Visual representations are essential for communication and meaning‐making in chemistry, and thus the representational practices play a vital role in the teaching and learning of chemistry. One powerful contemporary model of classroom learning, the variation theory of learning, posits that the way an object of learning gets handled is another vital feature for the establishment of successful teaching practices. An important part of what lies behind the constitution of teaching practices is visual representational reasoning that is a function of disciplinary relevant aspects and educationally critical features of the aspects embedded in the intended object of learning. Little is known about teachers reasoning about such visual representational practices. This work addresses this shortfall in the area of chemical bonding. The data consist of semistructured interviews with 12 chemistry teachers in the Swedish upper secondary school system. The methodology uses a thematic analytic approach to capture and characterize the teachers’ reasoning about their classroom visual representational practices. The results suggest that the teachers’ reasoning tended to be limited. However, the teachers’ pay attention to the meaning‐making potential of the approaches for showing representations. The analysis presents these visualization approaches and the discussion makes theoretical links to the variation theory of learning.

Since visual representations play a particularly important role in the teaching and learning of chemistry, the exploration described in this article focuses on them. This is an explorative study of the qualitatively different ways that visual representations can be unpacked by Swedish upper secondary school chemistry teachers dealing with intermolecular forces. Unpacking is characterized as the ways that visual representations get used to open up the possibility of having the critical aspects and features of an intended object of learning being brought into focal awareness, initially on their own and then simultaneously.The analysis, which combines a phenomenographic and a social semiotic approach, leads to the characterizations of five qualitatively different ways that visual representations may be unpacked. These outcome categories are presented in terms of a conceptual hierarchy, where two of these ways of unpacking are characterized as being teachercentered and the other three as student-centered. This leads to a case being made that if teachers use studentcentered ways of unpacking visual representations, then their students will be more likely to gain greater access to critical aspects and features of the enacted object of learning. We argue that in terms of making theoretical and This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.

<p>En noviembre de 1987, en la Facultad de Química de la UNAM se puso en marcha el nuevo plan de estudios de la licenciatura en Ingeniería Química. Entre los alumnos que ingresamos entonces a esta carrera, de la que somos la primera generación, existía confusión con respecto a la estructura y objetivos que se perseguían con dicho plan. Por esto, con la finalidad de que se conocieran nuestras dudas e inquietudes, presentamos a las autoridades de la Facultad de Química una encuesta para recabar y dar a conocer nuestros puntos de vista respecto a la carrera y a las asignaturas que habíamos cursado hasta mayo de 1989, es decir, hasta el tercer semestre.</p>

Restauration de sols volcaniques dégradés de l'altiplano mexicain par plantation d'agaves, d'herbes et d'arbres

The present study aimed to explore ‘what’s happening’ and ‘what’s possible’, when young pupils jointly create multimodal texts in small groups. This was achieved by studying the process when pupils in a grade 2 classroom (i) created handwritten fairy tales, (ii) drew images, and then, (iii) transformed them into animated multimodal texts using a digital application during three small-group activities. Data comprises video recordings, pupils’ multimodal texts (writing and drawings), teaching materials, and lesson plans. This qualitative case study focuses on one group of three pupils aged 8–9. The study is theoretically grounded in the designs for learning perspective, with the Learning Design Sequence Model utilized as an analytical tool. The teacher’s design for learning—including her planned activities and the resources made available to the pupils—appeared to have a major impact on what happens and what becomes possible for the pupils in their design for learning. The teacher’s design also influenced what competencies the pupils could (and chose) to draw upon in the different activities. An important result was that the pupils positioned themselves and each other in quite different ways during the small-group activities, which partly could be explained by the different affordances of the resources provided, as well as the teacher’s design. The detailed descriptions of how the pupils’ positioning changed in relation to the teacher’s design for learning and the available resources add valuable knowledge to the field of educational research.