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Exploring the value of ‘horizontal’learning in early years scienceclassroomsBronwen Cowie a & Kathrin Otrel-Cass ba WMIER, The University of Waikato , Hamilton , New Zealandb CSTER, The University of Waikato , Hamilton , New ZealandPublished online: 21 Sep 2011.

To cite this article: Bronwen Cowie & Kathrin Otrel-Cass (2011) Exploring the value of ‘horizontal’learning in early years science classrooms, Early Years: An International Research Journal, 31:3,285-295, DOI: 10.1080/09575146.2011.609157

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Exploring the value of ‘horizontal’ learning in early years scienceclassrooms

Bronwen Cowiea* and Kathrin Otrel-Cassb

aWMIER, The University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand; bCSTER, The University ofWaikato, Hamilton, New Zealand

(Received 17 March 2011; final version received 25 July 2011)

In contrast to a focus on vertical learning experiences where the emphasis is onprogression up a scale of complexity, this article explores the value of horizontallearning experiences. These aim to provide learners with a variety of opportuni-ties and spaces to participate, thereby expanding the entry points for them intoschool science. The process of horizontal learning is illustrated using data gener-ated within a new-entrant (children aged five) classroom. The findings show thatyoung children can engage with and develop proficiency with sophisticated sci-ence ideas when teachers provide a variety of multimodal learning opportunitiesthat expand on their existing and developing ideas and experiences. It is arguedthat the provision of horizontal learning experiences is worthy of considerationin science education where student interest in science is known to decline overthe school years.

Keywords: science education; multimodal; horizontal learning; time

Introduction

In this paper we use the notion of ‘horizontal learning’ to consider the value of ateacher maintaining a sustained focus on a particular topic and idea. Horizontallearning experiences provide learners with time and space to explore ideas whereasvertical experiences tend to focus on a progression in complexity. Gee (2004) notesthat although horizontal learning experiences can look like ‘mucking around’ theylay an important foundation for later learning. At a time when there is internationalconcern regarding the decline in student interest in science, evidence that earlyaccess to rich experiences influences science learning in later years (Fleer 2007)indicates that early years teachers have an important contribution to make. In thispaper we use examples from a new-entrant class to illustrate the value of a sus-tained focus on ‘big science ideas’. The teacher created multiple and multimodalopportunities for children to observe, question, develop and represent their under-standing of natural phenomena. She sustained their interest, and enhanced theirlearning, by engaging with and involving their families in the children’s learningexperiences. The teacher’s use of an ensemble of activities provided a variety ofopportunities and spaces for children to participate thereby expanding the entrypoints for them into school science. Such approaches also position children’s ideas

*Corresponding author. Email: bcowie@waikato.ac.nz

Early YearsAquatic InsectsVol. 31, No. 3, October 2011, 285–295

ISSN 0957-5146 print/ISSN 1472-4421 online� 2011 TACTYChttp://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09575146.2011.609157http://www.tandfonline.com

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as having high social value because they are bound into the relationships childrenhave with those they value. Our findings illustrate that young children can engagewith and develop proficiency with sophisticated science ideas when teachers providea variety of learning opportunities that build and expand on their existing anddeveloping ideas and experiences.

Clarifying the goals of primary science education

It is widely accepted that science should be included in the core curriculum fromthe start of schooling (Millar and Osborne, 1998) but there is no general consensusconcerning the aims and content of the primary science curriculum. One suggestion,and one we support, is that creating, ‘a sense of excitement about nature might bethe very best learning outcome for teachers to achieve in science and technologyeducation in the first years of schooling’ (Fensham 2008, 38). This orientationopens up the possibility of tapping into the fascination and curiosity about naturalphenomena and living species that inspire young children. A further recommenda-tion is that primary science teaching should focus on ‘big ideas’ or the overarchingprinciples in the science curriculum. However, ‘big ideas’ are just that – and asHarlen notes, they tend to be highly abstract and can be experienced as ‘meaning-less if they do not evoke the many real situations that they link together’ (2008,13). Big ideas need to be developed from a series of ‘small’ ideas that explain spe-cific events that are familiar to children. Learning within and about familiar contextsand issues ensures relevance and builds a foundation of understanding and intereston which broader ideas can be built at a later stage (Martins and Veiga 2001). Con-sequently, Harlen (1992) urges that early years science is contextual, interesting andrelevant to children: when children are familiar with a context they are more likelyto build on their own experiences and take control of their learning. School scienceneeds to support children to develop an understanding of the nature and processesof science, as well as the development of a scientific attitude towards problems(Harlen 1992). It can be seen therefore that current conceptualisations of the sciencecurriculum for young students are no less intellectually demanding than those forolder students. We now turn to the processes for teaching and learning that helpyoung children meet these demands.

Thinking about teaching primary science: a focus on temporal aspects

In this paper we adopt a sociocultural orientation towards science learning (Lemke2001). This focuses attention on the social and material aspects of learning andalso on its temporal aspects, particularly how learning plays out over longer timescales. As Mercer (2008) notes, it is only by following student learning trajecto-ries over time that it is possible to recognise the significance of the apparentrepetition of certain actions and interactions as part of students’ developing under-standing. He also notes that the same act repeated cannot be assumed to be ‘thesame’ act in repetition, because it builds historically on the earlier event. Teachingsequences that integrate a variety of social and material supports help students tolearn science through an iterative process that incorporates both doing and talkingscience (Puntambekar and Kolodner 2005). However, teachers need to deliberatelyorchestrate multiple supports or scaffolds so that they augment each other andwork in concert (Tabak 2004).

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From a student perspective, ‘school work should ideally have a cohesive, cumu-lative quality in which specific activities and their goals can be seen to form part ofgreater whole, as part of a purposeful educational journey’ (Mercer 2008, 34). How-ever, this continuity does not emerge naturally for students (Alexander 2000). Itneeds to be pursued actively as a pedagogic goal, through the use of appropriateteaching strategies whereby teachers introduce students to new scientific perspec-tives, helping them to develop new ways of viewing the world and new ways ofusing language to make sense of this experience while building on what has beenlearned before (Mercer 2005). In this process the teacher’s role is crucial in helpingstudents to integrate new information and representations within a wider scientificframe (Mortimer and Scott 2003). Students need to understand and integrate differ-ent representational modes in learning science and learning how to think and actscientifically (Lemke 2004).

Evidence is emerging of the value of teachers providing a variety of modes andmeans for children to express and gain feedback on their science ideas (O’Byrne2009; Yore and Hand 2010), with some researchers arguing that the development ofstudent representational sophistication must be part of the learning agenda of schoolscience (Tytler, Prain, and Peterson 2007). Alongside this, research on multimodalrepresentation has highlighted that different modes (e.g. speaking, writing) haveadvantages and limitations when it comes to representing different ideas and prac-tices (Kress, Tsatsarelis, Jewitt and Obgorn 2001). A combination of modes canenhance communication and learning and also enhance student proficiency in thedifferent modes. We will now examine these matters further in the context of theNew Zealand science curriculum in the early years of primary schooling.

An example from an early years science classroom in New Zealand

In this paper we draw on an example of science learning in a new-entrant classroom(children age five years) in New Zealand to illustrate the points already made. NewZealand has had a national science curriculum that sets out desired learning out-comes for the school years 1 to 13 since the early 1990s (Ministry of Education1995). This curriculum emphasises that learning needs to happen in context and,more recently (Ministry of Education 2007), that children need to learn about thenature of science as well as the content and processes of science.

Mary, the new-entrant teacher, was part of a study concerning culturally respon-sive pedagogy in primary science classrooms with a high proportion of Maoristudents (Maori are the indigenous people of New Zealand) (Glynn, Cowie,Otrel-Cass and Macfarlane 2010). The study research questions addressed the natureof culturally responsive learning environments, including the different sources ofknowledge and ways for students to develop and demonstrate their knowledge inscience. We observed two science units in Mary’s classroom – one on energy andthe other on tuatara, a reptile endemic in New Zealand. Data were collected byclassroom observation using video, digital photographs, field notes, the collection ofstudent and teacher work samples and interviews with the teacher and studentsregarding their experiences. The tuatara unit was the one for which we had the mostcomprehensive data. This was important in our being able to document and unpackthe situated, interactional and temporal aspects of the learning process.

The analysis for the paper proceeded through a process of inductive analysis(Patton 2002) in which the researchers reviewed the data for themes and patterns.

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Mary participated in post-classroom observation reflections as well as in a full-dayreview of the teaching sequence. The researchers followed this day up with an in-depth probing of the way activities and interactions provided evidence of cumula-tive student learning. We were interested in student progress up a scale from ‘lowto high skills, as if moving up a ladder’ and also in horizontal learning experiences(Gee 2004, 60). Gee described horizontal learning experiences as those where onestays on the initial rungs of a ladder awhile, exploring them and getting to knowwhat some of the rungs are and what the ladder looks like. Gutiérrez (2008) hascalled for attention to the horizontal dimensions of learning in terms of the expertisethat develops within and across practices and communities. In this the focus is onboth the distributive nature of learning and the repertoires of practices that individu-als develop as they move from, for example, home to school to the workplace.Barton and Tan (2010) argue that a focus on the horizontal dimensions of learningis important in science because students often find science challenging and this canbe misinterpreted as a lack of aptitude rather than them simply needing time todevelop an appreciation of scientific ways of talking, thinking and acting.

In this paper we take horizontal learning to include the learning that happenedin and outside the classroom, in different social arrangements, with different learn-ing partners, and using different modes and media. We pursue these ideas in thespecific examples below.

Learning about Tuatara: structure and function

In Mary’s classroom different modes (speaking, writing, drawing, dramatising, mak-ing), social arrangements (working as individuals, in small groups and as a wholeclass) and learning partners (peers, senior students, family members, wider commu-nity) provided children with a variety of different entry points into science alongwith rich opportunities, and incentives to practise and display what they knew andcould do. Mary decided that her class would study tuatara as part of her syndicate’sfocus on New Zealand’s ancient past after a class visit to a local marae (communalmeeting house) with a number of carvings of tuatara. The class had been studyingcarving and the children had asked about the meanings of the tuatara carvings.Mary thought that tuatara would provide ‘a tighter and more useful focus’ thandinosaurs (the topic the remainder of her syndicate chose to study). It was alsoimportant to her that she knew something of the cultural significance of tuatara toMaori. Her goals for the science unit were that the children were to learn about thephysical features of tuatara, their life cycle and habitat, that children develop theirscience observation skills, and that children and their families have a positive expe-rience of learning science.

Grounding and piquing children’s interest

Mary began the unit by reading the legend ‘Rata’s canoe’. The story was about acanoe being carved from a forest tree, which connected with the previous focus oncarving. It was set in the forest, mentioning the animals and birds that live in there.Mary’s aim was for the children to begin thinking about the animals of the NewZealand forest, where they each lived and why, while trying to find out what thechildren already knew about forest animals in general and tuatara specifically. Thiswould provide the children also with some insight into the ecosystem which tuatarafitted into – tuatara were mentioned in the story as forest floor dwellers.

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To stimulate the children’s interest in tuatara Mary began the first formal les-son by reading the ‘Old Tuatara’ story. In this story a tuatara who appears to beasleep is, in fact, waiting to catch a meal. Mary continued reading this storythroughout the unit and gave the children copies of the book to read with theirparents at home. Then, to focus the children’s attention on tuatara physical fea-tures she displayed a large photograph of a tuatara. Initially, the photograph wascompletely covered. Mary progressively removed the jigsaw pieces covering thephotograph to reveal and focus the children’s attention on features such as theskin texture, eyes, the shape and location of its limbs, claws and spiny back. Asshe revealed different features she introduced the related vocabulary and promptedthe children to guess what the photograph was of and to explain their reasons fortheir prediction.

One of the children, Yasmin said: ‘It looked like a lizard because it has a tailand spikes.’ Maria thought its skin looked like that of a frog. This activity gener-ated a lot of excitement and anticipation and resulted in an animated discussion dur-ing which Mary learned that some children could recognise tuatara and hadknowledge of them as a ‘living fossil’.

As a follow up to the disclosure activity (Cowie and Moreland 2006) Maryasked the children to draw a tuatara and once they were satisfied with their drawingshe scribed their ideas about tuatara onto their drawings. At this time she promptedthe children to think about the story, the photograph they had just viewed and anyother times they had seen tuatara. She posted these drawing-plus-comments on theclassroom wall, labelled ‘prior knowledge’.

A connected series of multimodal activities

The next day Mary guided the children to examine a range of pictures of tuatara inthe wild and in captivity, as well as close-ups of different body parts. Four olderstudents (from year 5/6, nine- to 10-year-olds) who were their senior buddies, cameto class and scribed the children’s where, how, why and what questions about tua-tara. Mary prompted the children to tell their buddies what questions they may haveabout tuatara. The children’s questions included: What does the tuatara eat? Whydoes the tuatara have spikes? Where does the tuatara live? During the third lessonthe class visited a kiwi and tuatara breeding sanctuary – they were accompanied bytheir parents and siblings. As they were leaving for the visit, one of the childrenreminded Mary that they needed to take their questions with them so they couldfind out the answers. At the sanctuary the children watched a video, then listenedto a tuatara expert, observed and sketched live tuatara in glass cages, and walkedaround the sanctuary looking for tuatara in the ‘wild’. The class went to Mary’sfamily marae, which had tuatara carvings on the centre pou (carved post) of thewhare (meeting house). This visit was a special event for the children, the parentsand for Mary because of Mary’s connection with the marae. The children and theparents looked at and felt the tuatara carvings and listened to traditional stories.They also sat in a carved canoe not dissimilar to the one they had heard about inthe legend of Rata.

When the children came back from the trip they looked at their questions andanswered those they could. For example, they recalled from their talk with thetuatara keeper that it takes a year for tuatara eggs to hatch and that the temperatureregulates the gender of tuatara. They also made some sketches/illustrations of what

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they had seen. Mary posted the children’s observational drawings and photographsof the visit on the class wall display.

Over the course of the next five weeks the children continued their investigationof tuatara through the examination of photographs, drawing, viewing material onthe Internet, making a clay model of a tuatara and so on. Mary continued to drawattention to small details in the ‘Old Tuatara’ story; for example when the childrenwere thinking about the tuatara’s habitat she reminded them that in the story the oldtuatara sits on top of a rock in the sun. Each of these experiences provided differentpossibilities for learning. To unpack what this entailed, we discuss now in detail theopportunities that opened up for the children through drawing and making a claymodel of a tuatara.

Exploiting the possibilities of drawing as part of an ensemble of activities

Mary asked the children to draw a tuatara as an assessment of their prior knowledgebecause she had found that drawing can provide young children with a compellingand enjoyable means of making a tangible and communicable record of their ideas.She asked them for a comment about tuatara as a way of ameliorating any limita-tions in their ability to draw their ideas. On this occasion the disclosure activityprovided the scaffolding that developed their knowledge of tuatara physical features.The children’s first drawings were comparatively unsophisticated; a number hadoval shapes for bodies, legs and heads. No children included specific characteristicssuch as the tuatara’s spiny back. Zac drew a tuatara with four toes and a widesmile. Example comments were: ‘Tuatara is on a rock’, ‘He is running’, ‘It startslike my name’.

Mary asked the children to observe and draw tuatara during the class visit to thesanctuary. On this occasion the children had only a limited view of the tuatara butseeing the reptile and having support from interested family members motivated thechildren’s close attention to detail in their sketches. This time their drawingsdepicted the tuatara’s spiny back and a reasonable representation of body shape.

In the fifth week the children completed another tuatara drawing with commen-tary. These drawings were much more detailed, again being grounded in their previ-ous attempts at drawing, substantial time spent looking at photographs of tuatara,and their experience of completing a jigsaw of a tuatara (this focused their attentionon the shape and location of different body parts). Mary’s action to explain whyonly three legs were visible on the drawing of the tuatara used for the jigsaw wasalso significant. Prior to the children completing the jigsaw Mary asked a child tocome to the front of the class and stand face-on and side-on. She quizzed the chil-dren about how many eyes they could see and linked this to the tuatara drawing. Inthis way she introduced to the children the limitations of drawings, and photo-graphs, as two-dimensional representations that depicted a three-dimensional objectfrom a particular orientation. Zac’s final drawing showed a tuatara with spines, athick tail, a textured skin, and feet with five claws. His comment was, ‘Tuatara havea spiny back. They hatch eggs.’

By revisiting the drawing activity over time, and following a variety of differentobservational experiences, Mary was able to scaffold the children’s drawing/think-ing about the tuatara’s physical features. The drawing activities were not the sameeach time but cumulatively elaborated the children’s ideas and ability with naturalis-tic representations. The original tuatara disclosure photograph provided a point of

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reference and continuity across the drawing tasks as Mary probed for the childrento include more detail in the skin texture, claws and so on using appropriate vocab-ulary. The children were able to compare their drawings-plus-comments over time(they were displayed on the classroom wall) and so to monitor change in their ownwork.

Exploiting the possibilities of making a physical model

The children produced a clay model of a tuatara in the fourth week of the unit.Given their age their models were remarkable in the sense that the proportions werereasonable, the legs were attached appropriately, and all models had spiny backsand a mottled skin texture and claws. The photograph (Figure 1) is of Zac’s model.To support the children in the modelling process Mary reanimated a number of ear-lier activities. She circulated the tuatara disclosure photograph and directed the chil-dren to look closely at the skin texture and drew their attention to ‘What do theyhave on their feet?’ and so on. Mary then displayed the tuatara photograph in apublic place as a point of reference. She gave each child his/her completed jigsawof a tuatara and prompted them to note the location and joining of the legs. Shereminded them of when they had ‘walked like a tuatara’. One of the children, Max,re-enacted the reptilian gait with the legs being on the side of the body rather thanunderneath.

The modelling time provided fertile ground for conversation between the childrenand parent helpers about the features of tuatara. The descriptors the children used for

Figure 1. Clay tuatara with skin.

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tuatara skin included spotty, scaly, smooth/rough. They also talked of the number offingers on its clawed feet, and discussed how to represent the tuatara’s ‘third eye’.During the modelling Mary prompted the children to check their model against thephotograph. At the end of the unit all the children were able to recall and describetheir experience of making a clay model of a tuatara. Mac’s comments below are rep-resentative and indicated he had learned a great deal about tuatara:

How I made the clay tuatara was a little bit harder ’cause I went into as much detailas I could . . . the legs, eyes, they have real sharp claws and also the spikes aren’t verysharp. They aren’t sharp because of the spiney back. And they have two rows of teeth,the bottom and one row of teeth at the top.

Mary was particularly pleased that a father, who had not been into class before, hadcome in to help his son with the modelling process. Both father and son were verypleased with the result and could hardly wait to take the finished product home.This incentive of a valued audience with whom the finished product would beshared appeared to be an important motivation for the children throughout the mod-elling process. The children were also enthusiastic about preparing a PowerPointpresentation, speeches and a song to present their learning to their families andother children at a syndicate and a whole-school assembly.

Teacher reflective comment

Mary considered that the sustained class focus on tuatara (the learning took placeover five weeks) was crucial to the outcomes the children achieved:

I think a deeper unit like this unit is more valuable. Coming back to it is the answerrather than two weeks of science and two weeks of something else because everythinggets muddled up, you don’t get to reach the deepness.

In Mary’s view it was the sustained focus and her scaffolding (her word) of chil-dren’s thinking about tuatara, through the provision of a variety of experiences heldtogether by reference back to the tuatara photograph and the Old Tuatara story, thatcontributed to the vocabulary development that allowed the children to produce cap-tions for photographs towards the end of the unit. On the second to last day of terma child showing Mary a book on tuatara led to her realisation that the children werestill interested in tuatara. The next day she asked the children to select and writeabout a photograph from their field trip. The children scribed themselves, searchingout the words they needed on class displays. Mary was amazed at the focus thechildren demonstrated, given that it was the last day of term. She was delightedwith the sophistication of their texts, in terms of both language use and their beingable to distance themselves to write captions such as: ‘Tuatara’s looking at the birdin the burrow’, ‘Tuatara is looking out at the gull’ and ‘Tuatara’s egg hatches andthe babies come out’. Mary asserted the children would not have been able to pro-duce writing of this quality if their learning had not been supported over anextended period. She considered this had allowed the language they needed toexpress their ideas to develop.

Mary considered that the extended focus on tuatara allowed time for widercommunity engagement – as families came to understand the unit focus they also

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came to see how they could contribute. This was an important contribution to thehorizontal learning aspect of the unit. Discussions with families members in classtime, on the field trip, in preparation for the assemblies and at home helped thechildren make links between their classroom learning and their out-of-school lives.Conversations were sustained in both contexts as valued family members affirmedthe worth of the children’s learning. Mary noted that often parents learn aboutthings after they have happened but in this case they were actively involved fromthe start. Shared experiences of viewing photographs, going on the field trip andhelping with the modelling provided multiple opportunities for parents and childrento talk about tuatara and, it is hoped, contributed to a positive experience with sci-ence that would sustain the children’s interest and parents’ continued involvementin their children’s science learning.

Discussion and conclusion

Young children are capable of careful observation of salient features of an animal,such as a tuatara, and of using this knowledge to represent and talk about these fea-tures. By using an ensemble of multimodal activities Mary created a variety ofopportunities and spaces for children, and their families, to enter into science anddevelop their understanding of tuatara physical features and habitat. Some childrenwere captivated by the Old Tuatara story, others by talking with the senior studentsand still others by the field trip and opportunities to share their learning with familymembers. Over time the activities provided a trajectory in support of learning abouttuatara. The children were able to access different sources of information (photo-graphs, the Internet, books and so on) with different learning partners (peers, Mary,family members and siblings, and experts) in different settings (in and outside theclassroom). In this way, the children had access to a range of social and materialsupport (Lemke 2001) along with multiple opportunities to express, gain feedbackand elaborate on their learning. The permanent display of the photograph from theinitial disclosure activity served as a pointer of continuity; Mary’s directing the chil-dren’s attention to it kept it within the interaction space. This ensemble of differentyet connected activities provided children with a ‘horizontal learning’ experiencethat allowed for the distributive nature of learning and them to develop a repertoireof ways of representing what they knew and could do (Gutiérrez 2008). From a sci-ence education point of view, the sequence of activities was anchored by the normsof scientific observation. Observation is fundamental to science activity and conse-quently counts as a ‘big idea’. Scientific observation requires particular ‘habits ofattention’ that distinguish it from everyday observation. Eberbach and Crowley(2009) assert that these habits include attention to salient features with a purpose inmind, careful and systematic documentation, and persistence. The sequence of activ-ities in the tuatara unit fostered these habits. Using schematic and real depictions oftuatara along with guidance about what to attend to when examining these becamea strong focus. Mary introduced key vocabulary to support this careful attentionand systematic documentation. In our view, by providing a positive and productivefirst experience of science Mary also enhanced the chances that the children, andtheir families, might wish to continue to engage with science. Given the outcome ofthis unit, it would seem that the provision of horizontal learning experiences tocomplement and enrich student vertical learning experiences is worthy of furtherconsideration in early years science education.

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AcknowledgementsThe CRPandA study was funded as a Teaching and Learning Initiative Research project,under the management of the New Zealand Council of Educational Research.

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