Constructing representations to learn science

While there has been considerable research attention paid to ways of supporting students to interpret and apply the multi modal representations that constitute scientific understanding, less has been paid to the active construction of representations as part of a science inquiry process. This chapter describes the development, over a decade, of major Australian research projects involving researchers from five universities exploring a guided inquiry approach to school science involving the construction and negotiation of representations. This program of research is based in pragmatist understandings of the relationship between representations, phenomena and meaning making. It links the pedagogy to the knowledge production processes of science itself, drawing on science study scholars such as Latour and Gooding. The approach has formed the basis of major government sponsored professional learning programs. This chapter describes the development of this ‘representation construction’ approach and provides examples of sequences of representational challenges, with associated student work, to demonstrate the key features of the pedagogy and the quality of learning that ensues. We describe current research working with schools to establish the approach more widely and the professional learning challenges this poses for teachers.