ABSTRACT. An amusement park can be seen as a large laboratory, offering an abundance of accelerated and rotating coordinate systems, giving unique opportunities to investigate the laws of physics and experience them throughout the body. What is up? What is down? How does the heart respond when you are upside down? How does technology ensure our safety through motions that appear dangerous? Many amusement parks offer different forms of school programmes or worksheets. How can we, as science of technology teacher educators, support teachers in using amusement ride examples in their science and technology teaching? As an introduction to the roundtable discussion, examples from a few Scandinavian parks are presented in some detail, and participants are invited to share and discuss other examples.

ABSTRACT. National systems of education are increasingly challenged to develop and learn in relation to other countries and a quickly changing society. Questions of sustainability, climate change, processes of migration and democratization, emphasize the importance of developing high-quality education – not only through educational reforms – but also through international research collaboration and partnerships. In particular, partnerships between institutions offering initial teacher education programs share the potential to contribute significantly to educational improvements. The aim of this collaborative initiative is to bring together science and technology teacher education researchers from universities in Sweden, Norway and South Africa. The focus is on comparing experiences, theoretical perspectives and sharing research findings. There is hope that doing this can help achieve the goals of science and technology education for global sustainable development in line with the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. At the roundtable, we present tentative results from a recent workshop conducted at the University of Gothenburg. The workshop initiated a comparative interrogation of the similarities and differences among the content and theoretical perspectives guiding science and technology teacher education from universities in the participating countries. During the roundtable we will focus discussions around the following three questions: 1) What are successful ways of connecting theory and practice in science and technology teacher education? 2) To what extent and in what ways do north and south perspectives influence how sustainability issues are included in science and technology teacher education? 3) What would be a possible design of future international comparative research of science and technology teacher education? We believe that comparative studies around these questions involving North–South cooperation can contribute insightful findings germane to the future development of teacher education practices in both worlds.

ABSTRACT. In the last few years, language has assumed a distinctive role in science education. Linguistic theories have entered this field of research either to analyze verbal interactions and meaning making processes in science classrooms or, more generally, to understand the structure of knowledge and the way science is produced and circulated in/through several contexts. For example, “scientific literacy”, metaphorically or not, has become synonymous of learning science and also the main goal of curricular reforms around the world. In this work we present a perspective of language within a Vygotskian perspective (in which language, activity, and consciousness constitute an integral process in the human development), we provide a rationale to portray the nature of language in Science Education by means of three categories: aesthetic appeal, elucidative function, and participative role. The analysis made explicit problematic aspects about the nature of science; the empiricist view of human cognition, and the contradiction between individual learning and collective action.