Visible science learning in Early Childhood Education (ECE): Example of multimodal representations to document learning in a Danish Early Childhood Education center (preschool).

To enhance children's knowledge building and development of skills related to science learning in early childhood education (ESE), it is important to make the children's learning visible for the teacher. Primarily to give the teacher tools to help the children further with their science learning, but also to document their learning for parents and other. Inspired by inquiry based science education (IBSE), and based on a project in preschool concerning children's inquiry, this presentation proposes a model that highlights multimodal ways of collecting evidence of young children’s learning experiences. The model deals with three approaches to science learning in ECE: a practical, a written/drawn and an oral. The model can furthermore be used in documentation of the children's science learning from different sources.
In a four weeks period, guided by three nursery teachers, 21 children (age 5-6 years) worked inquiry based with the topic “weather and wind”. The children draw and build models, which could give them some ideas of concepts and phenomena related to wind (speed and direction; windmills e.g.), and they made drawings of ‘the weather of today’, whereon the nursery teachers wrote, in collaboration and guided by the children, what concepts and phenomena they had drawn (breeze and wind direction: e.g. leaves blowing in the wind; the wind comes from west).
The children's learning was made visible by a teacher guided talk concerning their inquiry products and concepts mentioned in their drawings. Project data consisted of video recordings of the talk, collecting of artefacts (drawings and models), and recorded interviews with teachers and informal conversations with some of the children. The data was analyzed using second generation activity theory model (Engeström, 2001).
Results showed that paying attention to the multimodal ways learning experiences can be captured in preschools gives the teachers valuable information about the children’s knowledge, skill and abilities in science and assists teachers of the children's further science learning path.