”It vapors up like this”. Children making sense out of illustrations of evaporation at a Swedish Preschool
Author(s):
Anneli Bergnell Karlsson (presenting / submitting)
Conference:
ECER 2015
Network:
Emerging Researchers' Group (for presentation at Emerging Researchers' Conference)
Format:
Paper

Session Information

ERG SES C 11, Arts and Education

Paper Session

Time:
2015-09-07
11:00-12:30
Room:
336. [Main]
Chair:
Volker Bank

Contribution

In Sweden, as well as in in other European countries, there is an enhanced stress in educational legislative acts and common debates on the importance of early experiences in school subjects like mathe­matics and natural science (e.g., Ministry of Education and Research, 1998/2010). The emphasis on early, increases the demands on the role of preschool as for providing young children with opportunities to deal with, for example, common scientific concepts in hands-on, playful activities. Even so, this stressing of school subjects, seems to have led to a transition from a traditionally theme-based practice into a more subject-oriented one in Swedish preschools (e.g., Thulin, 2011) and has furthermore shifted the focus from what knowledge is needed and enjoyable for the child “today”, to what is desired “in future society”. However, even though early science-compe­ten­ces indeed are important, there are researchers who do not recommend such a unilateral focus on subject content in preschool education (e.g., Sheridan et al., 2009). Asplund Carlsson and Pramling Samuelsson (2003) on their part advocate that the scientific content is included in meaningful activities, where teachers consciously work with children’s ideas of the world. A common way to accomplish this is to make phenomena visual through illustrations. Such an approach is frequent in pre- and primary schools and particularly so in science education (Helldén, Lindahl & Redfors, 2005). This paper presents a study of 5­-6-year-old children as they interact and make meaning out of illustrations relating to the concept of evaporation, afforded at a Swedish preschool.

Young children seem use “whatever is at hand” (Kress, 1997, p.28), when creating, interac­ting or making meaning in a particular situation. Such spontaneous multi-modal ability supports the idea of including explanatory illustra­tions to intro­duce, concretize, clarify, repeat complex scientific phenomena, which is also stressed as important in the Curriculum for the Preschool, which states that preschools should strive to ensure that every child “develop an interest in pictures [...] as well as the ability to make use of, interpret and talk about them” (Ministry of Education and Research, 1998/2010, p.10).

However, a wide range of multi-modal materials presupposes that children can handle visual, verbal and physical affordances often at the same time, when grappling with the content (Lemke, 2000). Researchers have recognized that illustrations cannot be assumed to be universal or transparent, but rather dependent on the person doing an interpretation, the situation in itself, and the actual cultural context (Kress, 2003; Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006; Meira, 1998; Pintó & Ametller, 2002; Rogoff, 1990, 1995). Furthermore, previous studies have shown that even if the interpretation of an illustration may seem uncomplicated, preschool children could have great diffi­cul­­ties in interpreting them in an adequate way (e.g., Ljung-Djärf et al., 2014). This area still lacks re­search and especially investigations focusing on preschool children, which calls for studies like the present one.

The overall aim of the research presented in this paper has been to study what visual information images and bodily-based illustrations used in a preschool context offered the children. The questions were: How are the illustrations handled by the children? Do the illustra­tions afford the intended meaning to the children? What kind of meaning making do the illustrations render and what can be difficult to grasp?

By using a combination of sociocultural and multimodal theories, the analysis focuses on the situated interaction between the children and the teacher; both in terms of what meaning-making is offered and what the children actually are doing. In the present paper, the findings will be discussed by using a model provided by Enge­bretsen (2012), which analyzes the balance between multi-modal cohesion and ten­sion. 

Method

Three girls 5-6 years old and their preschool teacher were interacting and making meaning out of illustrations relating to evaporation. The activities took place both outside the preschool building at a nearby lawn and indoors in a room with chairs and tables. The participating preschool is located just outside a rather large Swedish city. It regularly works with environmental issues. Some weeks before the collection of the present data, a closed-looped-system activity had been launched, in which a plant had been secluded into a glass jar. Data were collected when this experiment was followed up with an out-door activity rela¬ting to the concept of evaporation; a term which none of the children had previous experiences of. In the first part of this outdoor activity, the teacher asked the children to put on a plastic glove. They were also requested to spray-water a mirror, a car and also up in the air. The teacher had also brought out both the glass jar with the secluded plant and a regular plant in a flowerpot. She encouraged the children to tell about their own ideas by posing questions like: What will happen? How come? Do you know anything else about this? At the end of this session, the children took off the plastic gloves and felt the moisture on their hands. Now the question whether the same thing would happen to plants and trees was posed. To find out the answer, a plastic bag was tied around a small branch with leaves in a tree and left there for two hours. In the meantime, the children and the researcher played a board-and-dice game relating to water cycles, where evaporation was one of the illustrated phenomena. After the two hours had elapsed, the group went back to the tree and discovered that the plastic bag was now damp inside. The use of video-recorded observations offered opportunities to capture, not only the children’s body movements, language and facial expressions, but also their grappling with the illustrations in use, in the context of the activity. The camera was hand held when recording outdoors but placed on a tripod during indoor activities. After the sessions, all verbal interaction was transcribed verbatim in a first phase, and thereafter selected parts were complemented with body movements, gestures, gazes etc.

Expected Outcomes

In this study, the participants were dealing with a rather complicated scientific content. Obviously, how the concept of evaporation is used and illustrated by the teacher may be discussed. Could statements about human beings “evaporating” mislead the children in their making of meaning? However, by taking the children’s own bodies as a starting point, the teacher embodied the concept of evaporation, which later on seemed to help the children to talk about the phenomenon. The teacher’s illustration (with the ascending arm-movement) of how the water “evaporates away from the leaves and up in the air” is but one such example. In the ensuing board-and-dice game conversation, the children added this embodied illustration of evaporation into their own discussion about how the trees “soak up water” and how the water later on “flies up in the air”. Even though no one actually used the word “evaporation”, the children seemed to have made meaning of the phenomenon as such with help of the illustrations afforded. When preschools are regarded by public authorities as such important places for providing early competences in school subjects, there may be a risk that preschool teachers will tend to be too cautious when dealing with scientific contents. Instead of widely discovering the world around them together with children, they might feel obliged narrow down to certain facts about concepts or phenomena. Teaching-aid materials could balance the need for both content’s accuracy and enjoying activities if used with proper guidance such as shown in the present paper. There is always a need to pay attention to the ways in which illustrations are presented to and enable the making of meaning for the children. Otherwise, such materials and activities would only weaken preschools play-based and theme-oriented traditions, where teachers are free to work in multi-subject and multi-modal ways.

References

Asplund Carlsson, M. & Pramling Samuelsson, I. (2003). Det lekande lärande barnet -i en utvecklingspedagogisk teori. Stockholm: Liber. Jewitt, Carey (2008). Multimodality, media, learning and identity. Medien Journal, 32 (1), 31-40. Engebretsen, Martin (2012). Balancing cohesion and tension in multmodal rhethoric. An interdisciplinary approach to the study of semiotic complexity. Learning, Media and Technology 37 (2), 145-162. Helldén, Gustav, Lindahl, Britt, & Redfors, Andreas (2005). Lärande och undervisning i naturvetenskap – En forskningsöversikt. Vetenskapsrådets Rapportserie 2005:2. Vetenskapsrådet. Uppsala: Ord & Form AB. Kress, Gunter (1997) Before writing: Rethinking the paths to literacy: London:Routledge. Kress, Gunther (2003). Literacy in the new media age. London: Routledge. Kress, Gunther, & van Leeuwen, Theo (2006). Reading images: The grammar of visual design. London: Routledge. Lemke, Jay (2000). Multimedia Literacy of the Science Curriculum. Linguistics and Education, 10, 241-271. Ljung-Djärf, Agneta., Åberg-Bengtsson, Lisbeth., Ottosson, Torgny., & Beach, Dennis (2014). Making sense of iconic symbols: A study of preschool children conducting a refuse-sorting task. Environmental Education Research. (Published online: 30 Jan 2014) DOI: 10.1080/13504622.2013.870128. Meira, Luciano (1998). Making sense of instructional devices: The emergence of transparency in mathematical activity. Journal of Reaserch in Mathematics Education, 29, 121-142. Ministry of Education and research (1998/Revised 2010). Curriculum for the Preschool, Lpfö. Stockholm: http://www.skolverket.se/publikationer?id=2704 Pintó, Roser, & Ametller, Jaume. (2002). Students’ difficulties in reading images. International Journal of Science Education, 24, 333-341. Rogoff, Barbara (1990). Apprenticeship in thinking. Cognitive development in social context. New York: Oxford University Press. Rogoff, Barbara (1995). Observing sociocultural activity on three planes: Participatory appropriation, guided participatory, and apprenticeship. Ingår i Wertsch, James V, Río, Pablo del, & Alvarez, Amelia. (Red.). Sociocultural studies of mind. New York: Camebridge University Press. Sheridan, Sonja, Pramling Samuelsson, Ingrid, & Johansson, Eva (2009). Barns tidiga lärande. En tvärsnittsstudie om förskolan som miljö för barns lärande. Göteborg: Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis. Thulin, Susanne (2011). Lärares tal och barns nyfikenhet. Kommunikation om naturvetenskapliga innehåll i förskolan. Göteborg: Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis. Amendment: The board-and-dice game, which is in use for this study, is produced by authors Malin Hardestam and Kristin Dahl (2010) at a Swedish publishing house: Alvina Förlag. It is stated by the publishers, to be “a game for knowledge”. It is called Vattenvandringen. In English: ”Water-hiking” (my translation). For more information about this game please visit: http://www.alvinaforlag.se/bocker/vattenvandringen.shtml

Author Information

Anneli Bergnell Karlsson (presenting / submitting)
University of Borås / University of Gothenburg
Borgstena

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