Evi Ketsea studied physics and graphic design and worked in the corporate world before entering teaching - almost by accident - by responding to a UK government initiative aimed at addressing the shortage of science teachers in urban areas.

“School science got me deeply engaged with the question of how to improve its effectiveness - could drawing help? Pursuing this question resulted in a PhD and has remained central to my work ever since".

Evi Ketsea is a researcher at Laboratoire de Didactique André Revuz, Université Paris Cité.

Students’ comics created in the context of science inquiry in secondary education reveal their modes of reasoning: an analysis methodology

This presentation introduces a methodology for analyzing comics drawn by students in the context of a science inquiry.

Within a pragmatist situated semiotic approach, comics created by the students during a science inquiry lesson are semiotic representations reflecting learning viewed as a sense-making inferential process via the building of a network of signs (Cunningham, 1998). Moreover, comics are viewed as following the linguistic system of the Visual Narrative Grammar (Cohn, 2013) of sequential images which is used to access meaning in the comics. Synthesis of the above with a typology of the modes of reasoning based on Peirce’s sign classification resulted in our methodology which provides the identification, characterisation and classification of the modes of reasoning in the comics.

The field research that provided the data for this study involved a series of ten alternating lessons of physics and art (comics making) during all of which students of a secondary class drew comics on the physics topic of ‘forces and interactions.’

Results show that the methodology in use provides a nuanced analysis of the students’ modes of reasoning in science inquiry, including abductive reasoning whose importance in school science is increasingly recognised (Adúriz Bravo & Sans Pinillos, 2023).

Adúriz Bravo, A., & Sans Pinillos, A. (2023). Abduction as a Mode of Inference in Science Education. Science & Education, 32, 993–1020.

Cohn, N. (2013). The visual language of comics: Introduction to the sturcture and cogntion of sequential images. Bloomsbury.

Cunningham, D. J. (1998). Cognition as semiosis: The role of inference. Theory & Psychology, 8(6), 827–840.

Vanessa de Andrade believes that when students pick up a pencil to draw, they don't just communicate what they know—they think. As science education researcher, her work bridges multimodality, embodied cognition, and collaborative learning through drawing.

In her current project, she explores how drawing unlocks causal reasoning in middle school classrooms in the context of climate change. Her PhD (University of Lisbon) revealed drawing as a cognitive tool where gestures, talk, and marks on paper weave together to build understanding.

Vanessa de Andrade is a Post-Doc fellow at the Department of Science Teaching, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot

The affordances of the spatial and material dimensions of drawing-space for reasoning about causal relationships

This presentation explores an aspect of drawing that has been left transparent in current empirical studies: the material dimension of the drawing medium. The perspective articulated here is that the drawing surface, instead of being treated as a neutral backdrop for inscription, is viewed as an active physical object that can frame what is to be represented and that can itself be manipulated, combined, separated, or repositioned—introducing a material dimension that extends beyond the marks on the page. Grounded in multimodal social semiotic theory (Kress, 2010; Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006), I introduce the concept of drawing-space: the semiotic field that emerges when material affordances of the drawing medium, such as paper boundaries, size, and the availability of multiple sheets of paper, are actively recruited alongside other modes (drawing, speech, gesture) for meaning-making.

In this presentation, the affordances of the spatial and material dimensions of drawing are explored in the context of students ’causal reasoning, specifically when it involves linking causes and effects spanning large distances and time frames, such as climate change–related phenomena—a concept that Grotzer and Solis (2015) called thinking across distant attentional frames. The empirical context involves four pairs of students (aged 11–13) who participated in a 90-minute session with various opportunities for drawing as they tried to build a causal story linking food waste in populated areas to polar bears declining in remote regions. Deliberately, A4-sized sheets of paper were provided instead of large chart paper, constraining students’ drawing-space and prompting them to negotiate the material boundaries of their medium.

Through multimodal microanalysis of video-recorded interactions, we identified three functions of drawing-space in students ’reasoning about causal relationships across attentional frames: (a) constituting and framing spaces—students used single sheets with connectors, joined or taped sheets, or separate sheets to organize phenomena as connected or disconnected; (b) making the gap visible—the physical separation between sheets materialized the conceptual gap between cause and effect, rendering the attentional distance tangible and available for inspection; and (c) constructing causal connections—students created intermediary spaces (e.g., new sheets placed between existing drawings) and used gestures across physical spaces to build causal links bridging the gap.

These findings offer a twofold contribution. Empirically, they reveal that the material dimension of the drawing medium plays an active role in students ’reasoning in the context of complex causality—a dimension previously overlooked in research on drawing in science education. Theoretically, the study introduces drawing-space as a conceptual tool for analyzing how students recruit the spatial and material properties of their drawing medium as semiotic resources. This presentation aims to open up a space of discussion about the different levels on which drawing and thinking with drawings occur: the usual two-dimensional surface on which inscriptions are made, and the three-dimensional material level and its affordances for reasoning.

Grotzer, T. A., & Solis, S. L. (2015). Action at an attentional distance: A study of children’s reasoning about causes and effects involving spatial and attentional discontinuity. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 52(7), 1003–1030.

Kress, G. (2010). Multimodality: A social semiotic approach to contemporary communication. Routledge.

Kress, G., & van Leeuwen, T. (2006). Reading images: The grammar of visual design (2nd ed.). Routledge.

Sofie Areljung is an associate professor at Umeå University working at the intersection of arts and science education. Her research explores how drawing emerges through student-material intra-actions, and how these intra-actions shape participation and meaning-making in science in early and primary education.

Following children’s drawing in motion: Five different ways of engaging with a drawing task

This presentation explores how children engage with a drawing task. I aspire to foreground the often overlooked diversity in how drawing unfolds – not only in stylistic variation, but in tempo, bodily and verbal expression, and in the ways children collaborate with materials, peers and teachers.

The study builds on research that views drawing as a situated process, shaped through moment-to-moment negotiations involving materials, humans and moods (Knight, 2013; Penn, 2019). Grounded in posthumanist perspectives (Barad, 2007), I assume that pens, papers, bodies, peers and teachers co-constitute the drawing process.

The presentation draws on a video-recorded session in which five five-year-old children were asked by their teachers to draw ‘how water gets to the tap.’ I analysed the video to trace the children’s drawing trajectories throughout this 25-minute session, attending closely to the shifting relations between bodies and materials.

The analysis reveals that each child engages with drawing in different ways: varying in tempo, in how much they negotiate with teachers and paper about what and where to draw, in how they adopt elements from peers’ drawings, in their responses to the abundance of colouring pens, and in how far their processes drift from the teacher’s initial task.

The findings suggest that teachers attend less to children’s final images and more to their embodied actions – especially as children may speak very little while they draw, and since early marks on paper may become ‘disguised’ as drawings develop.

Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Duke University Press.

Knight, L. (2008). Communication and transformation through collaboration: Rethinking drawing activities in early childhood. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 9(4), 306–316.

Penn, L. R. (2019). Drawing, bodies, and difference: Heterocorporeal dialogs and other intra-actions in children’s classroom drawing. Studies in Art Education, 60(2), 103–119.