Development of Biological Literacy through Drawing Organisms
This chapter is about how children’s drawings convey their level of conceptual understanding of organisms. Drawings are a useful pedagogical tool as a window to investigate children’s conceptual knowledge and the meanings they give to this form of express
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5. DEVELOPMENT OF BIOLOGICAL LITERACY THROUGH DRAWING ORGANISMS
INTRODUCTION
This chapter is about how children’s drawings convey their level of conceptual understanding of organisms. Drawings are a useful pedagogical tool as a window to investigate children’s conceptual knowledge and the meanings they give to this form of expression. We analyzed the drawings collected from pupils living in rural areas, towns, and suburban areas in Brazil. Louv (2008) has written that young children may be out of touch with wildlife in developed countries. However, in every culture children can be seen as interested in living things, identifying, classifying, and seeking patterns, especially about animals (Tomkins & Tunnicliffe, 2007). Young children aged 4 to 15 years in every culture notice and find out about living things around them (Patrick et al., 2013). When children encounter living organisms it provides countless opportunities for understanding the natural world, contributing to their science learning (Zoldosova & Prokop, 2006). These young children are interested in a wide variety of living organisms such as plants and the animals that they encounter: insects, birds, dogs and cats. They identify, classify and notice the patterns used in grouping them (Bartoszeck et al., 2011; Patrick & Tunnnicliffe, 2011; Rybska et al., 2014). Attitudes differ. Primary and secondary school students in some countries show positive atitudes towards animals such as spiders and toads while others regard them with disgust (Prokop et al., 2010; Tomazic, 2011). Children see live animals at home, in their backyards, in their gardens, around the local area or visits to zoos. They see plants (trees, shrubs, small flowering plants, ferns and mosses for example) at home or around where they live, or when going on trips to places such as botanical gardens (Sanders, 2007; Bartoszeck et al., 2014). They are able to identify striking features of the structures and sometimes behavior of these organisms. In this way children come to recognize the environment as a part of the natural world (Patrick & Tunnicliffe, 2011). The concept of animal and plant are fundamental ontological categories that allow children in every culture to organize the perception of the world in which they live (Angus, 1981; Wee, 2012). Even children entering preschool around age 3 already have an early understanding of biology acquired from observing what happens in the world around them (Legare et al., 2013). It is mostly at the preschool level that children begin to develop concepts that help them give meaning to the natural world around them. As they grow we see that they are able to draw a basic representation from memory of outer features of snails, flowering plants, trees, insects, and birds (Vieira et al., 1968; Bartoszeck & Tunnicliffe, 2013; Rybska et al., 2014a, 2014b; Tunnicliffe, 2012). Research is continuing to explore what young learners are thinking about the insides of organisms (e.g. Reiss & Tunnicliffe, 1999; Bartoszeck et al., 2011a). Children’s drawings as they
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