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This article explores visual formation of science content in multimodal compositions (text and image) made by students through their second school year, and aims to contribute to the body of metalanguage for explicit description and interpretation of this kind of meaning-making. The social semiotic analysis examined both visual and multimodal meaning-making, and resulted in descriptions of seven content representations. These are representing content as theory (content reduced to its most general aspects), as a natural experience (as would be seen with one’s own eyes), as an event (movement, process, perspectives), as art (abstract and/or sensory, vibrant colours and/or experimental shapes), as a person (anthropomorphization of content), as something attitude-evoking (explicitly revealing the author’s attitude towards the content) and as cultural heritage (metaphoric meaning instead of scientific). Among analysed student compositions, these content representations occur both separately and in combinations with each other. Each content representation and its specific combinations of semiotic resources are presented in detail and explained with illustrative examples. Finally, the representations are discussed in terms of their relevance for teaching and assessing visually oriented science literacy in the early school years, and for pre- and in-service teacher training.

The study investigates how teaching is related to young students’ visual representation of science content. It does so by studying the teaching of two elementary school teachers during five lessons and comparing how the content is represented visually in the text-image compositions their students produced during each respective lesson. A social semiotic analysis of how different content representations are combined suggests that these representations do not carry the same weight in creating a coherent multimodal science composition. Three of the seven content representations (theory, natural experience, cultural heritage) stand out, in that they do not always have the same function in different compositions. Sometimes they function as the composition’s main visual representation and sometimes as a modifier of one of the other two. The main representation connects image and text content-wise, ensuring that the composition makes sense as a whole. The additional four content representations (art, event, person, attitude-evoking) solely function as modifiers, which add to the main representation without changing its core meaning. Mapping students’ combined representations for each lesson showed a few things. First, lack of instructions regarding images resulted in fewer images and very few self-made ones. Second, model images and scaffolding resulted in more uniform compositions. Third, non-scientific, hereditary main representations resulted solely from lessons without model images. The discussion points out how students both use and produce resources for making meaning about science contents. It also argues that combining representations helps students envision science content and that mapping a student group’s visual content formation is a resource for assessment and classroom conversations.

This book chapter answers the following research question: How do aesthetic aspects of students’ visual formation of science content in the early school years relate to the norms of science? The chapter contributes three types of functions that aesthetics have for visual formation of science content, and the relation of these functions to the norms of science. In the chapter, questions are raised about in what ways and to what extent aesthetic qualities (pleasing or stirring effects on the senses) can contribute to meaning-making about science content, without compromising the quest for knowledge about nature. The purpose is to illuminate how the aesthetics of visual representations in multimodal text-image compositions, made by second grade students as part of their science education, form the science content – the subject matter – dealt with in the compositions, and how this relates to the norms of science. This is done through a prism of various perspectives on aesthetics. The images and image-text relations of multimodal compositions made by second grade students as part of their science education were studied, and the analysis was based on social semiotic theory (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2021; Folkeryd, 2006; Martinec & Salway, 2005). As a result, three main types of visual aesthetic formation of science content in the students’ compositions are presented. These three types are placed along a continuum displaying them as more or less aligned or in tension with the norms of science. The different aesthetics are described as semiotic resources, and then further described in relation to the values that each aesthetic represents. The discussion elaborates on how these types, respectively, correspond to a classic science norm, an extended science norm, and an artistic norm. Each of the three types of content formation function to fulfil a specific set of the epistemic, and cultural and social values described by, e.g., Hempel (1965), Allchin (2001) and Lederman (2007).