Mediações visuais no ensino de ciências: proposta de taxonomia para a análise de artefatos

Abstract

The study proposes a taxonomy intended to guide the analysis of instructional visual artefacts for science education, in a context in which sharing, creating, and editing images have become more common, while the distance grows between tool use and an understanding of the processes that underpin graphic and interpretive choices. The scope privileges artefacts produced with communicative intent, connected to science teaching and science communication, and assumes that strengthening repertoires for visual reading and visual production becomes necessary as the means of creation, editing, and circulation grow more complex. To support a unified analytical language, the work brings together contributions from diverse fields that make it possible to describe how artefacts organize information, structure relationships, and guide interpretive paths. It integrates studies from the psychology of perception and art theory, which emphasize perception as an organizing principle and offer categories for describing thought through form. It also draws on cartography and data visualization, with proposals for systematizing visual variables and modes of graphic construction, alongside criteria of visual economy and graphic integrity derived from statistics applied to communication. Approaches that treat the image as a contested field are also included, discussing the polysemy of the term “image,” media hybridity, and institutional tensions surrounding these concepts. Completing this set are perspectives from semiotics and visual rhetoric, which describe operations between the plastic and iconic layers of the sign; contributions on persuasive language in applied contexts that distinguish formal patterns and semantic deviations in terms of cognitive costs; and a socio-semiotic grammar focused on compositional choices, credibility, and ideological effects. In addition, the study considers models oriented toward structural unification and visualization design, including empirical dimensions for characterizing graphical abstracts, recursive descriptions of the syntax of the graphic object, and a philosophical roadmap for understanding how models can say something about the world. The Peircean framework contributes universal categories—Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness—along with the triadic definition of the sign and its organization into classes, and it supports the connection to science education through hypoicons and their sublevels—image, diagram, and metaphor—highlighting the role of the diagram in reasoning and in making relationships explicit, as well as the importance of collateral knowledge for images and metaphors to function as interpretable statements. On this basis, concepts are selected to create a basic taxonomy as an analytical instrument aimed at reading and producing visual artefacts used in science education, organized into the following taxons: Diagrammatic Space, Diagrammatic Multiplicity, Diagrammatic Relation, Diagrammatic Composition, Diagrammatic Navigation, Temporal–Diagrammatic Stability, Diagram Interactivity, Access to the Object, and Type–Specimen. Finally, taxonomy is applied to a range of objects through detailed analyses in order to observe the behavior of the taxons, discuss results, identify strengths and weaknesses, and reflect on criteria for evaluating the procedure.