Umeå universitets logga

This study is part of an ongoing research project that examines the pedagogical potential and limitations of drawing in science education. In this study we report from four primary school classrooms (year 1-3), where the task was to carefully observe and document a scientific object (leaves, mushroom, a bar magnet, and amosquito wing). Our aim is to identify how the teachers position drawing vis-à-vis science in these classrooms; what emerges as the foreground and background of teaching? Moreover, we seek to identify how teachers use different resources to support students’ drawing and science learning.

We have analysed video data from eight science lessons. Each lesson includes three phases; teacher’s introduction, individual students' work, and teachers’s follow-up at the end of the lesson. We apply a sociosemiotic approach tomultimodality, focusing on the semiotic resources (e.g., speech, images, artefacts) that teachers use to support the students’ drawing and science learning.

All the teachers use speech, body language, magnifying glasses, and images of enlarged objects to support students to carefully observe and draw scientific objects. Our preliminary findings show that drawing is foregrounded in three ofthe four classrooms. For example, the teachers show and discuss how to use different drawing tools and techniques to represent transparent surfaces (of a mosquito wing) and jagged edges (of a leaf), rather than discussing the mosquito wing and leaf from a science perspective. The findings raise questions about how to teach drawing and inquiry simultaneously in science classrooms.