In this study, we investigate how young students can make use of their own disciplinary drawings to support transitions between everyday and scientific discourses of water. The empirical data consists of video-recorded stimulated recall interviews with six student pairs (age 8 years), conducted six months after they had been introduced to a water theme that included disciplinary drawing techniques. During the interviews, we provided students with their drawings as recall material. To stimulate a stalled discussion further or to support a new line of thought, we also asked supporting questions and provided the students with plastic models of water molecules, and a bottle of water. To trace their reasoning over time during the interview, the empirical material was used to construct semantic profiles for all student pairs underpinned by Legitimation Code Theory (LCT). Our findings show that most students used their drawings to bridge everyday experiences and scientific explanations of phenomena involving water. The plastic models and the water bottle however had varying effects, sometimes leading to adding a scientific discourse, and sometimes leading to off-topic reasoning. The students generally needed adult guidance to use their own drawings for navigating between everyday and scientific reasoning. However, our findings also show that some students were able to independently use their drawings to move between everyday and scientific discourse, in a way that suggests a gradual deepening of their understanding of the chemical properties of water. Based on these findings, we advocate for emergent disciplinary drawing, in combination with guided discussions, as an age-appropriate method for supporting primary students to navigate between everyday and scientific discourses in chemistry class. This approach could ensure that the educational value of students' creative efforts when drawing extends beyond the moment of creation, to also foster a richer language that can open for new ways of understanding and making sense of the world. 

This article explores how teachers can support students’ observational drawing skills in the biology classroom. The article is based on classroom data from a collaborative project involving primary school teachers, arts educators, and researchers. Together, we have planned and implemented classroom interventions, aiming to contribute knowledge about the pedagogical potentials of drawing in science. In this article, we analyse one teacher’s way of teaching observational drawing to 8-year-old students. Our analysis reveals two main teaching emphases: (1) the interplay between observing and drawing and (2) the visual characteristics of natural objects, particularly the shape, colour, and specific details of different species. Our findings provide valuable insights for educators who seek to integrate observational drawing into science education. First, we highlight the significance of the teacher’s content knowledge in biology, as it corresponds to the ability to guide students’ attention to specific details in natural objects. Second, we show the pedagogical potential of providing explicit feedback during the drawing process in terms of encouraging students to make detailed and realistic drawings while also making them visually engaging. Lastly, we show that the teacher makes use of verbal, bodily, and visual resources to create a collaborative space for communication around student drawings.

This article is about the pedagogical potentials and challenges of co-drawing in science education. It builds on video data from three primary school classrooms where students worked in pairs to draw some science content on a shared paper. Grounded in a sociomaterialist approach, we analyse how students, drawing tools, paper templates, visual resources, and science concepts collaborate during drawing activities. Our findings reveal that even though two students share a paper they do not necessarily negotiate their understandings of the science content they are asked to draw. For example, one student may shape a verbal and visual narrative about the science content with little input from the other, or negotiations may focus more on drawing techniques and composition than on understanding the science content. However, the article identifies a promising scenario in terms of science learning opportunities, when both students draw within a confined space on the paper. In such cases, it seems that science learning emerge while drawing and that both students are involved in a joint learning process.

In democratic societies, exchange of written opinion is fundamental, but since the 1990s, public debate has gradually moved away from print media platforms to digital media platforms. In order to understand how a shift from print to digital media in opinion-oriented writing may have consequences for interaction and participation, it is relevant to investigate interpersonal aspects of opinion-oriented texts situated in digital and print media. The aim of the study is to explore and compare writers’ attitudes and the construction of the writer-reader-relationship in digital media (represented by Twitter) and (traditionally) print media (represented by letters to the editor, LEs). Bakhtinian dialogism and appraisal theory form the theoretical backdrop of the study. Results show that in the LEs, writers tend to take a negative general value position, but in the tweets, the writers’ attitude is more often either positive or negative, making Twitter a more diverse platform. Furthermore, attitudinal meaning is more transparent in the LEs, indicating that tweets are more often specialized, and readers who are not familiar with the context and interactional style of specific writers may be excluded from the communication. Another result is that a shift from print to digital media platforms seems to turn the focus of discussion more towards attitudes and perspectives in general, and less towards writers’ own attitudes. Therefore, digital media opinion exchange can be understood as a meta-discussion of attitudes, while print media rather transmit writers’ personal attitudes.

I demokratiska samhällen har åsiktsutbyte i skriftlig debatt en grundläggande funktion, men sedan 1990-talet har den offentliga debatten gradvis rört sig från tryckta medieplattformar till digitala medieplattformar. För att förstå hur detta skifte i opinionsorienterat skrivande kan få konsekvenser för interaktion och delaktighet, är det relevant att undersöka interpersonella aspekter av opinionsorienterade texter i digitala och tryckta medier. Syftet med studien är att utforska och jämföra författares attityder och konstruktion av relationen mellan skribent och läsare i digitala medier (representerade av Twitter) och (traditionellt) tryckta medier (representerade av dagstidningars insändarbrev). Dialogism i Bakhtins tradition och appraisal-teori utgör den teoretiska bakgrunden för studien. Resultaten visar att skribenter tenderar att inta en allmänt negativ attityd i insändarbrev, men i tweets är skribenters attityd mer heterogen, vilket gör Twitter till en mer skiftande och diversifierad mediaplattform. Dessutom uttrycks attityder i insändarbrev nästan uteslutande explicit, medan attityder i tweets oftare uttrycks implicit eller indirekt, vilket gör att läsare som inte är bekanta med sammanhanget och interaktionsstilen hos specifika skribenter riskerar bli utestängda från kommunikationssituationen. Ett annat resultat är att en övergång från tryckta till digitala mediaplattformar tycks flytta diskussionsfokus bort från skribenters egna attityder, till förmån för andras attityder och allmänna perspektiv. Därför kan digitala mediers åsiktsutbyte förstås som en metadiskussion av attityder, medan tryckta medier snarare förmedlar författares personliga attityder.

This study deals with all children’s possibilities of meeting the multilingual society and aims to explore the norms regarding language and culture that are reflected in picturebooks in preschools. Previous research has shown how picturebooks can be used to develop literacy skills and intercultural understandings among children. A postcolonial lens is used to identify social locations and thereby unfold hidden power relations and social positionings of who is to be included and who is not (Spivak, 1988; Yuval-Davis, 2006). 35 picturebooks collected from preschools in Iceland, Norway and Sweden have been analysed by frequency and qualitative content analysis, eleven of which were found to contain multilingualism and/or multiculturalism. The results show a) a prevailing monolingual norm in which solely artefacts carry multilingual trails; b) a strong monocultural norm, which places people of diversity in a marginalised position; c) the English language holds an advanced position compared to majority languages, which situates other minority languages as anomalous. The educational significance of the research implicates a need for multilingual and multicultural diversity to be more observable in picturebooks used in preschool, to help children develop languages, and their own linguistic and cultural identity/-ies and, thus, their sense of belonging to a multilingual society.

This article is an empirically grounded contribution to the understanding of how digitalization in education is interpreted and made into being by actors in everyday lives, in this case children and teachers in Swedish early childhood education. The focus is on interactions in an early childhood classroom upon and around a digital interactive floor setting. Drawing on the theoretical concept of socio-spatiality, this literacy event is understood as an enactment of policy where both teacher and children become actors and subjects. Using observations and video recordings as a methodological approach, the study shows how the literacy event in the digital setting is enacted and constituted as a relational process between literacy desirings and education policy regarding digitalization. The authors suggest that engaging with both children’s processes of literacy desirings and educational commands in ECE digital activities serves as a productive way to investigate how digitalization is enacted in contemporary ECE. 

This article addresses questions related to how the change in the textual landscape, from paper-based books to electronic books, has an effect on the teaching of reading in early childhood classrooms as well as how the digital devices relate to different aspects of reading instruction. Drawing on the theoretical concept of affect, the purpose is to expand knowledge about processes of experiencing literary digital texts that are enacted and produced in a Swedish classroom when the teacher and the six-year-old students encounter digital narrative texts. The study draws on ethnographical methods to collect empirical material using video recording, field notes, and small interviews with children. The documentation includes both individual and collaborative reading of digital narratives. Discussed in the intersection between envisionment and affect, the results show that e-book activities create multiple and differing processes of reading. The metacognitive processes initiated by the teacher's instruction of reading strategies create a distance between the student and the text, while processes of embodied sense-making create a closeness to the text that seems to be vital when the students encounter digital narratives and text worlds. These findings may contribute to educational as well as edu-political discussions about pedagogical rationales for e-book activities in which the dynamic and essential relation between body, space, and reading is made prominent.

I dagens samhälle är skrivande en nyckelkompetens för deltagande i arbetsliv och samhällsliv. Ur ett demokratiperspektiv är förmågan att både vilja, våga och kunna skriva för att delta grundläggande – för alla elever. I den här artikeln lyssnar vi till mellanstadieelevers röster om hur deras skrivande tar form i ett samspel mellan individen och kontextuella resurser. I samband med en klassrumsintervention där skrivandet stod i fokus skrev eleverna loggbok och intervjuades om sina åsikter, tankar och erfarenheter av skrivande i och utanför klassrummet. Loggböckerna skrevs en gång per vecka och intervjuerna genomfördes dels individuellt, dels i fokusgrupper. Interventionen pågick i tre veckor och utvecklades av lärare och forskare tillsammans.

Utgångspunkten för analyserna är att skrivande sker i ett samspel mellan individen och den kontext individen befinner sig i, såväl historiskt som pågående. I detta samspel skapar den som skriver ett avgränsat mål med skrivandet, vilket kan beskrivas som en meningsfull retorisk handling (Flower, 1989). Resultaten visar att elevernas skrivande kännetecknas av en samverkan mellan individen och olika kontextuella resurser såsom ord, modaliteter (bild och musik), struktur, skrivkamrat, mottagare, materialitet (mobiltelefon) samt elevens erfarenheter, åsikter, tankar och idéer. Dessa resurser används av eleverna för att skapa mål och mening med sitt skrivande; skrivandet blir relevant för dem.

This study describes and critically discusses a development project designed to create and enact a local language policy at a Swedish multilingual school, its context, content and implementation dimensions. The collaborative construction of a school language policy is a complex process, with tensions that need to be resolved. By describing the processes involved in the language policy project we examine the factors that facilitated and obstructed the enactment of the language policy. The data include 25 interviews with school headteachers and staff members, 15 observations of teachers and school-age educare teachers, field notes, and audio recordings of research circles. Drawing on insights from the enactment framework, the analysis reveals three important themes with respect to the enactment processes: continuity, cohesion, and inclusion. Factors such as communication and leadership, but also external factors, were found to influence outcomes of the project, illuminating an interwoven web of contexts and facets for understanding the enactment of the language policy. These factors influencing outcomes of the project will be discussed in the light of implications for the enactment of the school language policy project.