Jay Lemke

"Science has often presented itself, intentionally or unintentionally as a "truer" or even the true way of talking about the world. In science classrooms, except for rare occasions, this is the way science is taught and presented. Not as a way of talking about the world, but as the way the world is."

"Science teachers have a special responsibility to study the nature of science as a discipline, how it works, how it is described by sociologists, historians, and philosophers from different points of view…. Science education cannot just be about learning science: Its foundation must be learning about the nature of science as a human activity."

"The mystique of science is an essential tool for technocratic rule. Through it we are all taught that science, as the paradigm of all expert knowledge, has an objective, superior, and special truth that only the superintelligent few can understand. Science education, like it or not, does a great job in foisting these myths on most of us."

"The language others speak to us, from childhood, shapes the attitudes and beliefs that ground how we use all our powers of action."

"Minds are formed by our social interactions in a community and a culture."

"Multimodal presentations have an inherent critical potential to the extent that we learn how to use the images to deconstruct the viewpoint of the text, and the text to subvert the naturalness of the image."

"In terms of language, we do know what a scientific theory or conceptual system must be: it is a thematic pattern of semantic relationships in a subject, one that is reconstructed again and again in nearly the same ways by members of a community."

"[Teachers] emphasize the human side of science: real activities by real human beings, both today and in specific periods of history. Personal characteristics of scientists, with which students can identify, should be emphasized rather than making scientists seem superhuman or alien."

"The role of discourse in society is active; it not only re-confirms and re-enacts existing social relationships and patterns of behavior, it also renegotiates social relationships and introduces new meanings and new behaviors."

"When I speak about discourse in general, I will usually mean the social activity of making meanings with language and other symbolic systems in some particular kind of situation or setting."

"Learning science means learning to talk science... Talking science means observing, describing, comparing, classifying, analysing, discussing, hypothesizing, theorizing, questioning, challenging, arguing, designing experiments, following procedures, judging, evaluating, deciding, concluding, generalizing, reporting ... in and through the language of science."

"Ecosocial Dynamics concerns ecosocial systems and networks, i.e. those ecosystems, including all material components, for which semiotic practices are essential to characterizing the dynamics of the material processes which constitute the system through their networks of mutual interdependencies."