Global Developments in Literacy Research for Science Education

Kok-Sing Tang is a senior lecturer at the Science & Mathematics Education Centre, School of Education at Curtin University. He was formerly an assistant professor at the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University of Singapore. He holds a BA and MSc in Physics from the University of Cambridge and a MA and PhD in Education from the University of Michigan. His research examines the disciplinary literacy of science, which comprises the specialised ways of using and thinking with the language and representations of science to learn and participate in the discipline. In particular, he examines how disciplinary literacy is a necessary process skill in order to learn the content of physics and chemistry, and designs scaffolding strategies to help students learn disciplinary literacy. Before joining academia, Kok-Sing was a high school physics teacher and worked at the Singapore Ministry of Education in various areas such as science curriculum design, technology integration, and science teacher professional development. Kristina Danielsson  is a professor at Department of Swedish, Linnaeus University, Sweden. She has a PhD in Scandinavian languages and was formerly professor in reading and writing development at Department of Language Education, Stockholm University. Her research deals with multimodal perspectives of disciplinary literacy, in particular in science. She has been part of a number of interdisciplinary research projects and developmental projects in elementary and secondary science classrooms. In these projects she has examined the literacy practices as well as the ways in which different semiotic resources are used to talk about science phenomena, and what consequences this might lead to regarding the opportunities given for students’ meaning-making in science. A recent developmental project deals with the possibilities of letting young learners explain science phenomena through their own creation of stop-motion films.