Aesthetics concerns, on the one hand, people's feelings of pleasure and displeasure, and, on the other hand, the objects these feelings are directed to, that is, what people find beautiful or ugly (Wickman, 2006). Traditionally aesthetics and affect have been treated as separate from cognition and only rarely has it been studied how they are intertwined when learning a specific content (Wickman et al., 2021). However, recent situated and socio-culturally oriented research has begun to elucidate how aesthetics plays a key role for selection of content, what route learning takes in the classroom and for students' opportunities to develop an interest or taste for a specific school subject (e.g., Sinclair, 2006; Ainsworth and Bell, 2020; Wickman et al., 2021). This Research Topic compiles contributions from researchers examining these topics further.

There has been longstanding interest in students’ aesthetic feelings in engaging with school science, but new multimodal accounts of meaning-making, and changing curricular goals where science is integrated with other subjects, pose new methodological challenges for researching these feelings. In this paper, we aim to synthesise relevant literature as the bases for proposing methodological practices to address these new research challenges. We draw on past and current pragmatist and semiotic perspectives to justify our methodological approach. We claim that research on aesthetic feelings needs to identify: (a) the complex nature of aesthetic meaning/feeling processes and multiple influences on these processes and (b) short-term and longer-term consequences on participants’ taste for, and learning in, science. Building on a practical epistemology, we propose that these questions can be addressed through multimodal analyses of aesthetic intentions and responses when embedded in teacher and student inquiry purposes, discursive interactions, artefact-making, and evaluative feelings/judgements. To illustrate the scope and challenges of these methodological strategies, we draw on examples of analyses in companion papers in this special issue, both when science is taught alone and when integrated with other subjects. 

This overview gives a background for this special issue of the International Journal of Science Education on Aesthetics, affect, and making meaning in science education. Contributions to this special issue examine how and what kind of aesthetics of science is constituted when it meets the aesthetics of other practices (e.g. arts, mathematics, student lives), in and outside classrooms, and the consequences these encounters have for meaning-making and in learning science. It reviews various traditions and concepts used in studying aesthetics and affect in science education, their theoretical foundations and the different meanings these traditions assign to the concepts. The review spans from cognitivist, causal approaches to socio-culturally and pragmatically-oriented stances and examines the educational questions that these frameworks pose and resolve. The review makes a case that the socio-cultural and pragmatic frameworks adopted in the set of papers, focused on the continuity of aesthetic experience with meaning-making opens up fresh and powerful ways to support science teaching and learning. This review offers a backdrop against which the novelty of the individual contributions can be understood.

This paper introduces the notion of taste for teaching a subject, especially science, as a conceptual framework to analyse the aesthetics of teacher development as a lifelong process. We draw on the work of Pierre Bourdieu and John Dewey in order to account for how teachers distinguish admirable practices and, in doing so, distinguish themselves as inspiring professionals. In order to illustrate this framework, we report a narrative inquiry on the life story of Tomas, a white man nationally prized for his science teaching. This inquiry was inspired by sociological portraits recommended by Bernard Lahire. Results indicate how a practical disposition (as opposed to a theoretical one) played an important role in developing Tomas's individual taste for science teaching, producing a strong continuity between his early experiences as a masculine boy raised in a family of construction workers, on the one hand, and his later experiences as a biologist and a science teacher enacting inquiry-based activities. The significance of the findings for science education is discussed.

In this paper, we analyse results from one classroom session within an 8-week program in which Year 10 students constructed 'trash' puppets of endangered Australian animals. In making the puppets and using them as part of a 'theatre in a suitcase' performance at Melbourne Zoo, students were expected to integrate both scientific and artistic goals to demonstrate knowledge of specific endangered species. In this process, students needed to learn how their more immediate, everyday positive and negative aesthetic responses could be made continuous with a scientific aesthetic to produce both a coherent puppet and an advocacy performance. Through micro-ethnographic practical epistemology analysis of video data of this session, we demonstrate how this mix of everyday and subject-specific aesthetic responses, judgements and intentions interacted to shape and promote students' learning in science. In addressing this multimodal and multi-purpose task, students learnt and applied science knowledge to a real-world issue of species endangerment.

I denna studie undersöks tvåspråkiga elevers meningsskapande i naturvetenskap. En återkommande slutsats från tidigare studier är att tvåspråkiga elevers modersmål bör inkluderas i naturvetenskapsundervisningen. De flesta av dessa är dock från länder där lärare och elever talar samma modersmål. I Sverige är klasserna istället ofta mångspråkiga med flera olika modersmål i en och samma klass. Det är därför relevant att studera hur elevers modersmål kan inkluderas i naturvetenskapsundervisningen i en mångspråkig kontext. Data samlades in genom klassrumsobservationer i en årskurs 3 där eleverna arbetade med elektricitet. Två olika förändringar genomfördes i undervisningen: a) eleverna tilläts prata sina modersmål under lektioner i naturvetenskap och b) elever med samma modersmål fick arbeta tillsammans vid gruppaktiviteter. Data analyserades utifrån ett pragmatiskt perspektiv på meningsskapande och teorin om transpråkande. Resultatet visar dels att när eleverna fick möjligheten använde de alltid båda sina språk för att skapa mening i naturvetenskap, och dels en markant minskning av språkliga begräsningar vid gruppaktiviteterna. Under helklassundervisningen på svenska kunde eleverna delta i kortare meningsutbyten, men hade svårare att delta i mer avancerade samtal såsom diskussioner och generaliseringar jämför med när de hade möjlighet att använda hela sin språkliga repertoar. Detta är problematiskt eftersom dessa typer av samtal är nödvändiga för att elever ska utveckla en djupare förståelse av naturvetenskap. Studien visar således på möjliga sätt att öka elever lärande i naturvetenskap i en mångspråkig kontext genom strategier för att inkludera elevers modersmål i undervisningen.

In continental Europe didactics is identified as the professional science of teachers. A central concern of didactics is not only to deliver teaching methods for teachers and teacher education, but also to develop analytical units, analytical methods and design principles that are useful for teachers in making decisions on planning, carrying out and assessing teaching and learning. Didactic research provides rationales and conceptual schemata for choosing certain content and for choosing appropriate methods to teach that content with specific groups of students. We give a methodological account of a central field in didactics, namely didactic modelling, analysis and design. We review what didactic models are and how they can be produced. We describe the methodologies of modelling, namely (1) how models can be extracted from classroom data in conjunction with theory, (2) how extracted models need to be mangled with teachers, that is adapting models to make them more useful practically, and (3) procedures of collecting exemplars to illustrate how models can be used with various content and students. We also explain how extracted and mangled didactic models can be used for analysing teaching and learning, and for educational designs.

This article concerns how teachers can use physical artefacts as mediating means to support emergent bilingual students’ learning in science class. The data consist of non-participant observations in a Swedish 3^rd grade (9-10 years old) science class. All students were bilingual, but in different minority languages, and the teacher was monolingual in Swedish. The study focused on four students, all of whom had Turkish as their minority language. During the observations, the science content was electricity and the lessons were conducted by using physical artefacts, such as wires, bulbs and batteries. The study takes its stance in the ideas of Dewey and sociocultural approaches, implying that students’ learning is viewed as situational. For the analysis, practical epistemology analysis (PEA) was used. The teacher used physical artefacts in two different ways. First, the physical artefacts implied that the students experienced the science content by actually seeing it. The students talked about their observations in everyday language, which the teacher then drew on to introduce how the phenomena or process in question could be expressed in scientific language. Second, when students’ proficiency in the language of instruction limited their possibilities to make meaning, using physical artefacts enabled them to experience unfamiliar words being related to the science content and thus learn their meaning. The study findings contribute to knowledge concerning how teachers can create learning contexts where physical artefacts are used to mediate scientific meaning. 

This article deals with science content in the making and in particular the role of the body in producing scientific phenomena. While accounts of scientists' work have repeatedly demonstrated, how producing phenomena requires immense amounts of time and effort, involving tinkering and manual labor, this is a little empirically studied content in science education. Seeking to shed light on how the body is involved with materiality to produce physics phenomena, and in what terms this is learning physics content, the article first examines how bodily tinkering is a necessary part of knowing physics through reviewing major accounts of science studies and research in science education. Secondly, drawing on phenomenology and pragmatist ideas, the article examines how students' bodies need to be educated in the transactional process with material and artifacts to produce phenomena in the context of science learning in lower secondary physics education. Demonstrating that embodied phenomena production is an inescapable part of learning scientific inquiry, and that bodies are just as much a part of the subject physics as conceptual knowledge, we suggest that the education of students' bodies needs to be made an explicit content. This is important not only for making tacit content accessible to all, but also for addressing epistemological understandings of what science and technology is about.