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Inquiry-based science instruction (IBSI) has the potential to contribute to social justice through widening participation and success in science. However, teachers struggle to implement IBSI because of contextual factors. The purpose of this paper is to explore the use of agency as a framework for understanding teachers' decision-making, by asking the question: what was the agency of six science teachers in their social-justice aspirations and use of IBSI? An agency framework recognizes that teachers' decisions are informed by their internal conversations at the intersection of personal aspects (their history, repertoire, and aspirations) with the cultural and structural constraints and resources of their contexts. However, research on IBSI has focussed on teachers' personal aspects or their perceptions of contextual factors. The sample had learnt IBSI through service learning in the context of a science fair. From teacher interviews, it emerged that these teachers had strong social-justice aspirations to serve disadvantaged students. The teachers linked their social-justice aspirations to their choice of school rather than their use of IBSI. The teachers at better-resourced schools initiated participation in science fairs at their schools, whilst the rest judged that science fairs were not appropriate for their students. The results suggest that, rather than prescribing particular pedagogies, teacher education programmes should aim to increase teachers' pedagogical repertoires, in order to enrich their agency in whatever contexts they teach.

Drawing on a sociocultural understanding of identities as multiple and fluid, we investigate how six practicing teachers recruited their biographical resources in constituting their discourse identities in interviews. The South African context allows us to consider how systemic inequality shapes the identity resources available to teachers from diverse sociopolitical backgrounds. Using inductive thematic analysis, we found that racial positionality impacted the nature of the biographical resources at each teacher's disposal. The two teachers from advantaged backgrounds drew only on their own schooling experiences, whereas initial teacher education featured strongly in the identities of the other teachers. Two teachers chose to teach in schools serving poor communities, which contributed to their identities as teachers who give their students an escape from their home situations, in part because of resonance with the teachers' own home and schooling experiences. All six teachers' identities reflected both the discipline of science and a concern for student success, and evidenced the teachers' resourcefulness in using biographical resources to negotiate their identities in their current teaching contexts. The results suggest that science teacher educators would do well to pay attention to the diverse and idiosyncratic words that student teachers use to express their emerging identities, and the science teaching role-models available in their biographies. In addition, there is value in exposing student teachers to a range of teaching practices from which they can recruit material for their developing identities, rather than promoting a particular pedagogy.

This paper offers a perspective on the relationship between communities that conduct research on teaching and learning in higher education, focusing on Higher Education Studies (HES) and science Discipline-Based Education Research (DBER). The paper responds to HES debates about the strength of its epistemological base and who belongs to that community, and to a perception that DBER is marginalized in the higher education research context. To explicate our perspective, we describe the origins and trajectories of Physics Education Research and Engineering Education Research, as exemplars of DBER. Using Turnbull, we conceptualize HES and these two exemplars as distinct "knowledge spaces," with different histories, orthopraxes and participants, and hence different unifying principles, research foci and trust mechanisms. We conclude that HES, DBER and other higher education research communities stand to benefit from multidisciplinary engagement with each other, because of their different perspectives on the problems of higher education.

This study examined final year undergraduate chemistry students' choice of study programme offered at a large research-intensive university in South Africa, applying Social Cognitive Career Theory as a theoretical framework. The sample consisted of 18 students of diverse ethnicity and gender from both the extended curriculum programme and the mainstream programme who had successfully entered their final year chemistry course. These students were interviewed, and the transcripts were subjected to qualitative inductive thematic analysis. The study revealed that chemistry was a second-choice option for most of the students. Retrospective criteria significantly influenced the choice for the majority of extended curriculum programme students, especially those who chose chemistry as a second option. For the majority of the mainstream students who chose chemistry as either first or second option, it was a mixture of retrospective and prospective criteria, with a bias towards the prospective criteria. For this study, the university's requirement of a second major for the Bachelor of Science degree was an emerging reason for students choosing chemistry.

The valuing of Indigenous Knowledge Systems (IKS) is one of the principles on which the South African school curriculum is supposed to be based. The purpose of this paper is to critique the treatment of indigenous knowledge in the South African secondary Physical Sciences curriculum against a backdrop of international debates on the relationship between IKS and science. Such debates usually take either an Inclusive perspective, where IKS are regarded as part of science, or an Exclusive perspective, where IKS and science are regarded as separate domains of knowledge. We identify a third perspective where IKS and science are viewed as intersecting domains. A document analysis of all national post-apartheid curriculum documents relevant to secondary Physical Sciences identifies only nine examples of IKS related to Physical Sciences in the latest curriculum documents (CAPS), although this is an improvement on the previous curricula. The curriculum documents reflect some confusion about the relationship between IKS and science, both in the wording and in the positioning of examples in relation to science content. Physical sciences curriculum development in South Africa appears to have gone through the stages of colonisation, decolonisation and neo-colonisation. We recommend the development of theory that addresses the role of valuing IKS in science classrooms. The Intersecting perspective offers promise as an approach to use in science classrooms, allowing the distinction to be made between pieces of indigenous knowledge that intersect with modern science knowledge and IKS as whole systems of thinking with distinctive worldviews.

Pre-service teachers enter initial teacher education programmes with conceptions of teaching gleaned from their own schooling. These conceptions, which include teachers' beliefs, may be resistant to change, which is a challenge in contexts where teacher educators hope that teachers will teach in ways different from their own schooling. Conceptions of teaching found in different cultural and disciplinary contexts have contextual differences but have resonances with the results of research into teacher beliefs. Our sample of eight South African secondary physical science teachers was schooled in a system which encouraged knowledge transmission, but they were prepared in their initial teacher education for a learner-centred approach. After they had taught for a few years, we explored their conceptions of science teaching, using phenomenographic interviews. Four conceptions emerged inductively from the analysis: transferring science knowledge from mind to mind; transferring problematic science knowledge from mind to mind; creating space for learning science knowledge and creating space for learning problematic science knowledge. Internally these conceptions are constituted by three dimensions of variation: the nature of the science knowledge to be learnt, the role of the students and the role of the teacher. Media and practical work play different roles in the external horizon of these conceptions. These conceptions reflect the disciplinary context as well as the emphases of the sample's initial teacher education programme. This suggests that initial teacher education can significantly shape teachers' conceptions of teaching.

Dialogic talk, in which different ideas are considered, promotes conceptual understanding in science, and is in line with South Africa's school curriculum. The problem is that dialogic talk is difficult to facilitate and may run counter to cultural norms. As a result, classroom talk is often not dialogic. This paper reports on the nature of classroom talk in the classrooms of eight physical science teachers who were prepared in their initial teacher education for a student-centred school curriculum. An observer spent two school days in each teacher's classroom, writing a narrative description of each lesson. A grounded analysis revealed two significant dimensions in the lessons: the nature of the talk and the apparent purpose of the teacher. The classroom talk could be classified as exposition, question and answer (Q&A) or conversation. The teaching purposes were: introduction of general principles, application, feedback and revision. The three types of talk were used to serve all four teaching purposes. Dialogic talk was present with all the teachers showing that dialogic talk is possible across the diversity of classrooms investigated. We consider factors that may inhibit dialogic talk, and ways to address these. We recommend that initial teacher education provides students with personal experience of dialogic talk in science classrooms, a framework for thinking about classroom talk and suitable pedagogies for facilitating dialogic talk.