Public defence in Natural Sciences Didactics: Hanna Wanselin

Abstract

Ecology concerns organisms and their interactions with the environment, encompassing processes and relationships that often present challenges for students in biology classrooms. Challenges arise both from the abstract and complex nature of ecological content and from how the content is represented, particularly through multimodal communication as when using images, writing, and symbols. Although multimodality plays a central role in science learning, relatively little is known about how students use different semiotic resources to represent ecological phenomena and processes when creating multimodal texts, and how their representational choices evolve during this process. This thesis synthesises findings from three studies focusing on students’ creation of multimodal texts in ecology. The first study develops an analytical framework grounded in systemic functional linguistics (SFL) to investigate the scientific content and its representation. The second study applies this framework to student‑created texts. The third study analyses a student group’s discussion during text creation, focusing on ecological content and its representation.

The data, consisting of students’ multimodal texts and recordings of a student group’s discussion while collaboratively creating their text, were collected in Year 7 biology classrooms where the students worked in groups on an ecology assignment involving food webs. The findings show that the students draw on multiple modes and semiotic resources to represent ecological processes, demonstrating an awareness of the affordances of these resources. The students largely focus on macroscopic and organism-level aspects when making meaning of ecology, and their representational choices are shaped by a tension between scientific conventions and creative expression. In addition, the students’ discussion makes aspects of their meaning-making process discernible, revealing both strengths and uncertainties in scientific content and representation.

Taken together, the three studies show how students’ multimodal text creation reveals the science content they prioritise, the representational choices they negotiate, and aspects of their meaning‑making that cannot be discerned in the final texts. The findings suggest that science education would benefit from more explicit attention being paid not only to the content, but also as to how the scientific content is expressed, thereby enhancing students’ opportunities for meaning‑making.

Keywords: ecology education, students’ multimodal texts, students’ text discussion, multimodality, SFL