ABSTRACT
For several years we have been working with teachers on the integration of science and literacy through children’s journaling as a teaching, learning, and assessment tool. Recently our work was supported by the Toyota USA Foundation, which funded our Children’s Literacy and Science Project (CLASP). The aim of CLASP was to collaborate with teachers on the integration of science with literacy in the elementary school curriculum through children’s self-produced journals. A key component to this professional development was the enhancement of teachers’ abilities to take a more multimodal stance toward the use of science journaling; that is, the incorporation of representational resources beyond the written word. For many teachers, this requires not only a new way of thinking about scientific literacy but also sustained practice in ways of incorporating both linguistic and extralinguistic resources into science journaling. In this chapter, we detail what we have learned about ways of engaging teachers as intellectual and reflective practitioners in learning to look at children’s science journaling beyond the written word as the sole means of constructing and conveying both knowledge and science experience. First, however, we provide 238a brief review of the literature in order to locate our work within a more multimodal approach to scientific literacy. We next provide a general description of CLASP as a context for understanding our collaboration with teachers. Finally, we detail two experiences, the first addressing ways of analyzing children’s journal work and the second presenting a case study that illustrates just such an analysis by a teacher.
