise requiring coordination of multiple resources was designed to help students appreciate the movability of coordinate systems. Initially students were unable to coordinate the manipulation of a hand-held measuring device (IOLab) and observe changes in three readouts on a computer screen, whilst simultaneously drawing conclusions in their discussions with each other and the facilitator. However, the introduction of a paper arrow allowed students to quickly coordinate the resources and begin to experience the movability of coordinate systems. The study confirms earlier work on critical constellations of resources and the functioning of persistent resources as coordinating hubs.

The construction of physics knowledge of necessity entails a range of semiotic resources, (e.g. specialized language, graphs, algebra, diagrams, equipment, gesture, etc.). In this study we documented physics students' use of different resources when working with an "invisible" phenomenon--magnetic field. Using a social semiotic framework, we show how appropriate coordination of resources not only enabled students to learn something about the Earth's magnetic field, but also about the use of an abstract mathematical tool--coordinate systems. Our work leads us to make three suggestions: 1. The potential for learning physics can be maximized by designing tasks that encourage students to use a specific set of resources.  2. Thought should be put into what this particular set of resources should be and how they may be coordinated. 3. Close attention to the different resources that students use can allow physics teachers to gauge the learning occurring in their classrooms.

The construction of physics knowledge of necessity entails a range of semiotic resources, (e.g. specialized language, graphs, algebra, diagrams, equipment, gesture, etc.). In this study we documented physics students' use of different resources when working with an "invisible" phenomenon--magnetic field. Using a social semiotic framework, we show how appropriate coordination of resources not only enabled students to learn something about the Earth's magnetic field, but also about the use of an abstract mathematical tool--coordinate systems. Our work leads us to make three suggestions: 

1. The potential for learning physics can be maximized by designing tasks that encourage students to use a specific set of resources. 

2. Thought should be put into what this particular set of resources should be and how they may be coordinated.

3. Close attention to the different resources that students use can allow physics teachers to gauge the learning occurring in their classrooms.

In this chapter we discuss the application of social semiotics to the teaching and learning of university physics. Social semiotics is a broad construct where all communication in a particular social group is realized through the use of semiotic resources. In the discipline of physics, examples of such semiotic resources are graphs, diagrams, mathematics, spoken and written language, and laboratory apparatus. In physics education research it is usual to refer to most of these semiotic resources as representations. In social semiotics, then, disciplinary learning can be viewed as coming to interpret and use the meaning potential of disciplinary-specific semiotic resources (representations) that has been assigned by the discipline. We use this complementary depiction of representations to build theory with respect to the construction and sharing of disciplinary knowledge in the teaching and learning of university physics. To facilitate both scholarly discussion and future research in the area, a number of theoretical constructs have been developed. These constructs take their point of departure in empirical studies of teaching and learning in undergraduate physics. In the chapter we present each of these constructs in turn and examine their usefulness for problematizing teaching and learning with multiple representations in university physics.

When students are introduced to coordinate systems in their physics textbooks these are usually oriented in the same manner (x increases to the right). There is a real danger then, that students see coordinate systems as fixed. However, as we know, movability is one of the main disciplinary affordances of coordinate systems. Students worked with an open-ended task to find the direction of Earth’s magnetic field. This was achieved by manipulating a measurement device (IOLab) so as to maximize the signal for one component of the field, whilst at the same time keeping the other two components at zero. In the process of completing this task, students came to experience themselves as holding a movable coordinate system. From this point they spontaneously offer elaborations about the usefulness of purposefully setting up coordinate systems for problem solving. In our terms, they have discovered one of the disciplinary affordances of coordinate systems.

Most students will be familiar with the compass as a tool that points north. However, the compass only shows us one component—the terrestrial projection—of the Earth’s magnetic field. In contrast, the IOLab potentially gives students access to the actual direction of the field. We have designed an open-ended task in which pairs of students use the IOLab to determine the actual direction of the Earth’s magnetic field in a laboratory classroom. Without any prior instruction or step-by-step procedure to follow, students simultaneously coordinate a set of resources: speech (in groups; and with facilitator), interpretation of graphical readouts, physical manipulation of the IOLab and proprioception. By coordinating the resources available, the students in our study can be seen to quickly come to a moment of disciplinary insight, where they realize the true direction of the magnetic field.

Disciplinary learning is a multimodal endeavour that calls for achieving representational competency (Linder et al 2014), which is constituted from the coordination of disciplinary semiotic resources (Airey & Linder, in press). Examples of these semiotic resources for disciplines such as physics and chemistry are mathematics, graphs, gestures, diagrams and language. The effective learning of complex subjects such as these presents many unsolved challenges. In order to begin working towards solving these challenges much still needs to be done to deepen our understanding of how such disciplinary learning takes place. Taking the idea that formal learning is made possible through experiencing specific patterns of variation (Marton 2015), we will use our analysis of student-engagement data to present a case for seeing complex learning in terms of the multimodal emergence (Davis & Sumara, 2006) of transduction (Kress, 2010).  We use these results to propose a model of disciplinary learning that characterizes the multimodal emergence of transduction in terms of the start of a journey towards achieving fluency in a critical constellation of semiotic resources (Airey & Linder 2009; in press) for a given object of learning.