Talked Images: Process of Meaning Construction in a Biology Class

1. Talked Images: Process of Meaning Construction in a Biology Class Cláudia Avellar Freitas - FAFI /FEMM Maria Lúcia Castanheira- UFMG Thematic School on Ethnography in Education UCSB – OSU – UCSD - UFMG January 2006

2. OVERVIEW OF PRESENTATION • The historical and theoretical context of the study • Questions addressed in this presentation • Analytical examples • Summary and discussion

3. Theoretical background: the onset of a problem to study • Last 5 decades: growing variety and quantity of images in sciences textbooks. This aspect can be viewed as a consequence of the fact that science cannot be constructed or communicated only through verbal language.

4. Some studies reveal that the quantity of images is used as criteria by teachers when choosing biology textbooks. • Paradoxically, these studies also suggest that teachers make a limited use of such images in the process of teaching. • A literature review made visible that studies about the use of images in classrooms have not beingdeveloped.

5. Overarching question addressed in this study: How are images used in the process of teaching scientific knowledge in biology classes?

6. Research setting • A public school that attended 2318 students from elementary and high school in 2001. This school is located in the central area of a city of 200.000 inhabitants and functions in 3 shifts: morning, afternoon and night. • City economical change: new factories begin to require high school certificate.

7. A first year high school biology class: 36 students (majority 17 years old; 2 students 30 years old); they worked as salesman or housekeepers (minimal wage: R$ 300,00 = US$122) • The teacher was 37 years old. She has taught in state schools for the last 10 years, had a degree in biology from a major public university and worked during the morning and night shifts (a total of 36 teaching hours/week).

8. The field observation started at first day of class, February 8th, and continued until the end of June. A total of 37 hours of class were taped.

9. Data set • Video record of classroom interaction; • Audio record of interviews with teacher and students; • Field notes on classroom interaction and interviews with students and teacher; • Xerox of notebooks, exercise sheets, textbook, tests.

10. Different types of analysis were developed in the present study to address the overarching question proposed Macro analysis that inquired about: • How is the class organized? • When are images used? By whom? • What kind of images are used during the first year in a high school biology classes?

11. Kind of images: • what kind of biological concepts were contemplated through images in the class (content knowledge); • how these images could be classified according to Kress and Leeuwen: conceptual and narrative

12. Micro analysis that examined: • How are the meanings of images discursively constructed by participants? • How are different semiotic means used by the teacher when explaining biological concepts?

13. Premises that guided the proposition of such questions and their examination: • A view that classroom acts as a culture in which members locally construct patterned ways of engaging with each other through moment to moment interactions. (SBCDG, 1992; Green & Dixon, 1993) • An understanding that these patterned ways of interacting lead to particular ways of doing, ways of knowing and to the construction frames of reference that guide the interpretation of and participation in the group. (Green & Wallat, 1979; Gumperz, 1992 Gee & Green, 1999)

14. An understanding of teaching and learning as inferential processes: as teachers and students interact they rely on the interpretation of contextualization cues to produce meaning. • An understanding that meanings are not given but constructed by participants as they interact throughout the year. Meaning is context dependent. (Gumperz, 1992; Bakhtin, 1992; Bloome & Egan-Roberson, 1993; Erickson & Shultz, 1981)

15. Image A complex of visual elements correlated to each other that represents reality and can be recognized as a unit. An image can be constituted by visual and verbal elements. (Lemke, 1998; Martins, 2000; Kress & Van Leewen, 1990)

16. General Event Map

17. General patterns identified Class was developed in 3 major events:

18. Frequency of use of images Standardized images of biological concepts were used in a total of 77.4% of classes. From those 29.63% appeared in books and exercises sheets, tests (WG; I) 70.37% were drawn in the black board by teacher (WC- T)

19. The teacher drew 1 to 4 images a day (average of 2.3 images/day). • Images could be available on the board from 12 seconds to 18 minutes. Most of them stayed on the board between 6 to 8 minutes.

20. Digestive system and its organs

23. Digestive system and its organs

24. Teacher draws one organ and the system: a conceptual image. • The talked image becomes a model to understand part- whole relationship of a system (analytical). • Teacher names and identifies parts of the system by using different semiotic systems: gestures, deixis, drawing on the board. (Descriptive function)

25. Energy transfer Image used by ecologists

27. Representing selected elements of energy transfer model

28. Piranha C2º Herbivorefish C1º Sea weed P Food Chain

29. Redundancy and complementarity

30. Contradiction between semiotic means

32. Different semiotics means are explored by participants in the process of producing and using images in the classroom: verbal (oral and written language), gestures, drawings.

33. The result of exploring different semiotic means can be complementary by redundancy: gestures and talk reinforce potential meaning of elements visually represented in the image. • The result of exploring different semiotic means can also be contradictory: what is visually represented is the opposite of what is signaled by gestures or words.

34. The use of scientific representation implicated in the omission of original elements or its substitution by other means (the constraints of the context of use). • Images used in the classroom are related to different kinds of contexts: academic/scientific: where the concepts and images come from; education department orientation: which topics should be addressed and in which order.

35. The analysis shows that the meaning of an image is not simply in the image itself – it depends on the discourse that is produced about the image presented to students. (Context dependent/ constructed “shared” meanings: same understanding?)

36. The fact that students have to copy the images in their notebooks increased the changes of them not processing the different semiotic means explored by the teacher. What sense do students make of images used in the classroom?

37. Since images are such central to the teaching process in biology classes, it seems necessary to address with teachers what is implied in its transposition from the scientific world to the classroom. • It is necessary to make explicit the grammar used in the production of images to help students to understand the role of this semiotic mean in the construction of scientific knowledge.