Artistic Photography for Science Teaching: Preschool Teachers Creating Photographic Metaphors to Represent Scientific Phenomena

Digital photographs are commonly used for science instruction since they can facilitate meaning-making and can draw students' interest and attention. However, it appears valuable to explore teachers' own creations of digital photographs, e.g. by using their portable mobile phone devices, to illustrate scientific phenomena as well as to create metaphorical representations of these phenomena, which this study calls `photographic metaphors'. In this direction, this study qualitatively examined preservice preschool teachers' (n = 42) artistic photographs and photographic metaphors. Furthermore, it examined teachers' views on using such an arts-based approach through qualitative content analysis of their questionnaire reflections. The findings revealed that teachers created a variety of photographic metaphors having linguistic and conceptual features. Furthermore, they found such an approach engaging and effective for science teaching. However, challenges often arose since teachers created inaccurate or vague metaphors in several instances. The findings inform teacher education designers in implementing arts-based approaches in science, specifically through artistic photography.