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.

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.

Evolution is a fundamental concept in biology education, recently emphasized in the Swedish curriculum for Year 4–6. However, teaching evolution poses challenges, necessitating innovative educational tools. This study explores the development and use of a comic book, Cats on the Run–A Dizzying Evolutionary Journey, designed to teach evolutionary concepts to young students through a narrative involving two modern-day house cats traveling through time and space. To explore what function the material has for students’ meaning making we analyze what students describe to have learned working with the comic Cats on the Run, and how aspects of the comic book are reflected in the students’ self-reported learning. The study involved 159 students from Grades 4–6 who used the comic book in their biology lessons. Analysis of student survey responses revealed that the students draw on the comic’s narrative and imagery as they report on learning about key evolutionary concepts such as variation, natural selection, heredity, and evolutionary patterns. Analysis of student survey responses revealed that the comic facilitated meaning making about key evolutionary concepts such as variation, natural selection, heredity, and evolutionary patterns. Students were often referencing the comic's narrative and imagery as they reported their learning. The findings suggest that the comic book is a valuable educational tool. More specifically, the narrative and multimodal aspects of the comic support meaning making and learning. This study highlights the importance of thoughtfully designed educational materials and suggests that combining different resources can enable discussion and learning of complex scientific concepts.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine in the spring of 2022 sparked worldwide calls for empathy and solidarity with the Ukrainian people. In Sweden, many artists, authors and activists answered this call with performances, productions and other forms of public demonstrations. The publication of 'Report from Ukraine', by two Ukrainian cartoonists, was one such response. The comic follows the authors' perspective on the lead-up to, and start of, the events of February 2022. In the current article, we look at how Swedish teenagers (n = 91) in upper secondary school (aged 18-19) explore the message of 'Report from Ukraine' and how these students construct and critique ideas around solidarity and otherness through the visual and textual means of the comic. Analysing video observations of 25 small group discussions, the study discusses students' empathic responses to the comic. The findings reveal how the pupils form an emotional alliance with the Ukrainian characters based on their suffering and the similarities the students draw to their own lives. Furthermore, empathy with Ukraine is also intertwined with antipathy for Russia and the comic's depiction of Russian soldiers.

Professional higher education encompasses the development of relational skills and professional judgement, especially in welfare professions where close contact with people is essential, such as policing, teaching and health care. In the current article, using a cross-professional analysis, we explore how students from three different professional education programmes – teacher education, police education and medical education – construct professional judgement in group discussions and interviews. The results show that participants construct professional judgement as a relationship between three different dimensions: personal ethics, educational standards and professional practice. The examples in this article show how students utilise these three different dimensions when discussing professional dilemmas to account for choices that they (would) make as being morally or ethically sound. We argue that these results shed light on the importance of providing students with opportunities to reflect openly on professional judgement in different ways, even though this may not currently be examined or graded in their education. Furthermore, the analysis demonstrates similarities between the three examined programmes, as well as similar student reflections on essential aspects of the professions.

This article explores booktalk situations in which student teachers discuss a narrative text and construct in situ accounts of learning when recalling their reading. This study contributes to knowledge about the role of narrative fiction in general educational practice, as well as to the understanding of situated constructions of learning. Video and audio recordings were made in a seminar involving two groups of five master's students, and the situated interaction was analysed using discursive reception theory. The results show that students construct what are here called moments of insight: a social action constructing a significant shift in participants' self-described cognitive or emotional development, related to the reading. Students construct themselves as having been changed as both teachers and learners, either through the reading experience or when reflecting upon that experience. This demonstrates both how booktalk enables students to reflect upon their reading and their own cognitive development, and how situated classroom interaction studies enable us to engage with student learning in a naturalistic setting. This has an impact on our view of narrative fiction in educational practice, as well as educational research methods and practices.

The Swedish gender-neutral pronoun (GNP) hen has been in popular use since its (re)introduction to the public in 2012. Earlier research, analysing newspapers, academic papers and blogs, shows two uses of hen: when gender is unknown and when gender is irrelevant. However, there is a lack of studies of verbal, situated, uses of hen. In this article, we analyse recordings of year-eight students using hen when discussing a Nemi comic. Drawing on discursive psychology, we explore how students negotiate the gender of two unknown characters, and co-construct hen as the proper pronoun use. Adding to previous research, the analysis shows how students make both gendering as well as not gendering into accountable, repairable actions, and how they verbally use hen as a norm-critical other-repair, specifically as an action promoting GNP use. Thus, this exploratory case study contributes knowledge on the situated use of hen, something hitherto unexplored. These results are in turn important to research on gender-neutral pronouns, and our knowledge on their situated use, as well as norm-critical work in schools.

Arbete i fritidshem innebär en stor variation av material och aktiviteter i att möta elevers behov, intressen och erfarenheter, men även utmana dem att utvecklas i sina intressen. Populärkulturen erbjuder ett underlag för detta, som arena för barn att dela erfarenhet och kunskap. I denna artikel undersöker vi hur populärkulturella uttryck skapas i fritidshemmet. Studien bygger på fältobservationer med fritidshemspersonal (n=7) och barn (n=47), i årskurs 2 och 3. Resultatet visar hur elever använder populärkultur för att visa intressen, individualitet, grupptillhörighet, värderingar och status. Detta kan vara problematiskt, då barn inte alltid själva väljer vilka attribut som skapas utifrån den populärkultur de förknippas med, och dessutom kan viss populärkultur strida mot det sociala och pedagogiska uppdrag som fritidshemmet har. Det är därför viktigt att inte enbart förbjuda barns intressen, utan skapa samtal, och ett fokus för diskussion, för att medvetandegöra både barn och vuxna om populärkulturens influens i barns liv.

This paper explores how participants in a Swedish secondary school do gender talk with comics. Swedish schools are tasked with working with gender, but this can be a challenge for many teachers, and finding materials to work with gender aspects can be difficult. Meanwhile, literary research on comics has shown them to be a potential tool for problematising gender, but little educational research has investigated the gender discussions that comics can promote. Therefore, using conversation-analytical methodology, we have documented situated classroom talk through video observations, focusing on the social construction of gender. Five excerpts are shown, where different aspects of gender talk are displayed and discussed. Results indicate that although students deconstruct and criticise gendered binaries in characteristics and behaviour from comics' imagery, this critique remains superficial, revolving around the hypersexualised body imagery of the muscular superhero the Phantom or the outdated femininity of the girly Daisy Duck. Although comics present an opportunity for discussions of norm critique in the classroom, we suggest that more social-realistic comics, wherein gender roles are more subtle and nuanced, be used for furthering the research on this topic and allowing students more width when it comes to deconstructing gender binaries.

Kalle Anka & Co har hyllats för sitt berättande och sina karaktärer, samtidigt som serien kritiserats för att vara förmedlare av kulturimperialism. Denna artikel diskuterar två seriealbum skapade för användning i svensk grundskola, sammansättningar av tidigare publicerade serier. Då dessa samlingar är tänkta att användas i skola så kan samlingarna också förväntas gestalta värderingar i linje med detta. Som centrum för handlingen, eller för karaktärsmotivation, är pengar den enskilt mest förekommande faktorn i dessa berättelser. Nio berättelser har valts ut och analyseras utifrån 1) hur fattiga och rika karaktärer porträtteras genom bild och text och 2) hur pengar och materialism konstrueras som moraliska värden. Analysen visar hur värden om materialism och pengar representeras av olika karaktärer: Joakim von Anka (rikedom, snålhet), Kalle Anka (lättja, slösaktighet) och Knattarna (godhet, arbetsiver). Som representanter för barnläsaren skildras Knattarna som goda arbetare, där arbetet är sin egen belöning och essentiellt för god karaktär. Dock kan rikedom som kommer från hårt arbete (till exempel Joakims) associeras med omoral om inte pengarna används till goda syften. Vidare gestaltas vissa karaktärer som intrinsikalt fattiga, vilket kan ses som problematiskt om det inte diskuteras tillsammans med unga läsare. Här kan läraren vara avgörande för elevers möjlighet till texttolkning. English abstract “Hard work made me who I am”– money and moral value as pedagogical aspects of two Donald Duck albums. Donald Duck & Co have been simultaneously celebrated for vivid stories and characters, and criticized as being conveyors of cultural imperialism. This article discusses two comic albums collecting previously published comics for use in Swedish elementary school. As these collections are designed for schools, they can be expected to impart certain school values. As plot device, or as basis for character motivation, money is the single most common factor in a majority of the stories. Therefore, nine stories have been analysed, focusing primarily on 1) character portrayal through image and text, and 2) how money and materialism are constructed as moral values. The analysis shows how values of materialism and money are displayed differently, represented by different characters: Scrooge McDuck (wealth, greed), Donald Duck (sloth, wastefulness), and Huey, Dewey and Louie (goodness, hard-working). As representatives of the child reader, the nephews show a love of hard work essential to good moral character. However, wealth that comes from hard work (Scrooge’s wealth) could also be immoral if it is not spent properly (or at all). Moreover, certain characters are constructed as intrinsically poor and hopeless, which is problematic. Here, the teacher could be vital for students’ possibilities of interpreting the texts.

This paper analyses and discusses ongoing comics literacy events where two 3rd Grade students and their teachers are working with comic books, focusing specifically on visual representations of sound. The purpose of the paper is to explore how these representations, as multimodal aspects of comics literacy, provoke literacy experiences in the classroom. Visual representations of sound come in different shapes and sizes, but are generally written outside of speech bubbles in bold letters. Using discursive psychology –allowing the researcher to view participants’ verbal and embodied actions as performing actions in social and situated contexts– the current paper analyses how pairs of students and teachers co-construct visual aspects in comic books, translating them into verbal sound and embodied action. Results show that embodied motion, sensation, and audible sound are utilized to interactively display comic sound effects to enhance the reader’s experience of the narrative. This is done as co-construction between adult and child through re-enactment of the visuals as real-life sound and action –also connecting this to other visual aspects of adjacent panels in order to make this meaningful. The paper argues that this challenges both teachers’ and students’ perceptions of what literacy can be and how sound effects –through the shape, colour and font of the graphic text– influence and enliven the comic narratives created in the classroom.

The aim of this article is to increase knowledge on the use of comics as materials in K-9 education (ages 6–15). This is achieved through an integrative research review. Reference lists and websites have been searched, both by database searches and manually, and the results analysed and cross-referenced to identify common areas of research and possible gaps in knowledge. 55 texts (research articles and doctoral theses) were found, with 40 first authors from fourteen countries. The results revealed several gaps in knowledge. Most of the analysed studies had been carried out in North America, which suggests that more studies in other educational contexts, published in English, are needed, and that cross-national studies of comics in education will be productive. Furthermore, only three of the analysed texts describe studies that have high ecological validity, while all of the remaining 52 studies were ‘staged’ studies, in which the researcher had introduced material and observed the results. This suggests that further studies that utilize non-experimental research methods are needed. Finally, most studies focus on students’ reading preferences in regard to comics, rather than, for example, on how students compose comics or what they learn through comics. Thus, further studies that explore student work with comics, and examine the kinds of knowledge that reading comics enables, are desirable.

This article explores how teachers and pupils construct and negotiate discourses around comic books as part of interaction in the classroom from a New Literacy Studies perspective. The combination of imagery and text, the essence of comics, makes them relevant tools for exploring how literacy is constructed in social interaction in the classroom. The analysis is based on video material from two different Swedish schools, one class in Grade 3 and one class in Grade 8. Nine interactional sequences were initially found, and these have been analysed using a qualitative discursive psychological approach, investigating how assessments are utilized to perform social actions – how participants use assessments of comics as easy or difficult reading, or assessments of themselves or others as being or not being comic book readers – to make something happen in interaction. The results show that participants utilize discourses of personal, visual and textual literacy to construct a comics literacy in which image and text are both construed as important for, as well as a difficulty in, reading comics. This demonstrates constructions of comics literacy and readership, how personal experiences of reading comics are important and the importance of broadening the view of comics as school literature.

The aim of this article is to increase knowledge on the use of comics as materials in K-9 education (ages 6-15). This is examined through an integrative, systematic literature review of research. S ...

This article combines theory on comics, narrative, and discursive psychology and analyses how the gutter is co-constructed for storytelling in classroom interaction. Closure of the gutter has previously been treated as a cognitive aspect. Here, interactional video data are analysed, with participants organizing ten separate comic panels. The analysis focuses on participants' talk about the gutter, and how this constructs social actions. The results show how participants co-construct the gutter as meaningful space, hereby organizing time, actions, and events in narratives. The paper evinces that gutters are co-constructed as too narrow or too broad, relating chronologically and logically to surrounding panels. This contributes to sociocultural perspectives on literacy and use of comics for engaging with narratives in classroom practice.

Serietidningar i skolan gör det möjligt för elever att arbeta med handling och känsla i berättelser och visar hur lärares och elevers personliga erfarenheter med serier bidrar till klassrumsarbetet.

Kallery (2014) investigated Greek early-years-teachers’ views of factors that may influence the quality of their teaching performance in science. The study revealed factors that were classified in four domains: teacher-related factors, pupil-related factors, situational factors, and initiatives for personal professional upgrading. The study also revealed that the teachers recognize their knowledge as playing a primary role in relationships among the factors. Using the same methodology as this of the Greek study (written assignments and a group interview) we carried out the above study in Japan. Six experienced teachers from primary school and kindergarten participated in the study. The analysis of data yielded factors that were categorized in the following seven domains: teacher-related factors, teacher-teacher relation factors, pupil-related factors, pupil-pupil relation factors, teacher-pupil relation factors, parent-related factors, and material-situation related factors. Although the categorization of the factors in Japan is a little different from that in Greece, the results in the two countries are very similar. Early-Years-Teachers in Japan think that the most difficult problem for them is that they do not have enough science knowledge in order to be able to respond to children’s interests and curiosity in science. They also think that in order for them to overcome this problem and improve their background knowledge in science, it would be fruitful to participate in a work-group where they can freely ask questions and exchange ideas and views on scientific knowledge. Teachers also noted that they prefer the group-work than attending official workshops or conferences. Starting up such groups consisting of teachers from primary schools and kindergartens and from university staff and developing the networking of such groups will lay the foundation for early-years teachers’ education in science.