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Views of Nature and the Human-Nature Relations: An Analysis of the Visual Syntax of Pictures about the Environment in Greek Primary School Textbooks—Diachronic Considerations

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Abstract

This paper explores the function of the visual syntax of images in Greek primary school textbooks. By using a model for the formal analysis of the visual material, which will allow us to disclose the mechanisms through which meanings are manifested, our aim is to investigate the discursive transition relating to the view of nature and the human-nature relationship between two series of natural science textbooks. The model is applied to a total of 635 pictures; 434 coming from the old series of textbooks introduced in the early 1980s and 201 from the new introduced in 2006. The results show that a) no differences in the codes of the visual representation of nature or human-nature relationship were recorded between the two series of textbooks, b) the environmental rhetoric mediated by the pictorial material of the textbooks appears closer to its lay counterpart than to scientific rhetoric, c) both series of textbooks favor a viewer-picture relation which diverges from the epistemological (subject/object) ideas of the romantic worldview and comes closer to the baroque one that depicts the world as non-linear and disconnected, while gives more freedom to the viewer to proceed to subjective interpretations. Thus, we assert that the baroque approach adopted by both series of textbooks does not aim at the initiation of students to the highly conventionalized ways of expression, and ultimately to the formalized and scientific rhetoric. On the contrary, within a constructionist context, the textbooks’ visual mode allows students to equally share power with a quite familiar world.

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Notes

  1. Critical realism is a stratified materialist and dialectical philosophy involving real objects, material structures and mechanisms through which events and discourses are generated. Critical realism promotes a weak constructionism and perceives cognitive processes in terms of language, discourse and ideology. At the same time, however, it rejects strong relativism associated with post-modern constructionism (Stamou 2011, in press). Scientists have the task to understand the invisible deep structures which generate unobservable events, which in their turn generate observable counterparts (Stamou 2011, in press).

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Acknowledgements

All pictures from the Greek school textbooks are reproduced with the kind permission of the Greek Institute of Education.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Environmental and Natural Resources Management, University of Ioannina, Ioannina, Greece

    Rea Lemoni

  2. Department of Ecology, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, UPB 119, 54124, Thessaloniki, Greece

    Ageliki Lefkaditou

  3. Department of Early Childhood Education, University of Western Macedonia, Florina, 53100, Greece

    Anastasia G. Stamou

  4. Department of Ecology, School of Biology, Aristotle, University of Thessaloniki, UPB 119, 54124, Thessaloniki, Greece

    Dimitrios Schizas & George P. Stamou

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  1. Rea Lemoni
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Correspondence to Ageliki Lefkaditou.

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Lemoni, R., Lefkaditou, A., Stamou, A.G. et al. Views of Nature and the Human-Nature Relations: An Analysis of the Visual Syntax of Pictures about the Environment in Greek Primary School Textbooks—Diachronic Considerations. Res Sci Educ 43, 117–140 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11165-011-9250-5

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