Systemic oppression includes inequitable education that historically does not fully prepare students for comprehensive participation in society. The tools of science education, however, uniquely enable students to explore social inequities as well as the natural world. Thus, a role of education can be to embed social justice in science curricula.…

The study analyses the extent to which the sociological message transmitted by the Official Pedagogic Discourse of the curriculum for Portuguese middle schools contains the ideological and pedagogical principles of its authors. The research is epistemologically and sociologically grounded, placing particular emphasis on Bernstein theory of…

Students need to reflect on the practice of science to fully understand the nature of science (NOS), which is an important component of scientific literacy. In this paper, the authors describe how to implement an explicit and reflective pedagogy in college science laboratories and share examples from their implementation in a multiple-section…

Textuality is often thought of in linguistic terms; for instance, the talk and writing that circulate in the classroom. In this paper I take a multimodal perspective on textuality and context. I draw on illustrative examples from school Science and English to examine how image, colour, gesture, gaze, posture and movement--as well as writing and…

There is an increase in school-community linked initiatives in school science. A substantial proportion of these involve rural schools. This article asks the question: In what ways do these initiatives offer possibilities for better engaging rural students with school science? The paper draws on information from a number of school-community linked…

The work we report in this special issue attempted to exploit the power of technology and cognitive theory to help make conceptual systems taught in large college courses truly useful in students' future lives. Facing evidence that traditional instructional models have not succeeded in this regard, we sought feasible course designs and…