Learning in civics education involves developing an understanding of the complexity and the changeability in many different societal issues and phenomena. One common way of helping students to develop this understanding is to use visual models in teaching, such as flowcharts and different kinds of diagrams. However, teacher experience as well as earlier research indicate that students often find it difficult to understand and interpret such models (Cohn et al. 2001; Ruiz Estrada 2012; Wheat 2007). As much as they have the potential to help students grasp complexity and changeability in societal issues, visual models also risk hindering such development, as models for instance tend to simplify complex relations and phenomena (Davies & Mangan 2013; Wheat 2007). 

In this article we elaborate on the development of visual literacy in civics education - what seems to be critical for students to discern in order to be able to read different kinds of visual models and how teaching based on such models can be designed in order for students to deepen their understanding of the issues, relations and phenomena illustrated in the models. We do this based on a research project involving 300 students from primary and lower secondary school as well as upper secondary school. 

The project focused on two kinds of models (two flowcharts and two plot diagrams) often used in social studies teaching: a flowchart illustrating the democracy system in Sweden, a flowchart of the socio-economic cycle, a plot diagram illustrating the relationship between different countries’ GDP and level of CO2 emissions and a plot diagram illustrating the relationship between birth rate per woman in different countries and the amount of years girls in these countries attend to school. The results allow for a comparison between the aspects critical to discern in order to understand different kinds of models in relation to different contents. Conclusions include the importance of focusing internal structure, external context and civic agency in each model.

At the NOKSA conference we would like to participate in a paper-response session where a draft to a paper is being discussed.