Susan J. Britsch

The Role of Children's Journals in Elementary School Science Activities.

Abstract: This article reports on a study that investigated the ways that childrens 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 childrens 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 childs 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 childrens representations of their imaginary, experienced and/or investigative worlds were shaped by other texts and structures such as school science texts.

The multimodal mediation of power in the discourses of preschool story designers

Abstract The analyses offered in this paper attempt to elucidate some of the complex strategies that very young children use to assert power in socio-narrative activity. The paper focuses on three child storytellers in one preschool classroom who recruited verbal, visual, gestural, actional, and narrative mediating elements to carry out multimodal discourses. The children’s spontaneous narratives made use of various combinations of color, size and placement of drawings, as well as segmental and suprasegmental language features, written language, gesture, and silence. These elements carried out each narrator’s moment-to-moment design of the discourse by working in service of a switch-off between signs via the various narrative elements of the fictions that the children were creating. Simultaneously, the children played out real-world social relationships through these fictional narratives in successive attempts to invade—or at least touch—corners of each other’s realities. The analysis includes a textual component as well as visual representations that relate the exemplified interactions to the discourses of which they are part. These interactions and discourses are also linked with the notion of macro-narrative and the role of less visible mediating elements drawn from the history of the child’s relationships.

Differential discourses: the contribution of visual analysis to defining scientific literacy in the early years classroom:

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.

Building a Literacy Community: The Role of Literacy and Social Practice in Early Childhood Programs

This article reports findings from two qualitatively based studies, one conducted at an urban preschool in Northern California and the other at a rural Head Start Center in the Midwest. By presenting detailed data from the two preschool sites, the article describes several ways to strengthen existing literacy practices for children, families, and teachers in both urban and rural early childhood settings. The studies focus on such critical aspects of child and family literacy development as ownership and inclusion, raising important issues for practice and policy in early childhood literacy and language education.

‘But what did they learn?’ Clearing third spaces in virtual dialogues with children

In the age of standards, the challenge is great to sustain children’s voices as transformative forces in academic contexts. Interactive writing may offer an environment where children can reframe their engagement with curricular and personal knowledges, or even redefine the nature of academic content itself. This article focuses on the second year of a school-university project in which child and adult writers carried out long-term email dialogues. The adult writer-researchers questioned the suitability of these dialogues for enhancing the children’s curricular knowledge while supporting their personal investment in writing. The year-long dialogues resulted in three types of third-space environments where children differently balanced the relationship of curricular knowledge to personal knowledge.

Emergent Environmental Literacy in the Nonnarrative Compositions of Kindergarten Children.

This article shows how links between science and literacy offer kindergarten children the opportunity to create and express their individual understandings about environmental change through emergent environmental literacy. This article reports on one of the science experiences in a kindergarten classroom in which the children explored the phenomenon of environmental change. The kindergarten science program can help children learn how scientists look at the world; young children can express these concepts through nonnarrative compositions. The article concludes with suggestions for teaching practice in the kindergarten science program.

Tools for Assessing and Teaching Science in Elementary and Middle School

In this chapter we first provide an overview of assessment in elementary and middle school classrooms: we describe the purposes for assessment, outline a strategy for planning assessment in science, discuss the difference between evaluation and grading, and propose a view of assessment as profiling. We next present an overview of different types of assessments, ranging from open-ended response tasks to practical tasks. We then discuss specific methods and formats for assessing children based on their science activity and the products they produce within those activities, including the assessment of science attitude, and peer and self-assessment. We conclude the chapter by talking about children’s self-produced journals as a teaching, learning, and assessing tool in science.

The researcher as teacher: constructing one's place in the story of events of preschoolers

This article focuses on the authors work as a researcher‐teacher, examining storytelling activities of preschool children in her own classroom. By examining ways in which one university‐based researcher dealt with the demands of being both teacher and researcher, this paper proposes that university‐based researchers who take on the role of teacher both construct and define an enactment‐of‐self in the classroom. In a Janus‐faced kind of interplay, the researcher draws on teacher skills, and the teacher draws on the research perspective and continuously walks the line between the moment‐to‐moment demands of each role.

Exploring science visually: Science and photography with pre-kindergarten children

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.