Personal, deeply affective, and aesthetic engagement with science content

In science education, the influence that students’ identities have on learning appears a rather familiar focus. However, the inverse question of how disciplinary content learning can be a vehicle for identity formation is little explored. In the contribution, the authors focus on this direction and pursue this agenda by operationally defining a theoretical construct, appropriation. In particular, they first explore how the construct of appropriation sheds light on the process by which content knowledge learning influences identity development. The authors then use appropriation to develop some nuance related to the notion of concept projection from coordination class theory, a well-known perspective within the landscape of theoretical approaches on conceptual change.