Inscriptions in Science Teaching: From Realism to Abstraction

Abstract

This article attempts to highlight inscriptions, i.e., photographs, drawings, diagrams, or graphs as autonomous carriers of meaning that can illuminate the different dimensions of a scientific concept. In addition, the article examines the inherent potential of diverse types of inscriptions to be combined with each other creating conceptual sequences and thus, crafting a narrative for the formation of a concept. For the formation of conceptual sequences the proper synthesis of both naturalistic and abstractive inscriptions that hold different types of information and complement each other is suggested. That is, inscriptions such as photographs that hold morphological relevance with their referent describing at the same time the everyday knowledge, as well as inscriptions such as graphs or equations that, from a morphological perspective, have a no linear connection to their referent and are related to the typical visual code of school knowledge. Thus, existing, transformed, or novel inscriptions can create conceptual continuums offering logical connections between visual codes from everyday experience and the codes of diagrams, graphs, and equations. From both the teachers and the students, when inscriptions cooperate with the human body, oral language, and other elements of the space, constitute a critical aspect in multimodal communication within school classrooms.