In this study, we explore how students in Year 4 (10 years old) utilize different semiotic modes while designing a comic displaying the evolution of a lizard with a particular trait: armor. Situated use of comic design for natural science didactics is an understudied practice, and, thus, based on video observations of three case students working throughout seven lessons, we draw on designs for learning when exploring how different semiotic modes are utilized in meaning making to create an evolutionary trait in designing a comic. The analysis demonstrates how the lizards’ armor is designed, and how this semiotic content is transformed and transduced by the students through different semiotic modes. The results demonstrate that the students’ process develops from mainly verbal discussions to drawn images, to writing, to finally producing the multimodal ensembles of their comics. However, this process is not linear, and the analysis shows how sometimes an individual student’s drawing, gestures, or writing can also become the origin of an idea that is developed through transductions to other modes. Thus, in comic design, transductions between modes support students’ understanding of the biological content, as well as their ability to formulate more general conclusions in the classroom.

In this study, we elaborate on whether – and if so, how – students’ creation of analog and digital representations, in combination, may strengthen their meaning making in combinatorics while engaging in problem solving. An intervention was conducted in two Swedish preschool classes (six-year-olds) involving 25 students. The results indicate that creating a digital animation did not primarily enhance problem solving but rather served as an aid for students to redesign their analog knowledge representations, enabling them to further engage with the mathematical content. A conclusion is that the creation of analog and digital representations, in combination, contributed to students’ explorations of combinatorics and that, when integrated into a learning-design sequence, digital animations enhanced students' understanding of combinatorics. This conclusion should be seen in relation to the small scale of the study, which means that more studies are needed in order to generalize the findings.

This study explores how student-generated comic books can provide insight into students' meaning making about evolution. Despite the complexity of evolution, previous research indicates that students can grasp concepts like natural selection through age-appropriate activities. In this study, we followed a group of Grade 4 students over seven weeks as they engaged in meaning making about evolution. As part of the lessons, the students read comics about evolution, learnt about comic conventions, and at the end of the unit, they created their own comics to represent their understanding of evolution. Building on multimodal theory rooted in social semiotics, we have analysed 14 student comics, focusing on what evolutionary principles are shown in the texts and the semiotic resources used to express these. Findings reveal that all targeted evolutionary principles (variation, heredity, and selection) were represented in the comics, though not all comics included every concept. Evolutionary ideas were expressed multimodally, with common patterns showing evolution at a population level. The sequentiality of the comic format facilitated the depiction of adaptation through natural selection. This study provides insights into the potential of using comics as a tool for students to make meaning and communicate their knowledge about evolutionary concepts.

Unpacking the complexities of learning processes in science education often requires more than just one analytical framework. Despite the need for such analytical and, by extension, methodological diversity, the science education research literature reveals a scarcity of studies integrating multiple analytical perspectives, thereby possibly overlooking crucial aspects of meaning-making and learning. Addressing this gap, we present a methodological innovation by analysing data through the dual lens of two research traditions and their respective analytical frameworks. Specifically, we integrate perspectives of the social semiotic theory of multimodality and embodied cognition to unpack additional layers of complexity within the learning processes in a case study on Newton’s laws in a primary physics classroom in Sweden. By choosing and contrasting different analytical lenses, we uncover the subtle yet profound ways in which students’ interactions with Newtonian physics are intertwined with their embodied experiences. Exploring students’ physical enactment and phenomenological experiences alongside the various functions of language (in a multimodal sense) within a social semiotic framework can deepen our understanding of the challenges students face in learning force concepts in physics. Ultimately, our dual analysis demonstrates the value of synthesising disparate theoretical perspectives and paves the way for richer research methodologies. Such syntheses have important disciplinary implications for science education research and can lay the ground for fostering collaborations among various disciplinary traditions. We argue that this interdisciplinary approach is crucial for making meaningful progress in our field and beyond.

Today, there is an ongoing debate about the use of digital tools among young pupils. However, previous research indicates that digital tools can play an important role even in the early school years, as hybrid learning activities can promote joint activities with interaction as a natural component. Yet, few studies have explored such hybrid activities. This case study investigates how 6- and 7-year-old pupils in two empirical data sets (one from 2012, one from 2023) position themselves when collaboratively creating digital fairy tales in small groups using a tablet application, and specifically how they position themselves in relation to each other and the task they are to fulfil. The study is grounded in social constructivist theory, which posits that individuals interact through verbal and embodied actions in collaboration with others in social contexts. The data comprises video recordings of the participants' interaction with each other and their learning tablets. These recordings were first analysed to discern patterns in the pupils' positioning and video episodes with critical sequences were transcribed with tools from multimodal interaction analysis. The analysis revealed several themes, such as pupils’ positioning through both embodied and verbal interaction in terms of invitations for collaboration, negotiations of power, and positioning in relation to the task, primarily in terms of acceptance and perseverance, with resistance being less common. To conclude, the activity appeared complex, inviting the children to various negotiations and positionings through verbal and embodied interaction. Even though most groups solved both concrete challenges and minor disagreements, the complexity of the activity points to the importance of an attentive teacher.

Using children's literature in different formats is a well-established pedagogical approach for discussing existential questions with young children. This study analyses two books: Goodbye, Mr. Muffin and The Visit from Little Death. The linguistic and visual analyses shed light on the narrative structures, participant roles, and various semiotic elements in these books. A strong contrast in contextual meaning emerges when comparing the two. In Goodbye, Mr. Muffin, death is depicted as a natural part of the life cycle, harmoniously intertwined with nature's beauty, using warm colours and evoking emotions of tenderness. In contrast, The Visit from Little Death portrays death as a more direct and personal presence, employing indexical and iconic signs to evoke a sense of mystery and the unknown. This study contributes to understanding the complex dynamics of using children's literature to navigate sensitive topics in early childhood education.

Previous research suggests that the use of metaphors in science education have both possibilities and challenges. In this study, we analyse the role of metaphors in meaning-making in the upper primary science classroom. We investigate the potential of metaphors about nutrient uptake occurring in classrooms in which an animation was used. To identify metaphors in the classroom interaction, we have applied an analysis according to systemic-functional grammar (SFG), rooted in social semiotic theory. The present study indicates that the use of metaphors can play an important role in scientific meaning-making, since, in that way, students and teachers can make meaning about scientific processes and functions before having access to the scientific terminology. However, if metaphors are to be functional tools for meaning-making in science education, the teacher has an important role to play in, among other things, explicitly connecting the metaphors and everyday language to scientific concepts. We argue that metaphors based on functional similarity have a high affordance for making meaning about complex processes, such as nutrient uptake.

Making meaning about disciplinary knowledge involves both disciplinary content and relevant semiotic resources (e.g., text structures) for communicating the content, as two sides of a coin. The purpose of this study is to contribute to research in science education with a model for visualising how the two sides of the coin are elaborated in classroom interaction, aiming to support students’ disciplinary knowledge development. The model was developed based on data from a series of lessons in a primary science classroom where the teacher and her students negotiated and made meaning about action and reaction forces. We show how the model can be used to deepen the understanding of how the meaning making through classroom interaction forms a pathway, visualising different levels of disciplinary literacy and hence the model's usefulness for both research and for designing teaching practices.

Over the past decades, languages and literacies have become a prominent focus in science education research and practice. While there is broad consensus on the central roles of disciplinary, representational, and cultural languages and their associated literacies in learning and teaching science, the field faces a critical moment. An ever-growing number of new theoretical and methodological perspectives have revealed rich facets of the multilingual and multimodal nature of learning processes in science. These developments prompt us to reflect on the distinct identity and impact of languages and literacies on the contemporary discourse in science education, especially in light of technological innovations (e.g. large-language models) and societal developments (e.g. multilingual contexts). This position paper offers an opportunity to assess the field's past developments and future directions, building on a recent meeting of the Special Interest Group (SIG) on Languages and Literacies in Science Education under the European Science Education Research Association (ESERA). We present viewpoints from four founding members of the SIG, discussing current trends, challenges, and visions for the future. Ultimately, this paper invites our global community to engage in informed dialogues on the role and value of languages and literacies in science education today.

Previous research shows that pupils’ participation in educational activities increases when they are allowed to use several forms of expression. Furthermore, digital media have become increasingly prominent as “carriers” of meaning in chemistry education. Based on that, this paper aims to explore ‘what is happening’ and ‘what is possible’ when six-year-old pupils participate in multimodally designed learning activities and create digital animations of water molecules and phase changes of water. This study is qualitative and draws on the frameworks of social semiotics and Designs for Learning, DfL, where teaching and learning are seen as a multimodal design. The Learning Design Sequence model, developed within DfL is used as a basis for the lesson design and as an analytical tool. The analyzed data were generated by filming when pupils participated in multimodal learning activities, created digital animations, and participated in meta-reflective discussions regarding their digital animations. The main findings are that multimodally designed lessons can increase pupils’ meaning making in chemistry, that the creation of digital animations may both increase pupils’ participation and support their meaning making, and that meta-reflection of pupils’ representations is an important part of the lesson design.

This study examined the potential for children’s multilingual development supported by a digital e-book application (Polyglutt) used in Swedish preschools. The analysis focused on the app’s software design and the reflections of 17 preschool teachers in a large Swedish city, many of whom work with multilingual groups of children. A social semiotic perspective of multimodality was utilized to evaluate the app’s potential and a qualitative content analysis was employed to analyse the interviews. Findings indicated that the app was popular among the teachers and was considered an efficient tool for read-aloud activities, although the potential for multilingual purposes was rarely realized. The analysis shows that the app has potential for multilingual interaction, yet the design does not always make this clearly visible. Didactic implications of the use of the application are critically discussed.

This study reports on a case study about multimodal work in a primary physics classroom focusing on forces. Previous research reports that students benefit from multimodal work in science classrooms. Yet, few systematic studies have been performed to reveal how students represent their experiences and ideas of science phenomena over time within and across different semiotic modes (e.g., through action, speech, writing, and image, including multimodal ensembles). The design of the lessons was built around a number of experimental activities, starting with a puzzling phenomenon and where students for each experiment predicted, observed, described, and tried to come up with explanations. Based on social-semiotics, we combined analysis at an overall level (long timescale and large grain size) and a detailed level (short timescale and small grain size) to shed light on how the science content was represented within and between modes over the teaching and learning period, and what content was expressed in these representations. Our findings reveal how students moved from focusing on attributes such as a "heavy" regarding artifacts used in the experiments, towards the central physics processes, such as one object exerting force on another object. Furthermore, we were able to detect that such "signs of learning" were shown in students' small-group discussions and multimodal texts following a carefully orchestrated multimodal exposition by the teacher. Hence, such a careful multimodal orchestration appeared to be critical for the students' meaning-making about the science content.

The present study aimed to explore ‘what’s happening’ and ‘what’s possible’, when young pupils jointly create multimodal texts in small groups. This was achieved by studying the process when pupils in a grade 2 classroom (i) created handwritten fairy tales, (ii) drew images, and then, (iii) transformed them into animated multimodal texts using a digital application during three small-group activities. Data comprises video recordings, pupils’ multimodal texts (writing and drawings), teaching materials, and lesson plans. This qualitative case study focuses on one group of three pupils aged 8–9. The study is theoretically grounded in the designs for learning perspective, with the Learning Design Sequence Model utilized as an analytical tool. The teacher’s design for learning—including her planned activities and the resources made available to the pupils—appeared to have a major impact on what happens and what becomes possible for the pupils in their design for learning. The teacher’s design also influenced what competencies the pupils could (and chose) to draw upon in the different activities. An important result was that the pupils positioned themselves and each other in quite different ways during the small-group activities, which partly could be explained by the different affordances of the resources provided, as well as the teacher’s design. The detailed descriptions of how the pupils’ positioning changed in relation to the teacher’s design for learning and the available resources add valuable knowledge to the field of educational research.

One central issue for research in classrooms is to provide insights concerning characteristics of classroom interaction that can help teachers improve their teaching. In the present study, we analyse spoken interaction in one elementary physics classroom by the use of two different frameworks, targeting similar aspects of social communication, namely how discourse patterns shape the relations between participants. The two frameworks utilized are on the one hand analyses of the communicative approach according to Mortimer and Scott, combined with analyses of discourse patterns such as IRE-patterns, and on the other hand analyses related to the interpersonal meta-function in Halliday’s systemic-functional grammar, SFG. The aim was to highlight possibilities and limitations of the different frameworks. Our analyses reveal that the two analytical frameworks have partly the same, partly different affordances concerning what they can reveal about classroom interaction. The analyses of the communicative approaches have the potential of elucidating discursive patterns and power relations at a general level, while the analyses based on SFG can provide more details about the power relations in terms of how the participants actually structure their utterances. The results are also discussed regarding implications for education.

Teaching and learning in ecology depend on multimodality, involving semiotic resources such as visual representations, subject-specific symbols, and written and spoken language. Furthermore, the ecology field involves complex processes and relationships, presenting student challenges. However, more research has yet to investigate how students design multimodal texts to represent complex biological processes. For a holistic understanding of ecology, it is crucial to understand different complex processes, such as the matter cycle, energy flow, decomposition, and their relations. Therefore, this study aims to, through multimodal text analysis based on systemic functional linguistics (SFL), identify how secondary students collectively present and combine such processes and how they position themselves through their textual choices. Results indicate that representing biological processes comprises several challenges for students. One way in which this is shown is the unclear use and meaning of arrows. Thereto, the students include various aspects uncommon in the field of ecology, for example, symbols inspired by comic books, values, and the role of humans, thereby relating ecosystems to their interests and everyday life. Implications for teaching are discussed, for instance, the importance of supporting students in terms of scientific content and how to represent it, which can be conducted through text discussions.

The focus of this article is on digital tools as part of mathematics education with six-year-olds. More explicitly, we study how the creation of digital animations, as a part of working on a problem-solving task, enables young students’ learning of combinatorics. In the article, the creation of digital animations implies that the students re-design, that is, recreate their solution procedure with a digital application. The aim with letting the young students create digital animations is diverse. We presume that such work enables problem solving as well as the learning of combinatorics, but also that it has potential to enable creativity and agency in learning. Video-documentations from three classrooms where students work on the problem-solving task were analysed from a multimodal perspective where teaching is seen as a design process. In that process, the teacher designs learning activities that give students access to different resources for their meaning making process. The results show that working with digital animations, when integrated in a learning design sequence, amplify students’ learning of combinatorics.

ABSTRACT This paper examines the affordances of physical objects (e.g. apparatus, models, manipulatives) as they were used by teachers and students to make meaning in coordination with their speech and gestures. Despite the pervasive use of physical objects as material and tactile resources in hands-on investigations or demonstrations, there have been few attempts to analyze their role and function in meaning-making, in the same way, that researchers have previously done for other modes of representation such as speech, written text, diagram and gesture. Using social semiotics as a theoretical framework, we conceptualise physical objects as a semiotic mode with a particular affordance for making meaning that involves embodied actions and manipulation of tools. Based on a multimodal discourse analysis of numerous classroom situations, we illustrate how physical objects as a mode have four unique affordances for meaning-making in science classrooms. These affordances are: (a) enacting material interaction, (b) providing evidential meaning, (c) orientating three-dimensional spatial meaning and (d) sensitising experiential meaning. The implication of why we should use physical objects to support or value-add science meaning-making is then discussed.

Students' and teachers' meaning making in science classrooms is dependent on language in a broad, multimodal, sense, comprising specialized lexicogrammar and ways of using semiotic resources such as models, diagrams, and subject specific symbols. Altogether, the multimodal demands of science can be challenging, in particular for students learning the language of instruction in parallel with the subject content. Yet, multimodal perspectives are scarce in research concerning science learning in linguistically diverse classrooms, where several students are educated in their second language. Drawing on designs for learning theory, the interaction in a linguistically diverse physics classroom was analyzed through the Learning Design Sequence model to investigate the teacher's design for learning for students' meaning-making about 'sound'. Thereto, students' 'signs of learning' regarding subject content and how to communicate content in line with the discourse of science was analyzed. The teacher's design for learning gave the students opportunities to interact about content by use of different semiotic modes, with gradually higher demands regarding both content and how to express the content which appeared to support students' development of content knowledge and competency to express this knowledge in line with the discourse of science. However, some of the teacher's choices appeared to be a hindrance for the students.

Worksheets are common in science classrooms with an aim to support pupils’ meaning-making, e.g., for guiding them in performing hands-on activities and documenting their experiences of such activities. Yet, there have been few systematic studies of pupils’ disciplinary representations in worksheets. Drawing on systemic functional linguistics, we have analyzed fifth grade pupils’ (age 10–11) multimodal texts in worksheets (n = 25) when they were working with shadow formation as part of their regular classroom activities. In the worksheets they were asked to first explain in writing why or why not a shadow was formed and then explain shadow formation through a drawing. At an overall level, we found that a majority of the pupils managed to express in writing why a shadow is formed, though it appeared to be more challenging for them to explain why a shadow is not formed. In their drawings, quite a few pupils managed to include several key aspects of shadow formation, at least when combining image with writing. For all tasks, the explanatory parts of the pupils’ responses were often implicit. Based on our results, we suggest that pupils may benefit from teaching practices that integrate a parallel focus on form and content as a way to raise their awareness of, for instance, the affordances of different resources and how explanations can be structured. Such practices may support pupils to be able to consider and choose appropriate resources in their disciplinary texts.