Environmental Awareness in Moroccan Preschool Children’s Eco-Drawings: A Socio-semiotic Approach

Environmental awareness (EA) is an environmental education objective to develop a population that is aware of and concerned about the environment and its challenges. Many pedagogical methods and techniques are used to raise such awareness. In preschool education, children need to be taught about the damage and overexploitation that humans are inflicting on nature. Though this issue has been scientifically documented in different parts of the globe, in the Moroccan context, studies on children’s environmental drawings are scarce, unexplored, and not well explained. The aim of this chapter is to explore the multiple perspectives of environmental meaning-making in Moroccan preschool children’s drawings to reveal early traces of EA formation among preschool children. To examine this issue, 91 drawings were collected from three kindergartens in Oujda, Meknes, and Tata. The socio-semiotic approach (Kress, van Leeuwen, Reading images the grammar of visual design. Routledge, New York, 2021) was adopted to account for the significance of the environmental elements depicted in children’s preschool drawings. Specifically, the study uses a hybrid model that combines the principles of information, contact, framing, and salience. The results show that EA is weak among preschool children in Morocco. However, the study assumes that the drawings are significant in terms of what they reveal about connections that bind children to natural elements. In a naïve and innocent way, the drawings reflect that the environment (a place of joy, play, and entertainment) should be preserved. Additionally, the results show that the drawings were intertwined with many elements that pertain to the categories of the environment, humans, and objects. According to the socio-semiotic model, the results indicate that (1) certain elements were particularly prominent, (2) drawings were close to reality, and (3) children demand care and preservation of natural settings. This study has many implications for educational officials, teachers, and future research. At an early age, children need to be informed and sensitized to the importance of the environment. More than that, educational materials and activities must be integrated at this level to improve preschool children’s awareness of preserving the environment.