92 participant students completed a worksheet that involved drawing comic strips about
electric charges as characters of a cartoon series. Three students who had spontaneously produced arrow
diagrams were interviewed individually after class. We identified nine ideas related to electric fields that
these three students spontaneously leveraged in the comic strip activity. In this paper, we describe in detail
each idea and its situated context. As most research in the literature has understood students as having
relatively fixed conceptions and mostly identified divergences in those conceptions from canonical targets,
this study shows students’reasoning to be more variable in particular moments, and that variability includes
common sense resources that can be productive for learning about electric fields.