Abstract
This study explores the potential of a photo-elicitation technique, photo-talks (Serriere, 2010), for understanding how young girls understand, employ and translate new scientific discourses. Over the course of a nine week period, 24 kindergarten girls in an urban girls’ academy were observed, videotaped, photographed and interviewed while they were immersed into scientific discourse. This paper explicitly describes how their emerging discursive patterns were made visible through this methodological tool. The findings are presented in vignettes in three themes uncovered during our analysis which are the following: Presented the recollection of the scientific Discourse, Described the understanding of scientific Discourse, and Created an opportunity for the translation into everyday discourse. Science educators can benefit from this methodological tool as a reflective tool with their participants, to validate and/or complicate data. Additionally, this methodological tool serves to make discourse patterns more visible by providing a visual backdrop to the conversations thus revealing the development as it is occurring in young children.
Highlights
“The butterfly is in the chrysalis stage!” Victory exclaimed during a photo-talks conversation as she pointed to a digital photograph of herself looking at the brown chrysalis in the jar on the lab bench, “It was an egg it formed its chrysalis or pupa and it will become a butterfly”
The objective of this paper is to share this photo-elicitation technique, photo-talks (Serriere, 2010) with science educators so they may use it as an innovative methodological tool to understand the construction of integrated discourses (Moje et al, 2001)
The data is presented in snippets of the transcripts to allow the reader to visualize how the photo-talks transpired, the questions that we asked, the conversations that occurred between the girls and us, and the language the girls used during photo-talks
Summary
“The butterfly is in the chrysalis stage!” Victory exclaimed during a photo-talks conversation as she pointed to a digital photograph of herself looking at the brown chrysalis in the jar on the lab bench, “It was an egg it formed its chrysalis or pupa and it will become a butterfly”. When asked how she would describe this to her friends she remarked, “It is like when you go into the dressing room and put on a church dress-you act like someone different” In this example, Victory, a kindergartener in an all-girls urban public school, translated the scientific language taught to her into her own language through the use of an innovative photo-elicitation tool, photo-talks (Serriere, 2010). Victory, a kindergartener in an all-girls urban public school, translated the scientific language taught to her into her own language through the use of an innovative photo-elicitation tool, photo-talks (Serriere, 2010) This tool provided a reflective moment in a democratic and non-threatening way while providing a visual backdrop of digital photographs taken during science lessons. This specialized system of words is not readily made available to the students and can
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
