This study aims to explore the meanings communicated by young children with visual cultural semiotic resources available in the science classroom. It is a case study in an Early Childhood Education classroom of 23 children (3-4 years old) and their teacher, all engaged in a long-term science project about snails. We focus on the analysis of two…

In this study, the aim is to explore what genres can be found in applications used in preschool as a way to facilitate preschool teachers' informed choices and raise awareness concerning the importance of choosing digital content carefully. In particular, applications that facilitate communication beyond a verbal majority language are in focus in…

The aims of this article are to document the types of signs that young children make to represent their mathematical thinking, and to determine the extent to which features of usage-based language acquisition are evident in children's early graphical communications made in mathematical contexts. Studies of young children's symbolic principles in…

This paper analyses how teachers and toddlers enact participation frames in bidialectal early education in Limburg, the Netherlands. Teachers' language choice is often context-bound as they use the national language, Dutch, for instruction and the regional language, Limburgish, for playful or social-emotional situations with individual children.…

The purpose of this qualitative single case study was to explore what happened when preschool teachers engaged in multimodal meaning making around notions of literacy through visual art making. Eight participant preschool teachers attended 3 six-hour long multimodal workshops designed around social semiotic theory of multimodal communication…

According to the Swedish Preschool Curriculum, one of the tasks of the preschool is to pass on a cultural heritage, its values, traditions and history, language and knowledge, from one generation to the next. The formulation indicates that cultural heritage plays an important role in defining the tasks of preschool teachers as far as the…

This article explores quality in early childhood education by de-elevating the importance of the human subject and experience, and heightening instead a focus on and tensions with the post-human. The argument traces the intricate web of "qualities" woven throughout entanglements of subjects, objects and things that constitute what is…

The purpose of the present article is to attend to the theoretical and methodological implications of expanding a view of geosemiotic to include a social geography lens. A Geosemiotics<-->social geography approach creates possibilities to more fully attend to the dynamic and dialogic relationship of material, spatial, and social resources as…

This paper arises from research undertaken by educational semioticians and science educators investigating the use of student generated digital artefacts as assessment tasks in pre-service science teacher education. Part of a broader shift toward student-generated media in tertiary science, the use of such tasks is driven by the need to deepen…

Historically there has always been a lively research discussion on whether the development of number concept should be considered as innate, or whether the catalyst for the development of the number concept -- and for counting -- is hearing number words combined with seeing concrete examples. One can recognize these theories as the nativist view…

This research explores young Indigenous children's multimodal meaning-making to carry out social intentions in dramatic and construction/materials play settings. The participants are two teachers and 21 children from two Northern Canadian Indigenous communities. Underpinned by social semiotic theory, the research involves inductive analyses of six…

Two approaches to materiality (i.e. mediated discourse and agential realism) are compared to explore their usefulness in tracking literacies in action and artefacts produced during a play and design activity in a preschool makerspace. Mediated discourse analysis has relied on linguistic framing and social semiotics to make sense of multimodality.…

This article is part of a larger project focusing upon explanatory illustrations that children encounter in pre- and primary school education. The research questions concerned (a) how preschool children make sense of iconic symbols when placing items of refuse on illustrations of refuse bins in a sorting task and (b) what stumbling blocks they…

In this article Paula Mildenhall describes a research project that investigated the use of a multi-semiotic teaching approach to develop flexible computational strategies in young children.

What are the material-semiotic relationships between a language policy and a table game activity in a bilingual preschool? Using Actor-Network Theory (ANT), the aim of this article is to explore this question, working with both human and nonhuman aspects of the activity, symmetrically, at the same level. The game playing activity takes place at a…