ABSTRACT:In some contexts, a photograph may be worth a thousand words. Previous research revealed a dialectical character of photographs: they simultaneously lack determinacy and exhibit an excess of meaning. The purpose of this study was to understand how, under this condition, high school students interpret photographs that were accompanied by different amounts and types of cotext (caption, main text). The data for this study consists of video-recorded interviews with twelve Brazilian high school students. What students perceived was in part a function of the presence of caption and main text; these texts not only described what could be seen but also taught students how to look at photographs. We conclude that high school students not only need to develop subject matter literacy but also a literacy concerning photographs to fully understand their textbooks. INTRODUCTIONEvery image embodies a way of seeing. Even a photograph. For photographs are not, as is often assumed, a mechanical record. Every time we look at a photograph, we are aware, however slightly, of the photographer selecting that sight from an infinity of other possible sights. This is true even in the most casual family snapshot. The photographer's way of seeing is reflected in his choice of subject. . . . Yet, although every image embodies a way of seeing, our perception or appreciation of an image depends also upon our own way of seeing. (Berger, 1972, p. 10) We live in a visual world. Television, movies, and photographs are pervasive, constantly overwhelming us with images of reality in places other than where we currently are. It is therefore not surprising that photographs are also the most frequent type of inscription (representations other than language) in high school biology textbooks (Roth, Bowen, & McGinn, 1999). Existing research suggests that pictures make significant contributions to textbooks because of their potential for improving students' retention of associated text (Peeck, 1993). Yet there is very little research investigating the pedagogical role of photographs in school science: neither the psychology of cognition and learning (Schnotz, Picard, & Hron, 1993) nor science education research has paid much attention to this topic (Pozzer & Roth, 2003b). What complicates the issue is that photographs may be worth a thousand words, but on their own, they mean very little (Wittgenstein, 1958(Wittgenstein, /1994. They give rise to innumerable, different interpretations because, as our introductory quote articulates, their meaning emerges from the dialectic relation between the photographer's way of seeing and the perceptions of the reader. It is the reader's work of reading, the viewer's perception of the narrative and perceptual order of the photographic image and the surrounding text, and the meaning-making resources available to the reader that allows a specific interpretation of a photograph to arise (Bjelic, 1992). What then do high school students perceive when they look at photographic images in biology textbooks? How d...

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ABSTRACT:When lecturing, teachers make use of both verbal and nonverbal communication. What is called teaching, therefore, involves not only the words and sentences a teacher utters and writes on the board during a lesson, but also all the hands/arms gestures, body movements, and facial expressions a teacher performs in the classroom. All of these communicative modalities constitute resources that are made available to students for making sense of and learning from lectures. Yet in the literature on teaching science, these other means of communication are little investigated and understood-and, correspondingly, they are undertheorized. The purpose of this position paper is to argue for a different view of concepts in lectures: they are performed simultaneously drawing on and producing multiple resources that are different expressions of the same holistic meaning unit. To support our point, we provide examples from a database of 26 lectures in a 12th-grade biology class, where the human body was the main topic of study. We analyze how different types of resources-including verbal and nonverbal discourse and various material artifacts-interact during lectures. We provide evidence for the unified production of these various sense-making resources during teaching to constitute a meaning unit, and we emphasize particularly the use of gestures and body orientations inside this meaning unit. We suggest that proper analyses of meaning units need to take into account not only language and diagrams but also a lecturer's pointing and depicting gestures, body positions, and the relationships between these different modalities. Scientific knowledge (conceptions) exists in the concurrent display of all sense-making resources, which we, following Vygotsky, understand as forming a unit (identity) of nonidentical entities.

Photographs are the most frequent inscriptions in high school biology textbooks. However, little is known about how students make sense of and learn from photographs; even less is known about the different resources available for making sense of photographs when they appear in lectures. In this study, the use of photographs during lectures and lecture-type situations was analyzed with respect to the semiotic resources that speakers standing next to the projected photographs provided for understanding and learning from them. Our analysis identified eight types of gesture as semiotic resources that decreased the ambiguity inherent in photographs, and that have the potential to enhance the understanding of photographs and the scientific concepts embodied in them. We surmise that teachers can help their students learn to read and interpret photographs from lectures when they project them in such a way that it allows the use of gestures as additional meaning-making resources.

This study is about the interaction of scientific expertise and local knowledge in the context of a contested issue: the quality and quantity of safe drinking water available to some residents in one Canadian community. We articulate the boundary work in which scientific and technological expertise and discourse are played out against local knowledge and water needs to prevent the construction of a watermain extension that would provide a group of residents with the same water that others in the community already access. We draw on an extensive database constructed during a three-year ethnographic study of one community; the database includes the transcript of a public meeting, newspaper clippings, interviews, and communications between residents and town council. We show not only that scientists and residents differ in their assessment of water quality and quantity but also that there is a penchant for undercutting residents in their attempts to make themselves heard in the political process.In our society, the stories of ordinary peoples' relationships to ordinary places remain largely a hidden and untapped resource for understanding the complicated, shifting connections between human behaviour and environmental conditions. (Bowerbank, 1997, p. 28) This article is concerned with the conflict between scientific expertise and local knowledge in the context of a case study that focuses on the attempt of some residents of one Canadian community to become connected to the watermain