Experience is one of the most-used terms in (science) education, and it is recognized as being related to learning (education). Yet what experience is and how it is related to learning and change remains untheorized. In this paper, we mainly draw on the work of J. Dewey and L. S. Vygotsky but also on M. Bakhtin and more recent advances on the topic of experience from French philosophy to contribute to a theory of this important category. Accordingly, experience is not something that belongs to or is had by individuals but rather denotes transactions in and across space and time within irreducible person-in-setting units; and it is perfused with affect that is not (only) the result of mental constructions. An episode from an Australian physics classroom is used to exemplify what such a theory and its method-related implications has to accomplish in the analysis of concrete science lessons.

The authors have declared no conflicts of interest for this article.

The aim of this study is to advance current understanding of the transactional processes that characterize students' sense-making practices when they are confronted with multiple representations of scientific phenomena. Data for the study are derived from a design experiment that involves a technology-rich, inquiry-based sequence of activities. We draw on interaction analysis to examine the work by means of which a group of upper secondary school students make sense of a number of different ways in which a physical phenomenon-a phase transition-is presented to them. Our analytical perspective, grounded in a cultural-historical framework, involves scrutinizing how the different materials emerge and evolve as signifiers for something other than themselves during teacherstudent and student-student transactions. This approach allows us to trace the emergence of students' interpretations of the relations between phenomena and their diverse presentations without committing to any preconceived notion of what these presentations stand for. We describe how students' bodily and pragmatic actions become reified in conceptual terms and how these relate to lived-in experiences rather than to formal underlying concepts. Findings are discussed with regard to the central role of body and praxis in research on learning science with multiple representations.

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This article employs an ecological perspective as a means of revisiting the notion of learning, with a particular focus on learning in higher education. Learning is reconceptualised as a process entailing mutually constitutive, epistemic, social and affective relations in which knowledge, identity and agency become collective achievements of whole ecosystems. This conceptualisation implies that learning involves a trans-contextual and multimodal process, in which both learners and their social and material environments change. This article examines the implications of an ecological perspective on framing notions central to learning and current educational research, namely (a) knowledge co-construction and epistemic agency, (b) the role of (material) knowledge resources in the learning process and (c) the trans-contextuality that characterises learning in today's knowledge society. The discussion concludes by identifying prospects that an ecological perspective offers to education and research on learning in higher education. The insights emerging from this reconceptualisation imply changes in the ways we can enhance and analytically account for the transformative potential of education. They also indicate the necessity for further advancing our understanding of learners' ways of assembling the epistemic spaces necessary to engage in meaningful learning, their agency in this process and their relationship with the (social and material) environment.