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This article explores how teachers can support students’ observational drawing skills in the biology classroom. The article is based on classroom data from a collaborative project involving primary school teachers, arts educators, and researchers. Together, we have planned and implemented classroom interventions, aiming to contribute knowledge about the pedagogical potentials of drawing in science. In this article, we analyse one teacher’s way of teaching observational drawing to 8-year-old students. Our analysis reveals two main teaching emphases: (1) the interplay between observing and drawing and (2) the visual characteristics of natural objects, particularly the shape, colour, and specific details of different species. Our findings provide valuable insights for educators who seek to integrate observational drawing into science education. First, we highlight the significance of the teacher’s content knowledge in biology, as it corresponds to the ability to guide students’ attention to specific details in natural objects. Second, we show the pedagogical potential of providing explicit feedback during the drawing process in terms of encouraging students to make detailed and realistic drawings while also making them visually engaging. Lastly, we show that the teacher makes use of verbal, bodily, and visual resources to create a collaborative space for communication around student drawings.

This article is about the pedagogical potentials and challenges of co-drawing in science education. It builds on video data from three primary school classrooms where students worked in pairs to draw some science content on a shared paper. Grounded in a sociomaterialist approach, we analyse how students, drawing tools, paper templates, visual resources, and science concepts collaborate during drawing activities. Our findings reveal that even though two students share a paper they do not necessarily negotiate their understandings of the science content they are asked to draw. For example, one student may shape a verbal and visual narrative about the science content with little input from the other, or negotiations may focus more on drawing techniques and composition than on understanding the science content. However, the article identifies a promising scenario in terms of science learning opportunities, when both students draw within a confined space on the paper. In such cases, it seems that science learning emerge while drawing and that both students are involved in a joint learning process.

This presentation examines how children (7-9 years) negotiate scientific and visual meaning when they co-draw a science explanation. Research has shown that the process of drawing is beneficial for students’ meaning-making (Ainsworth et al. 2011) and reasoning (Tytler et al. 2019) in science. Still, previous studies predominately focus on drawing as product - not as process. As Wilmes and Siry (2021), we assume that science learning unfolds in interaction. Moreover, we employ a socio-material perspective on learning and communication (Barad 2007). Acting within a qualitative interpretative paradigm, we analyse video data from six primary school classrooms. Children’s task was to draw a science explanation in pairs. Our analysis focuses on how children engage in the drawing process. First, we excluded the video sound, focusing on whether children participate with pencil, gestures and gaze in the drawing. Second, we added sound, to identify children's discussions about visual and scientific meaning. We informed children and parents about the project before we asked for their consent to participate. During classroom visits, we recurrently asked for children’s consent prior to recording an event.Our preliminary findings show two ways of enacting the task: (1) Both children draw or (2) One child is the main “drawer”, while the other (2a) occasionally breaks in with their pencil, (2b) engages in the process with gaze and gesture but does not draw, or (2c) is not involved in the drawing process. The findings raise questions about how teacher can scaffold children to make co-drawing exercises a joint venture.