Pictures in Biology Education

Abstract

The question of reading tends to be relegated to processes that occur within the head and between the ears. There are other approaches, however, that have shown to be of much greater use for understanding reading process and for how to design classroom instruction: those of anthropological and social-psychological nature. In this chapter, we articulate this theoretical approach and provide exemplary analyses of the process of reading pictures. We show that the implications of this way of conceptualizing the reading process are easily applicable in biology classrooms, insofar as reading pictures is treated as a social practice that has its origin, as other higher cognitive functions, in social relations.