This is the third article in a series, emanating from a project that used social semiotics and phenomenography to explore the role visual representations play in the teaching and learning of chemistry. Building on our earlier work that identified five qualitatively different ways that teachers may use to unpack visual representations in their introductory classes at upper secondary school when dealing with intermolecular forces, this article deals with how students describe their experience of chemistry teachers' unpacking of visual representations. The theoretical thematic analysis, grounded in phenomenography and social semiotics, foregrounds qualitative differences in students' experiences of teachers' representational work. The results show that the ways of unpacking that we previously characterized as student-centered were described by the students as being particularly valuable. Here, a key point from a student perspective is that the teacher reflects on how to verbally guide them through the unpacking process in ways that support them in their meaning-making. We use these results to propose that chemistry teacher practice and education can be modified to emphasize the importance of seeing the practice of unpacking from a semiotic perspective. Furthermore, based on our findings and previous research in the chemistry education field, we conclude by suggesting a strategy that can be used in teacher education and by in-service teachers as a basis for planning chemistry lessons and reflecting on them, particularly with respect to the visual representations employed.

Chemical bonding is a concept that students often find challenging, not least due to the phenomenon being invisible to the naked eye. In order to visualize invisible chemical phenomena, various visual representations are used, such as ball and stick models, structural formulas, chemical equations and energy diagrams. Previous research shows that many of the challenges that students face when trying to achieve a disciplinary understanding of chemical bonding emanate from the ways in which it is represented by teachers and in textbooks. This study aims to explore how undergraduate chemistry textbooks represent theories of chemical bonding at this level. The study is theoretically framed within a social semiotic perspective, which focuses on how people communicate and make meaning with a variety of semiotic resources (i.e., representations) in particular social settings. As a first step, we performed a semiotic audit of the presentation of chemical bonding in three textbooks. Next, we performed a deeper analysis of how diagrams representing this process are unpacked in the textbooks. The semiotic audit showed that all textbooks mainly used symbolic and submicroscopic diagrams. These representations have a high disciplinary affordance, i.e., they represent specialized disciplinary meanings. It may be necessary to unpack these representations for students in order to make the intended meanings more accessible. In this respect, five different categories of unpacking of diagrams were identified. We conclude that the ways in which a visual representation is unpacked potentially affect students’ disciplinary understanding.

Eftersom kemi ofta handlar om saker som inte kan ses med blotta ögat är visuella representationer en central del av kommunikation och meningsskapande i ämnet. Studien fokuserar på hur ”osynliga” kemiska fenomen synliggörs i läroböcker för universitetsstudenter inom området kemisk bindning. 

Studien grundas i ett socialsemiotiskt perspektiv med fokus på hur kommunikation och meningsskapande sker med olika semiotiska resurser. Inledningsvis genomfördes en övergripande analys av de visuella representationer som används för att synliggöra kemisk bindning i tre läroböcker. Resultatet visar att läroböckerna främst använder diagram med ett disciplinärt och abstrakt innehåll. En slutsats som dras är att dessa representationer kan behöva packas upp i läromedlet för att främja studenters meningsskapande. 

I nästa steg genomfördes en mer detaljerad analys av hur molekylorbitaldiagram illustreras och packas upp i läroböckerna. Denna typ av diagram är centrala i bindningsteori, samtidigt som de visats vara svåra för studenter att förstå. Diagrammen analyserades med avseende på vilka relevanta aspekter som synliggörs och hur de packas upp. Resultatet visar fem olika kategorier av upp-packning; 

·       antagande, (dvs. ingen uppackning sker),

·       skriven text i representationen, 

·       omgivande skriven text,

·       visuella representationer i samma semiotiska system,

·       visuella representationer i annat semiotiskt system

Baserat på resultaten dras slutsatsen att studenters möjlighet till meningsskapande kan påverkas av hur relevanta aspekter packas upp i läroböcker. Det är centralt att läromedelsförfattare reflekterar över vilka visuella representationer som används och hur de packas upp i läromedlet. Resultaten bör även vara relevanta för lärare i andra ämnen som berör fenomen som inte går att se med blotta ögat. 

UNESCO has identified education for sustainable development (ESD) as a key factor in the achievement of sustainable development goals (SDGs). Education is important in developing awareness of how to preserve natural ecosystems and promote the uptake of renewable energy sources. Ecology education in primary school aims to give students a scientific foundation to further their education in biology and develop environmentally literate citizens who will protect, restore and promote the sustainable use of natural ecosystems. This early education includes awareness of how human welfare depends on functional ecosystems to provide food, clean water and oxygen. However, previous studies have shown that young students face serious challenges when constructing a holistic view of complex ecological relationships. In this study, we interpret students’ written texts and drawings when, in small groups, they were asked collectively to describe necessary functions in an ecosystem, as a final task after a series of lessons on ecology. By focusing on students’ expressed ideas on the availability of energy and matter in the ecosystem, we construe four models. The students in our study propose, firstly, that energy flows or can circulate, and secondly, that matter circulates, is provided by the sun, or is created anew. Moreover, the students often express fragmented processes, combined in different ways. According to our results, we propose aspects that can inform the design of primary school teaching of ecology for sustainable development. 

As disciplines, undergraduate physics and chemistry leverage a particularly wide range of semiotic systems (modes) in order to create and communicate their scientific meanings. Examples of the different semiotic systems employed are: spoken and written language, mathematics, chemical formulae, graphs, diagrams, sketches, computer simulations, hands-on work with experimental apparatus, computer simulations, etc. Individual semiotic resources within this range of semiotic systems are coordinated in specific constellations (Airey & Linder, 2009) in order to mediate scientific knowledge. In this Swedish Research Council project, we are interested in the representation of scientific phenomena that cannot be seen. The question we pose is: How is scientific knowledge mediated when we cannot directly interact with the phenomena in question through our senses?  We adopt a social semiotic approach (Airey & Linder, 2017; van Leeuwen, 2005), to investigate the ways in which two phenomena—electromagnetic fields and chemical bonds—are presented in undergraduate textbooks. To do this we carried out a semiotic audit (Airey & Erikson, 2019) of eight textbooks (four in each discipline). We note that the individual resources used have a mixture of affordances—whilst the majority retain high disciplinary affordance, others are unpacked (Patron et al. 2021) providing higher pedagogical affordance. We discuss the ways in which the resources have been combined and orchestrated (Bezemer & Jewitt, 2010) in order to attempt to make visible that which is invisible, and identify a number of potential problems. In earlier work, Volkwyn et al. (2019) demonstrated how experimental work with physics devices can make the Earth’s magnetic field accessible to students through chains of transduction. Thus, we propose that encouraging transductions across the semiotic resource systems provided in textbooks may help students to experience the invisible.

References

Airey, J. (2006). Physics students' experiences of the disciplinary discourse encountered in lectures in English and Swedish (Licentiate dissertation, Department of Physics, Uppsala University).

Airey, J. (2009). Science, language, and literacy: Case studies of learning in Swedish university physics (Doctoral dissertation, Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis).

Airey, J. (2015). Social Semiotics in Higher Education: Examples from teaching and learning in undergraduate physics. In In: SACF Singapore-Sweden Excellence Seminars, Swedish Foundation for International Cooperation in Research in   Higher Education (STINT) , 2015 (pp. 103). 

Airey, J., & Eriksson, U. (2019). Unpacking the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram: A social semiotic analysis of the disciplinary and pedagogical affordances of a central resource in astronomy. Designs for Learning, 11(1), 99-107.

Goodwin, C. (2015). Professional vision. In Aufmerksamkeit: Geschichte-Theorie-Empirie (pp. 387-425). Wiesbaden: Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden.

O’Halloran, K. (2007). Mathematical and scientific forms of knowledge: A systemic functional multimodal grammatical approach. language, Knowledge and pedagogy: functional linguistic and sociological perspective, 205-236.

Patron, E. (2022). Exploring the role that visual representations play when teaching and learning chemical bonding: An approach built on social semiotics and phenomenography(Doctoral dissertation, Linnaeus University Press).

Teaching and learning in ecology depend on multimodality, involving semiotic resourcessuch 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 representcomplex biological processes. For a holistic understanding of ecology, it is crucial to understanddifferent 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 howthey position themselves through their textual choices. Results indicate that representing biologicalprocesses comprises several challenges for students. One way in which this is shown is the unclearuse and meaning of arrows. Thereto, the students include various aspects uncommon in the fieldof ecology, for example, symbols inspired by comic books, values, and the role of humans, therebyrelating ecosystems to their interests and everyday life. Implications for teaching are discussed, forinstance, the importance of supporting students in terms of scientific content and how to represent it,which can be conducted through text discussions. 

Teaching and learning in science disciplines are dependent on multimodal communication. Earlier research implies that students may be challenged when trying to interpret and use different semiotic resources. There have been calls for extensive frameworks that enable analysis of multimodal texts in science education. In this study, we combine analytical tools deriving from social semiotics, including systemic functional linguistics (SFL), where the ideational, interpersonal, and textual metafunctions are central. In regard to other modes than writing—and to analyse how textual resources are combined—we build on aspects highlighted in research on multimodality. The aim of this study is to uncover how such a framework can provide researchers and teachers with insights into the ways in which various aspects of the content in multimodal texts are communicated through different semiotic resources. Furthermore, we aim to explore how different text resources interact and, finally, how the students, or authors of teaching resources, position themselves in relation to the subject. Data consist of one student text and one teaching resource text, both comprising drawn and written elements in combination with symbols. Our analyses of the student text suggest that the proposed framework can provide insights into students’ content knowledge and, hence, how construction of multimodal texts may be a useful tool for formative assessment. When it comes to teaching resources, the framework may be a useful tool for teachers when choosing resources, particularly in relation to students’ possibilities of meaning making when engaging with such texts, but also, as a basis for classroom discussions.

Since visual representations play a particularly important role in the teaching and learning of chemistry, the exploration described in this article focuses on them. This is an explorative study of the qualitatively different ways that visual representations can be unpacked by Swedish upper secondary school chemistry teachers dealing with intermolecular forces. Unpacking is characterized as the ways that visual representations get used to open up the possibility of having the critical aspects and features of an intended object of learning being brought into focal awareness, initially on their own and then simultaneously. The analysis, which combines a phenomenographic and a social semiotic approach, leads to the characterizations of five qualitatively different ways that visual representations may be unpacked. These outcome categories are presented in terms of a conceptual hierarchy, where two of these ways of unpacking are characterized as being teacher-centered and the other three as student-centered. This leads to a case being made that if teachers use student-centered ways of unpacking visual representations, then their students will be more likely to gain greater access to critical aspects and features of the enacted object of learning. We argue that in terms of making theoretical and practical contributions to the phenomenographic perspective on learning, the results can be used as a tool for researchers wishing to explore how visual representations can be used effectively in science education and also provide a useful basis for discussion in teacher education and in teacher professional development programs.

Många elever har svårigheter i att skapa mening kring naturvetenskapliga koncept. Tidigare studier inom biologiämnet visar att elever har svårt för att beskriva och tolka hur näringsvävar och andra komplexa begrepp hänger samman. Undervisning och lärande inom naturvetenskapliga områden är beroende av en stor mängd representationer som illustrerar fenomen som är för små, stora, abstrakta eller komplexa för att kunna beskrivas enbart med ord. En förutsättning för att elever ska kunna skapa mening kring naturvetenskapliga begrepp är dels att de kan tolka de representationer som används i undervisningen, dels att de aktivt använder representationer. De möjligheter och utmaningar som elever upplever i sitt meningsskapande i samband med ett eget konstruerande av representationer har rönt alltmer intresse; dock saknas studier som specifikt rör ekologiundervisningen. Syftet med denna studie är att identifiera elevers olika syn på komplexa ekologiska koncept och illustrera på vilket sätt eleverna försöker kombinera dessa för en större helhetsförståelse. Insamlad data består av bilder som elever skapat under ett grupparbete och dessa tolkas ur ett socialsemiotiskt perspektiv. Resultaten indikerar att eleverna fokuserar på representationernas ytliga egenskaper, snarare än den underliggande strukturen, samt att strukturen och vetenskapligheten i elevers visuella beskrivningar av ekologiska koncept skiljer sig åt. Eleverna uppvisar svårigheter när de försöker kombinera faktorer kopplade till olika kretslopp. Vidare visar resultaten att eleverna behöver stöd i att skapa en helhetsbild av ekologiska processer och att analys av elevers representationer kan användas för att identifiera elevers svårigheter. Detta kan möjliggöra ett djupare och mer vetenskapligt resonerande i det naturvetenskapliga klassrummet.

In disciplinary learning classrooms, access to an intended object of learning gets constituted through the affordance of discerned disciplinary relevant aspects, which are typically distributed across several semiotic systems and their resources. This characterization means that classroom learning can fruitfully be seen as a function of getting to be able to interpret and use the meaning potential of these disciplinary-specific semiotic systems and their resources. The aim of this presentation is to use characterization as a framing to make a theoretical link to the complex system notion of emergenceas characterized for educational practices by Davis & Sumara. The data environment is interactive learning with stereochemistry molecular-structure identification exercises, which takes place during a five-week introductory level organic chemistry course. The data environment is chosen because of the appresent dynamics that the stereochemistry curriculum presents – the disciplinary relevant aspects are microscopic and thus their discernment and affordance require semiotic mediating to facilitate access to the disciplinary relevant aspects that are appresent. The analysis shows how, through semiotic transduction, students in group-work situations combine disciplinary convention with their own alternative invention to create semiotic resources that they are able to engage with in a meaningful way, both concretely and visually.