Professional development is a critical concept in the literature on teaching and teacher education. However, in this literature, continuous growth (learning)—e.g., improve teaching strategies, elaborate a variety of activities or integrate new technologies into their practice—is not distinguished from (crisis-like) change to qualitatively different forms of experience—e.g., engage students in learning, implement student-centered practices, consider students' individual needs and further learning. Based on a case study of the change a Brazilian teacher experienced over the course of an 8-year period, we develop an approach based on ideas of the Russian psychologist L. S. Vygotsky that not only theorizes a distinction between learning and development but also the articulation between the two processes whereby continuous change turns into discontinuous change.

A Cartesian conception of material space views each part as external to every other part: partes extra partes . Because two material things cannot occupy the same space, each of it exists in itself, separated by a boundary from everything else, including other things. This ontology is the origin of thinking the world in terms of self-identical entities, separated from everything else surrounding them. This leads to the borders or boundaries that separate each thing from what it is not. The areas near them are borderlands. Those capable of living on either side are “boundary workers” and “boundary crossers” or “wizards.” And “immutable mobiles” are things that without change are crossing boundaries and affording connections distinct parts of the social world. Although the concepts of borders and boundaries have had considerable currency in the scholarly literature, there have been alternate conceptions of the social and cultural world that have instead focused on the impossibility to have anything like pure parts (e.g., culture, language) and the pervasiveness of mixtures, hybridity, métissage , and heterogeneity. Any interest in coming to grips with the aliveness of life leads us to a fluid ontology, where the figure of thought is something alive, in movement, an event. The purpose of this article is to articulate a perspective on boundaries and borders through the lens of a fluid ontology of the social. A concrete case study from a physics classroom is used to exemplify the fact that life has the characteristic of a fluid, where there always are mixture and hybridity, and where the impending future always includes, unpredictable, novelty. The very boundaries and borders that are stable things and concepts in other theories are but the result of abstractions from a multitude of flows and counter-flows. The fluid perspective puts into question the usefulness of a range of theoretical conceptions—including “actor network,” “third space,” and “cultural appropriation”—all of which are based on an ontology of self-identical things.

The target article presents an alternative view on cognition through the lens of human practice, which is experienced from within by practitioners and through their course-of-experience. It pays specific heed to micro-phenomenological and semiotic aspects that the situated cognition literature has not in general attended to. However, the proposed framework can be read as reducing events to self-identical actors, organisms, environment, or signs, which impedes the goal of overcoming the body-mind Cartesian dualism. This commentary focuses on two issues. First, experiencing, as event, needs to be analyzed by means of categories that retain the its evental qualities. This cannot be done by attempting to breathe life into people and things through enaction. Second, human life and any of its parts, as irreducibly transactional phenomena, are essentially and originarily social.

The study was undertaken to examine within a single model the relationships between the teachers' perceived self-efficacy beliefs and their intention to practice STrEaM teaching in the classroom. The acronym STrEaM refers to the expansion of integrated STEM, merging it with a focus on reading, writing, and arts, for connecting the four STEM disciplines. Integrated STrEaM teaching overcomes the prevalent contention that the complexity of the suggested STEM teaching framework encumbers teachers performing cross-disciplinary STEM teaching in the classroom. Science and mathematics teachers who participated in an integrated STrEaM teaching workshop responded to the Teacher Self-Efficacy Scale and a STrEaM Teaching Practice Questionnaire. The data were analyzed using the Partial Least Square-Structural Equation Modeling approach to model the direct relationships between the three sub-scales of self-efficacy (instructional strategies, classroom management, student engagement self-efficacy) and STrEaM teaching practices and indirect moderating effects of location of the school and years of teaching on the relationships. A total of 472 (261 female, 211 male) science and mathematics teachers were included in the analyses. Study results reveal that the three subscales of self-efficacy directly relate to employing STrEaM teaching practices. Location of school (urban/rural) and level of teaching experience did not moderate the relationships between instructional and classroom efficacies and STrEaM teaching practices. However, years of teaching experience moderated the relationship between student engagement efficacy and teaching practice. The model derived from the current study is helpful to guide the policymakers and curriculum developers.

In this chapter, I describe and theorize a phenomenon related to one known in the popular literature and psychology as flow, a concept used to refer to a particular state of being associated with positive affect. Unlike existing, overly psychological views and conceptualizations of the phenomenon, my own descriptions emphasize aspects that only an event-based ontology appropriately captures. Working from my many, daily experiences of being-in-the-flow and drawing on phenomenological and pragmatic literature, I develop a way of approaching the experience of being-in-the-flow that is not marked by rationalism. Importantly, my approach abandons classical conceptions of the individual subject opposed to objects and world that are the goals of the former’s intentional activity.

In an effort to promote integrated STEM education, the Malaysian government has integrated STEM teaching framework within the science and mathematics curriculum specifications to guide the science and mathematics teachers to design and implement interdisciplinary teaching while teaching science and/or mathematics concepts. Some of the factors that make STEM teaching effective include knowledge about integrating the different subjects in teaching and teachers’ pedagogical strategies, perceived difficulties (PD), and self-efficacy. This study was designed to measure and model the relationships between these three factors and integrated STEM teaching practices in a sample of Malaysian teachers. Data obtained from 573 science and mathematics teachers were analyzed using a partial least square structural equation modeling approach. Findings revealed that the model derived from a combination of the three factors exhibits substantial predictive power and thus has substantial relevance for STEM teaching. Knowledge and perceived efficacy have significant positive effects on and PD have significant negative direct relationships with STEM teaching. Knowledge has a significant negative and positive mediation effect between difficulties and integrated STEM practices, and self-efficacy and integrated STEM practices, respectively. This study has immediate implications for developing teacher professional development curriculum and STEM education policymakers in Malaysia, and it is a model to be tested in other countries or regions intending STEM education reforms.

During the COVID-19 crisis, we have been able to witness, in many countries, a substantive resistance to the science-based arguments of politicians and to the calls from the medical field to implement safety measures (masks, distancing) and to get vaccinated. In this text, some reflections are provided on what this resistance might tell the science education community about the impact the field has had on individual persons specifically and society as a whole. It is suggested that we ought to think about science learning for life following formal education, and some features are described that make science in the classroom more relevant to students.

Die Entstehung und Entfaltung von gewaltsamen Ereignissen: Ein transaktionaler Ansatz'. Standard approaches to the analysis of crisis situa-tions either take some psychological stance, where the individual is the unit of analysis, or they investigate groups of actors taking turns, where individu-als act following their own interpretation of what others have done. Philoso-phers have characterized these two approaches as self-actional and interac-tional. Actions and interpretations clearly can be assigned to one or the other actor, which allows allocating the responsibility for a violent event to some-one "culprit." A radically different, rarely chosen approach is a transactional one, where each action is understood as joint action both in space and in time that cannot be decomposed into independent individual contributions. In this paper, following a sketch of the differences in the epistemological under-pinnings between standard and transactional approaches, exemplifying analyses are presented and discussed from a violent encounter that left a streetcar passenger dead and a police officer before the courts of justice for homicide. Discussion topics include the attribution of cause and effect, un-derstanding the historical trajectories of participant actors, and the conse-quences of analyzing events in terms of events (not substantive entities, and inter-actions).

To be successful, collaboration at work requires its participants to have a common sense about what is happening and where things are heading. But how can collaborators have such a sense in common if what is going on continuously changes? This study investigates the joint communicative work participants in collaborative activity do to remain aligned on how things are going and where things are at for the purpose of maintaining a ground in common. Our test case for illustrating this joint work is the fluid and constantly changing world of software development. Our study uses a transactional approach to show how software developers working together continuously make available what they are attuned to, which constitutes their common ground that allows actions and talk to make sense. The common ground enables a common, inherently shared sense of what is happening and how things are going. Rather than having "meaning" in themselves, signifiers (words, gestures, body movements, cursor movements) create and are part of the common ground against which they make sense. Signifiers are motivated by and produce an accented visible that is available to all group members; and this accented visible (including the signs) makes for the common ground.

A recent article in this journal suggests that although learner agency is central to understanding young people's engagement with the curriculum, there is little exploration of such ideas in the field. In response, they argued for an Archerian approach to learner agency and a contextually, interpersonally, intra-personally and temporally situated curriculum that suggests the centrality of young people's educational reflexivity and associated learner agency for mediating the structural aspects of their educational lives. We reflect on this thinking through the lens of a curriculum project the design of which was similarly inspired by the work of Margaret Archer. We do so through the eyes of Grace, one of the young participants in the project. We learn from Grace that learner agency and curriculum engagement is not, as Archer's framework suggests, a substantively self-authored reflexive endeavour that can be made amenable to change through a bespoke curriculum project. Rather learner (agency) in young people might be more accurately theorised in pragmatist terms as something embedded in the drama of the fullness of their everyday lives of which the curriculum represents just a tiny part. The implications for the field of learner agency and curriculum studies are discussed.

The core epistemologies underlying science education have changed little over the past 40 years: whereas science educators tend to take constructivist stances, many or most teachers tend to be concerned with the appropriation and transfer of facts and theories mandated as outcomes in the curriculum guidelines of the relevant authorities (e.g., school boards, provinces, or nations). All of the going epistemologies, in and despite their diversities, have in common that they oppose the learner (subject, with identity) and the thing learned (object) and these are linked by the doings of the former (agency). The underlying master ontology is a Platonic one, in which entitative, self-identical things act upon other entities that are external to them. But is this the best way of thinking about how we know and learn? A radical (because incommensurable) alternative is a relational ontology of an organic type. Such an ontology has flux and becoming (as opposed to being) as its basic figures of thought, a way of thinking initially proposed by Heraclitus and later advocated by philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche, William James, Henri Bergson, Alfred North Whitehead, and (more recently) Gilles Deleuze. As a result, our educative and investigative concerns no longer are entitative things (students, teachers, identities, curricula, activities, conceptions) but interrelated lines of becoming. This is a view in which stable things are but abstractions from a world-as-event that is forever becoming. In this study, using material aspects of gardening, I articulate and explain a different way of theorizing and understanding the world. I use growing (vegetables, trees) as a metaphor because of its capacity to express the proposed organic ontology. In this case, the lines of becoming (or lines of flight) include gardener-becoming-tree and tree-becoming-gardener: the gardener grows as he grows plants. The metaphor of growing in the modality of growing-together troubles present discourses in the field of science education, which fail to acknowledge that flux of life comes with intransitive qualities and the quality of becoming is affected by all the other events that are cogredient with human lives.

The link between science education and early childhood education is still blurred. This is so because many science education researchers apparently, but mistakenly, believe that the way young children interrogate and investigate the world around them is not appropriate for their understanding of scientific concepts. Although there is an effort among early childhood teachers to be aware of how young children explore the world around them, there still consists considerable uncertainty about how they learn and develop while immersed in classroom science activities. To understand learning processes in early childhood science, this study followed a group of five-year-old children enrolled in a public early childhood center in Belo Horizonte (Brazil) while they participated in a science unit jointly designed by teachers and the children. The study was designed to understand the world through the children's eyes (i.e., their lifeworlds) and how this world expands while they engage in science. We use the theoretical category of experience to investigate how children, immersed in the social practices of inquiry, expand their lifeworld while engaging with each other, with the adults present and with the material world. Our findings show: (a) the importance of producing a common ground, that is, a sense-giving field contexture that allows actions and speeches to make sense; (b) how the movements of the participants through transactions allow the emergence of an experience that stands out and remains; and (c) how "an experience" might leads to learning and expansion of the participants' lifeworlds.

In dem Band, dessen Teil dieser Artikel ist, geht es um die Grenzen der Kommunikation und damit auch um Kommunikation an den Grenzen (siehe die Einleitung von Jo Reichertz). Als Forscher, der sein ganzes wissenschaftliches Leben lang Kommunikation in all ihren Erscheinungsformen, also sowohl in informellen Kontexten (Freizeit), im Bereich der Arbeit, als auch in formalen Bildungseinrichtungen untersucht hat, fallen mir bei Kommunikation an den Grenzen sofort Situationen der Entwicklung im Allgemeinen (=Lernen) und der Begriff der Zone der nächsten Entwicklung im Besonderen ein. Lev Vygotsky, der den mittlerweile weltweit für Prozesse des Lernens zentralen Begriff der Zone der nächsten Entwicklung geprägt hat, bestimmt dessen Bedeutung so: »The zone of proximal development [...] is the distance between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers« (Vygotsky 1978: 86). Die Zone der nächsten Entwicklung adressiert also den Unterschied zwischen dem, was ein Kind (Schüler) allein tun kann, und dem, was es unter der Bedingung der Anleitung eines Erwachsenen oder einer anderen Person (z.B. Peer) tun kann, die in Bezug auf das betreffende Thema weiter fortgeschritten sind. Die Anleitung der Erwachsenen selbst besteht dabei immer aus kommunikativem Handeln – einem Handeln, das anstrebt, die Grenzen der Zone der nächsten Entwicklung der Lernenden zu verschieben. Somit ist Lernen immer kommunikative ›Grenzarbeit‹ – Kommunikation an der Grenze der Entwicklung des Lernenden mit dem Ziel, eben diese Grenze mittels Kommunikation zu überwinden. Hier von Interesse ist, dass dieser besondere Ort des Entwicklungsraums – der in einer katastrophentheoretischen Betrachtungsweise als Übergang zwischen zwei qualitativ unterschiedlichen Zustandsebenen theoretisiert werden kann (Roth 2017) – sichtbar macht, wann und weshalb Kommunikation gleich dreifach an ihrer Leistungsgrenze ist und wie diese überwunden werden kann.

According to the World Health Organization, dementia is an assembly of conditions with rapidly increasing numbers of afflicted individuals. Whereas the standard medical model focuses on the individual whose brain deteriorates and who therefore needs help, few studies treat dementia as a social phenomenon. This study—part of a larger investigation into the changing nature of the relations within couples where one individual suffers from severe changes in the brain—reports on the irreducibly social dimensions of coping with everyday life activities that involve both partners. We draw on the occasions of shaving and brushing teeth in one couple to exemplify our broader findings of the irreducibly joint work accomplished to successfully complete mundane activities. We draw on the Vygotskian notion of the Ur-wir (Great-we) and on Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the dual sensation touching-touched to discuss issues related to identity, solidarity, and ethics of care.

In present-day cultural-historical sciences, explanations of activity are provided in terms of thing-like, independent, and self-actional entities including subject, object, tool, sign, mind, culture, meaning, and community. In this theory-building contribution, I instead suggest an organic theory to theorize activity in terms of events, characterized by actuality and becomingness. Organic theories have radical consequences for the cultural sciences in that cherished notions—e.g. mediation, identity, intersubjectivity, and cause–effect relation—no longer have a place in organic theories of human activity. This study describes the foundations of an organic approach, provides an analysis exemplifying an organic view, and develops some of its implications for the cultural-historical sciences.