Researchers have provided many arguments for why drawing may contribute to science learning. However, little is known about how teachers in early childhood education (ECE) make use of drawing for science learning purposes. This article examines how teachers' views and framing of drawing activities influence the science learning opportunities afforded to children in the activities. We use activity theory to analyse teacher interviews and observation data from ten science classrooms (children aged 3-8 years) where drawing activities occurred. The interviews reveal that few of the teachers relate drawing to science learning specifically. Rather, they portray drawing as a component of variation in teaching and learning in general. Looking at what happens in the classrooms, we conclude that drawing has a relatively weak position as means of communicating and learning science. Instead, the teaching emphasis is on writing or on 'making a product'. However, there are examples where teachers explicitly use drawing for science learning purposes. These teachers are the same few who, in interviews, relate drawing to science learning specifically. Based on these findings, we encourage school teachers, teacher educators, and researchers to identify, and overcome,obstacles to realising the pedagogical potentials of drawing in ECE science classrooms.

This article elaborates on classroom interaction in relation to literacy learning across the curriculum. Drawing on a study in two grade six classrooms in Sweden, we report on identified possibilities of interaction during 12 lessons in the two subject areas of Law and Rights and World Religions. The analysis focuses on the register of repertoires for interaction through organisation and teaching talk and, to some extent, learning talk (Alexander, 2008). These repertoires, and the possibilities they create, are related to Cummins' (2001) framework. The results elucidate the important role interaction plays for students' learning of literacy through subject content and vice versa. Drawing on the results, we argue it is necessary to consider the students to be participants with resources, who can increase their possibilities of taking active part in both the initial, intermediate and final phases of learning in various subject areas if interaction is more present. In this way the students can get access to classroom practices, drawing on various subject content, that more strongly support them to develop sustainable abilities of literacies and specific subject knowledge. The latter is necessary for the learning of all subjects across the curriculum, but also for future commitment within society and citizenship.

This classroom-based study aims to contribute knowledge about children’s opportunities to make use of drawing to make meaning in science. Employing a social semiotic approach to drawing, we examine what ways of representing science content that are (1) made available by the teacher and (2) adopted in children’s drawings. We analysed observation data from 11 science lessons in early childhood classrooms (children aged 3 to 8 years), including the drawings that children made during those lessons (129 drawings in total). Our findings suggest that the semiotic resources that teachers provide have a large impact on how children represent science content in their drawings. Moreover, we interpret that teachers strive to support children’s ‘emergent disciplinary drawing’ in science, since they predominantly provided semiotic resources where the science content was generalised and decontextualised. Finally, we propose that ‘emergent disciplinary drawing’ is incorporated as an element of science pedagogy in ECE practice and ECE teacher education.

This paper focuses on teachers' and students' use of textual resources offline and online in two Grade 6 classrooms. Using analysis of video recordings, the paper presents the ways in which the textual resources are used, and what critical approaches emerge within the teachers' and students' repertoires of teaching and learning. We then investigate what characterizes these repertoires and discuss consequences and possibilities for students' own learning talk in relation to critical approaches and with regard to diversity and participation. The analysis reveals that it is when students ask authentic questions or respond to their teachers' or peers' reflections, that critical approaches appear in relation to content, the surrounding world and themselves. Drawing on the results, we argue that these critical approaches can be deepened in relation to ethical issues, source criticism and redesign, and regardless of whether textual resources are online or offline. Since Swedish national curriculum standards have contributed towards a greater focus on knowledge outcomes, we are concerned that processes of meaning making and criticality might be downplayed. We believe that one of the biggest challenges for future education is how criticality can be linked to teaching and learning in dialogic ways.

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