ABSTRACT
It has been common to think of classroom talk in science as ‘inducting students into scientific discourse’ or as their learning to ‘talk science’. In our work on understanding the nature of science teachers’ explanations, we treat the same issues as a matter of how ‘entities of science’ are brought into being for students (Ogborn et al. 1996). This reflects our preference for going beyond the realm of words and what they refer to, and to stress the role played by action, real and imagined, by and on material things. And we extend this preference to conceptual ‘things’.
