diagrams and graphs. Students are required to use these representations to “describe
patterns or relationships in data” and to draw scientific conclusions.
The national curriculum objectives that are outlined above inform the science lesson
on ‘states of matter’ analysed in this chapter but do so in particular ways, ways which
differ in relation to the technology used to mediate the curriculum. Throughout the
lesson the students use the multimedia package Multimedia Science School to
investigate particle arrangements in a solid, a liquid and a gas and to explore the
changes in particle arrangement that occur with heating and cooling. The lesson is
divided into two parts, in the first part the students work at individual computers
using a worksheet prepared by the teacher, and in the second part the students work
with an interactive whiteboard to present their ideas to the whole class for discussion.
In the following section I discuss the ways in which the entities ‘states of matter’ and
‘particles’ have been taught traditionally in the science classroom without new
technologies.
The Representation of ‘States of Matter’ on Page and in the Classroom
‘Particles’ and ‘states of matter’ are represented in the majority of School Science
textbooks in two main ways: either in the form of diagrams (e.g. figure 6.1) or in the
form of photographic images. The former kind of image serves to classify ‘states of
matter’ in terms of their arrangement, the density of ‘particles’, and the spacing of
‘particles’. The latter type of image represents everyday examples of ‘states of
matter’ in a ‘realistic form’ (e.g. figure 6.2). These images tend to offer
representations of the ‘states of matter’ that draw on children’s everyday experience
of materials- usually ice, water, and steam. Teachers offer ‘canonical’ images of
‘states of matter’ similar to these in the classroom. Here I draw briefly on work with
colleagues on the multimodal production of school science (Jewitt and Kress, 2002)
which analyses the multimodal construction of ‘states of matter’ in a lesson with year
eight students. In order to represent and communicate the entity ‘particles’ the
211