A social semiotic analysis of university level astronomy teaching resources

Abstract

The use of representations in astronomy education has been a subject of investigation spanning across educational levels and with various content-specific topics. Within astronomy education research, a major focus can be identified; the use of different types of visualizations (from planetaria to textbook images and drawings) and their usefulness in the astronomy classroom. However, in order to construct and communicate its knowledge, the discipline of astronomy relies not only on visualizations, but also other resources, including mathematics, written language and code. Therefore, there is a need for astronomy education researchers and practitioners to analyse the use of all the different resources that together constitute complex, multifaceted disciplinary knowledge about the universe. This is our goal with this paper; to present a social semiotic perspective of teaching and learning astronomy at the university level, through the use of representations. For this purpose, we catalogued representations (semiotic resources) from lecture notes and textbooks used in six higher education astronomy courses, and using thematic analysis divided them into nine different categories (semiotic systems), on the basis of their fundamental differences in representing knowledge. Using the notion of affordance, we analysed what each of these systems tends to accomplish for disciplinary meaning making. Finally, we discuss the implications of using the framework of social semiotics as a lens to better understand teaching and learning in astronomy, and how it can give access to new insights and perspectives that would not otherwise be foregrounded.