Research project This project is about exploring the educational potential of drawing in primary school science teaching. Researchers and teachers therefore work together to develop, implement and analyze teaching activities. The activities include that the students practically investigate a natural phenomenon and then try to represent the phenomenon visually by drawing
The purpose of the project is to create knowledge about how and why drawing can contribute to teaching and learning in natural sciences in the low school. A further aim is to contribute new ways of visually representing scientific concepts.
The project responds to a need to involve teachers' voices in research on drawing in science teaching. We will collaborate in groups that include two primary school teachers, an image educator, a researcher in literacy and a researcher in science didactics. Three such groups will develop, test, document and analyze science activities that include drawing.
Our analysis is based on a social-semiotic approach to multimodality and we investigate, among other things, how students create and communicate meaning when drawing. The ambition is that the project will contribute with an educational vocabulary and a practical repertoire for teaching about and through drawing in the natural sciences - and to interpret and evaluate children's drawing as a sign of learning in the natural sciences.
