THE SCIENCE FACULTY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CAPE TOWN INVITES YOU TO THE 2026 SEMINAR SERIES

This seminar series is organised by the Science Faculty Research Committee.
Everyone interested is welcome to attend.

Speaker
Prof. Urban Eriksson
Department of physics and astronomy
Uppsala University, Sweden

Title
Learning science at higher education - like learning a new, challenging multimodal visual language

Abstract

Learning any science discipline can indeed be challenging and often be seen as learning a new language. However, the language is complex and consists of not just spoken and written words, but also graphs, tables, simulations, gestures, mathematics, activities, tools, etc. All these we refer to as resources, modes, representations and more, depending on one's theoretical lenses. In this talk, I start to present the predominant theoretical lens I use in my group's research – social semiotics – where we refer to these “language items” as semiotic resources and systems, and give examples taken from different disciplines to exemplify disciplinary languages.
With this in mind, I will present a project where the use of semiotic resources is really challenging, and that is students’ and experts’ understanding and communication of large and small spatio-temporal scales. Scales and large and small numbers are central to all science and seen as a threshold concepts: novices need scale comprehension to really understand science on any deeper level. How hard can that be? I will thus present the latest results for our SCALE study.

Speaker Biography

Urban Eriksson is a university-appointed professor in physics with specialisation in Physics and Astronomy Education Research (PAER) at Uppsala University, Sweden, where he leads the division of Physics and Astronomy Education Research (PAER). He is responsible for both the research programme and doctoral studies in PAER. Prof. Eriksson is deputy head of department, director for undergraduate studies, and leads the Unit for Fundamental Physics and Astronomy. He is also editor for the International Astronomy Education Journal.