No abstract

Teachers can integrate discussion and writing about photographs into the early childhood curriculum to build speaking, reading, and writing skills in any language. Although little available research focuses on photography and early childhood education as related specifically to English Language Learners, several current teacher resources do focus on uses of photography in classrooms for young children. What is lacking, however, is substantial reference to the planned use of language along with image creation through photography for the language development of English Language Learners (ELLs) in the early childhood classroom. Teacher training, too, devotes insufficient attention to either visual literacy or visual communication. This article provides a discussion of the role of the visual in English language development as a basis for a sample photography project that can be incorporated into a course for pre-service teachers in methods of teaching ELLs. Pre-service teachers thus experience the project first-hand in terms of image creation and the planning of appropriate content, language, and visual literacy objectives. The resulting visual products then function as teaching resources themselves; however, effective visual learning for ELLs requires that teachers possess such an informed understanding of the techniques that structure and assist language development.

This article reports on a study that investigated the ways that children's use of science journals aided their acquisition of science understandings in one kindergarten and one fourth‐grade classroom. The questions for investigation were: how does the child contextualize the science experience on the journal page? How do child‐produced graphics on the journal page reflect the children's experiences with other school texts? The study found that children recontextualized their understandings of the science investigation and phenomena by using three types of mental contexts that were reflected in their science journals: these contexts were imaginary, experienced, and investigative worlds. By drawing on these three worlds or internal contexts, the children were able to pull the external phenomenon into an internal context that was familiar to them. The child's construction of ideas about a current science experience as expressed on the journal page may reflect experiences with other conventional texts. In this study the children's representations of their imaginary, experienced and/or investigative worlds were shaped by other texts and structures such as school science texts. © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 38: 43–69, 2001

This paper presents initial findings from a project that explored the use of digital cameras by preschool children in classroom science investigations. Children's science experience was viewed through a multimodal, social semiotic lens. A qualitative approach to data analysis was used to track and codify the visual choices made by the child photographers. This paper characterizes the precise visual choice-making in which the children engaged to compose their photographs. Focusing on one investigation of mixture and separation, the paper contrasts case studies of two of the focal children, arguing that a series of child-composed photographs can be viewed as a visual structuring of perceptual experience. In fact, the photographs provided visual evidence of the children's relationships to the investigation. These photographs are also compared with the children's post-investigation drawings to demonstrate differences in the use of image-as-photograph and image-as-drawing to visually characterize their roles in the science investigation.

This article presents a kindergarten science inquiry as an exemplar for the purpose of suggesting an analytic graphic that is visually inclusive of the multimodal resources brought to bear by children and teachers engaged in classroom interaction. The central aim is the visual representation of the analysis so that the analysis itself becomes visual communication, a means of generating knowledge about multimodal discourse. This makes the discourse structure much more accessible to viewers than a verbal transcript. Findings demonstrate that the children and teacher carried out activity that reflected generally mismatched classroom discourses. The children engaged in the science processes of observation, interpretation, and design of the investigation while the teacher focused on the social process of classroom management. Visual communication is central in helping researchers and teachers to visually associate the elements and structure of interactions so that teaching response can be designed.