This chapter examines the European-inspired notion of content and language integrated learning (CLIL), and discusses what makes CLIL different from English-medium instruction (EMI) on the one hand and EAP on the other. For this revised edition, more recent work in the areas of CLIL and EMI has been added, while the historical background to the terms remains unchanged. After examining the definition of CLIL, the chapter maps out the relationship between CLIL, EMI and EAP and discusses the rise of EMI. Then, after summarising research into the disciplinary learning outcomes of EMI, the focus turns to who should teach CLIL and the source of the sometimes-difficult relationships between content and language experts. Can EAP professionals teach content? Can disciplinary experts teach language? Or does a CLIL approach necessarily imply collaboration between language and content teachers? These are some of the questions addressed in this chapter. The chapter concludes by suggesting the concept of disciplinary literacy as a way for content teachers to problematize CLIL and to begin to view themselves as teachers of disciplinary discourse. n

One of the goals of higher education astronomy is to guide students towards becoming expert astronomers, enabling them to participate in the discourse and practices of the discipline (Gee, 2004). However, the specifics of what expert astronomers do in their professional practice are not well documented in the current astronomy education research literature. In particular, there is a lack of knowledge regarding how expert astronomers develop the competence of visual inspection, with previous research highlighting that it is mostly acquired informally (Walsh, 2024). Using data from an autoethnography of participating in astronomy research following a mentorship-apprenticeship model, we will first present how astronomers apply the skill of visual inspection in their professional practices. Following from that, we will discuss some key components in facilitating the development of this skill, that could be leveraged in a more systematic way in astronomy education at the university.

Introduction: In this paper we discuss disciplinary learning and the roles that different modalities can play in the process. We first describe the extant research in the field of social semiotics with an emphasis on the functions of affordance and transduction in university science, before presenting the comparatively sparse research on transformation. Our goal is to identify whether the process of transformation, besides its previously described procedural functions, can have important meaning making functions as well.

Methods: Taking the discipline of cosmology as our point of reference, our data consist of four different forms of the mathematical rearrangement of the Friedmann equation, as observed in university lectures. We analyzed these forms for their meaning making functions using abductive reasoning and the framework of symbolic forms.

Results: We identify an important, hitherto undescribed type of meaning-making —purposeful transformation. We describe its key characteristics (narrowing down meaning potential, foreground-background movement and purposeful direction) and we provide a first definition.

Discussion: First, we discuss the implications of our findings on social semiotics theory, focusing on the notions of disciplinary and pedagogical affordance and the possibility of identifying purposeful transformations in other semiotic systems. Finally, we demonstrate its importance in the teaching and learning of natural sciences.

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).