“Are You Aware Enough of Feeding Birds, Sweetie?” A Semiotic View on Environmental Awareness in Iraqi Preschool Children’s Drawings

Climate change, pollution, deforestation, wildlife extinction, and other human-induced disasters are affecting the world. Since children are more susceptible to environmental harm, raising environmental awareness in children at early ages becomes a mandatory item in the educational system. The current qualitative research attempts to examine Iraqi preschool children’s drawings about care for the environment based on one observable problem: The Iraqi educational system for preschool children lacks an introduction to environmental awareness and sustainability. We carefully designed this study to describe and analyze Iraqi kindergarteners’ views of nature and the ways they are aware of the need to protect the threatened biodiversity in a war-zone area like Iraq. Peircean semiotic categories, viz. icon, index, and symbol, provide a workable model to understand the children’s 27 drawings. The authors collected the corpus during a one-day visit to Al-Jawsaq Private Kindergarten, located in the Right Bank area of Mosul, Nineveh, Iraq on June 28th, 2022. The children were informed about the visit several days before. The participants were 20 kindergarteners aged 4–6 years. On the day itself, the authors joined one class where they started with a 10-minute warm-up to help the children think about their natural surroundings. The children saw six posters about environmental awareness prepared by the researchers and were asked some questions. After this, the children had 30 minutes to make drawings depending on their perceptions. The total number of drawings was 27—20 from the class itself and 7 that were found on the boards in the kindergartens’ administration, which were also considered significant. The drawings were categorized into 20 “realistic drawings” and 7 “realistic and scribble drawings.” Results showed that environmental elements such as plants, water, the sun, soil, and mountains were iconically represented as part of a healthy environment. Colors as blue, green, brown, and red symbolized a gorgeous clean nature. Indexically, the children were not able to communicate messages on how to keep Mother Earth safe as they are unaware of their imbalanced surroundings.