One starting point for a dialogue between literacy education and science education is the way in which science uses multiple literacies. Literacy education usually begins with an emphasis on language and on texts: how they're made, what they mean. Science education begins with questions about how things happen in the world. We might imagine a scientist studying literacy to be a bit like an ethnographer. An ethnographer of science and its literacies will come across other scientists making and using texts, but will look at the properties of texts only in relation to how they function in meaningful social and cultural activity.