Unpacking measurement devices: Transduction and multimodality for blending mathematics and physics in teacher education

This exploratory study investigates how the analysis of measurement processes and transduction mechanisms can support the integration of mathematics and physics in teacher education. Framed within a socio‑semiotic perspective on multimodality, we conceptualise teaching and learning as the result of cognitively and affectively motivated choices among available meaning‑making resources. Building on work by Duval, Bezemer and Kress, Airey and colleagues, and others, we distinguish between semiotic and non‑semiotic representations and between intra‑modal transformations (treatments) and inter‑modal transformations (transductions). We then use these constructs to examine how mathematical and physical reasoning can be blended rather than separated. The empirical context is a teacher training course (February–June 2023) within the Multidisciplinary Laboratory Teaching project at INDIRE, involving a working group of researchers and eight secondary school mathematics and physics teachers. The group collaboratively designed and analysed experimental activities centred on motion and measurement, with particular attention to the functioning of motion detectors as paradigmatic “black‑box” instruments. By progressively unpacking the internal mechanisms of such devices—analogue and digital, continuous and discrete—the teachers explored transductive chains linking bodily action, sensor signals, graphs, and formal mathematical expressions. Video‑recorded and transcribed meetings were cross‑analysed to identify key epistemological and didactical themes. Two transversal foci emerged: (1) the role of transduction and measurement in mediating between continuous physical magnitudes and discrete numerical structures; and (2) the interplay between analogue and digital representations in contemporary measuring instruments. The findings suggest that treating transduction and measurement as central scientific practices offers a promising educational alliance for overcoming the perceived gap between formal mathematical entities and the modelling of physical phenomena, while also fostering teachers’ critical engagement with technology and multimodal classroom design.