The articles comprising this special issue provide insights into the current state of discourse studies in science education and into the emerging theoretical, methodological, and educational challenges facing the field. Over the past three decades, numerous studies of classroom life have identified the ways that discourse processes construct events, meaning, and educational opportunities in science settings. Previous research has identified ways that the discourse of science can be differentially positioned to alienate or include students' ways of knowing and understanding in educational settings. Looking across the eleven articles in this special issue, a number of questions surface; one primary question asks: What does this collection contribute as a whole in terms of theories of discourse, research methodologies, and educational implications that is more compelling than the specific results of the individual studies? I shall answer this by looking at the theoretical and methodological commitments of the studies. In doing so, I identify ways that this special issue as a whole advances the field of discourse studies in science education.The eleven articles spanning nations, student grade levels, and interactional contexts frame a set of topics providing insights into theory-methods relationships of discourse studies in education. We can interpret the various definitions of discourse as embedding theoretical assumptions about interactions that lead to methodological choices. Building on work in educational ethnography, sociolinguistics, and micro-analytic discourse analysis, the collection generally builds from a set of premises about how to interpret discourse in these science education contexts.First, consistent with a sociolinguistic view of interaction, discourse is interpreted as situated in ongoing sociocultural practices with histories, discourses, intertextual references, social relationships, positions, and obligations of members of the relevant social group (Kelly, 2014). Thus, although discourse is central to communication, and comprised of language-inuse, it is not limited to structural aspects of language. In these studies, multimodal dimensions of communication are visible in the interactions of participants, texts, and technologies, where the ideational, relational, and ideological messages co-occur. In this way, discourse constitutes being in the world that integrates meaning, values, and identities (Gee, 2014).