This book explores reading and interpretation practices related to visual materials - here referred to as inscriptions - that accompany texts. Guiding questions include: ‘What practices are required for reading inscriptions?’ and ‘Do textbooks allow students to develop graphicacy skill required to critically read scientific texts?’ The book reveals what it takes to interpret, read, and understand visual materials, and what it takes to engage inscriptions in a critical way.

This book introduces the concept of Inquiry Graphics, which positions graphics as significant and integrated tools of inquiry in higher education teaching and research. Simply put, the book explores the nuances of thinking and learning with digital images as types of graphics. Although the amount of images in modern life is overwhelming, they have been scarcely explored and understood as integral to concept and knowledge development within higher education practice. This book reflects on why and how digital photographs can be adapted and used in teaching and research contexts. It provides practical examples and applications, as well as theoretical foundations, building on a range of perspectives, such as Peircean triadic sign and approaches to conceptual development. Ultimately, it builds on diverse approaches to make a case for exploring knowledge and analysing concepts and images in a non-dualist and pluralist manner. This unique book will appeal to scholars and students in education studies and educational research, media and communication, and anyone interested in applied semiotics, visual and multimodal pedagogy and learning.

Without conscious consideration of diversity in the curriculum, there is a danger that teachers fall back on a narrow syllabus. Trainee and new teachers need support to expand their knowledge and understanding of the curriculum to enable them to make active choices to ensure diversity in what they teach. This book explains why and how diversity can be taught through the primary National Curriculum. It includes practical examples of good practice and realistic straightforward ideas and resources to support new teachers to go into the classroom ready to bring diverse voices and learning to their teaching.

This book examines the diverse use of visual representations by teachers in the science classroom. It contains unique pedagogies related to the use of visualization, presents original curriculum materials as well as explores future possibilities. The book begins by looking at the significance of visual representations in the teaching of science. It then goes on to detail two recent innovations in the field: simulations and slowmation, a process of explicit visualization. It also evaluates the way teachers have used different diagrams to illustrate concepts in biology and chemistry. Next, the book explores the use of visual representations in culturally diverse classrooms, including the implication of culture for teachers’ use of representations, the crucial importance of language in the design and use of visualizations and visualizations in popular books about chemistry. It also shows the place of visualizations in the growing use of informal, self-directed science education. Overall, the book concludes that if the potential of visualizations in science education is to be realized in the future, the subject must be included in both pre-service and in-service teacher education. It explores ways to develop science teachers’ representational competence and details the impact that this will have on their teaching. The worldwide trend towards providing science education for all, coupled with the increased availability of color printing, access to personal computers and projection facilities, has lead to a more extensive and diverse use of visual representations in the classroom. This book offers unique insights into the relationship between visual representations and science education, making it an ideal resource for educators as well as researchers in science education, visualization and pedagogy.

The Internet is transforming the experience of reading and learning-through-reading. Is this transformation effecting a radical change in reading processes as readers synthesize understandings from fragments across multiple texts? Or, conversely, is the Internet merely a new place to use the same reading skills and processes developed through experience with traditional print-based media? Are the changes in reading processes a matter of degree, or are they fundamentally new? And if so, how must reading theory, research, and instruction adjust? This volume brings together distinguished experts from the fields of reading research, teacher education, educational psychology, cognitive science, rhetoric and composition, digital humanities, and educational technology to address these questions. Every question is not answered in every chapter. How could they be? But every contributor has many thoughtful things to say about a subset of these important questions. Together, they add up to a comprehensive response to the issues the field faces as it approaches what may well be—or not —a crossroads. A website devoted to extending discussion around the book in creative (and disjunctive) ways [readingatacrossroads.net] moves it beyond the printed page.

Featuring a collection of newly commissioned essays, edited by two leading scholars, this Handbook surveys the key research findings in the field of English for Specific Purposes (ESP). • Provides a state-of-the-art overview of the origins and evolution, current research, and future directions in ESP • Features newly-commissioned contributions from a global team of leading scholars • Explores the history of ESP and current areas of research, including speaking, reading, writing, technology, and business, legal, and medical English • Considers perspectives on ESP research such as genre, intercultural rhetoric, multimodality, English as a lingua franca and ethnography