Seeing climate change: developing professional vision through interactive data visualisations

This article examines how interactive data visualisations can foster professional vision in science teacher education, focusing on socioscientific issues (SSIs) related to climate change. Drawing on video-recorded teaching at a Swedish science centre exhibit, we analyse how an experienced educator engaged two pre-service teachers in exploring dynamic visualisations of sea-level rise and urban vulnerability projected onto a large-scale city model. Using interaction analysis and Charles Goodwin’s concept of professional vision, we identify key episodes that illustrate how professional ways of seeing are enacted in interaction. The analysis shows how the educator established a visual frame, interpreted risks, and projected futures. Professional vision was not only disciplinary and centred on interpreting scientific categories such as sea-level rise, infrastructural systems, temporal and scenario-based reasoning, and data-literacy practices. It was also pedagogical, oriented towards what might be teachable, engaging, or confusing for students. We propose the notion of dual-layered professional vision to capture this intersection of scientific and pedagogical seeing. The study contributes to research on SSI pedagogy and teacher education by demonstrating how interactive visualisations can be orchestrated to cultivate interpretive expertise, enabling pre-service teachers to engage with complexity, uncertainty, and the entanglement of science and society in an out-of-school context.