This research investigates the interconnectedness of scientific inquiring at the early childhood level, as we explore the discourse-in-interaction processes occurring within small inquiry groups of 5-and 6-year-old children. The rationale behind this research is to explore the nature of science-related discourse, and to that end, this work focuses on student-to-student interactions as they collaboratively investigate water. As we document the nature of children's ways of explaining, imagining, and representing the properties of water, we demonstrate the constructions of understandings as displayed and emergent from these interactions. The study has generated outcomes about the discursive ways of young children's enacting of knowledge about science, as the analysis reveals that by positioning scientific inquiry as a fluid process children were able to enact science collaboratively and through multimodal means. As such, the study reveals a wide range of indicators to children's understandings about water and to the processes in which students worked together to construct science within discourse-in-interaction.

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This manuscript elaborates the value of looking beyond the written and spoken word in science education research and practice at the early childhood level. We examine one plurilingual child's descriptions of a science activity to explore the diversity of resources that she used while expressing her understandings of a sound investigation. We demonstrate the ways in which she made her understandings evident via multiple modalities, including gesture, facial expression, and drawing, in two different classroom contexts; a whole-class discussion and a small group interaction. Foregrounding the resources she engaged serves to illustrate how different classroom structures mediated the complexities of her explanations. The findings of this research underscore our central argument regarding the value of considering the range of resources that facilitate children's expressing understandings in science education so they can be successful, especially within multilingual contexts. We draw implications for research and teaching praxis for positioning science as more than what is spoken and written, but as a complex, embodied enactment deeply embedded in multimodal, multilingual, interactions.

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This manuscript details a field-based methods course for preservice teachers that has been designed to integrate shared teaching experiences in elementary classrooms with ongoing critical dialogues with a focus on highlighting the complexities of teaching. I describe the structure of the course and explore the use of coteaching and cogenerative dialogue as approaches to learning how to teach. Vignettes that typify experiences in this course are analyzed, and two main findings explored. First, coteaching provided critical support to preservice teachers as they taught their first lessons to children. Second, cogenerative dialogues mediated reflexive dialogue around the complexities of teaching, and provided for participants a foundation to examine their epistemological assumptions. It is argued that at a time of increasing segmentation of teacher education, teacher educators need to support dialogic, multi-perspectival approaches that emphasize the complex nature of teaching and learning in elementary classrooms.