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The context of the township school provides several hurdles for learners engaging in school science, including low achievement and self-confidence. The use of multiple representations has been advocated for the development of conceptual understanding in physics. The study reported in this paper explores the relationship between learner academic engagement and the nature of the depictive representation of a simple circuit, and learners' reasons for their preference for any of these representations for learning among 78 Grade 8 learners from two township schools. Academic engagement was measured through a social dimension (learners' observed behaviour whilst on-task) and a cognitive dimension (learners' written responses to the task). Interview and questionnaire data addressed learner preferences. The findings show that the schematic circuit diagram generated no engagement with the task, as such tasks were associated with textbooks that learners did not understand and examinations that they perceived they would fail. In contrast, the naive photographic representation encouraged almost all participants to engage because of the familiarity with and concrete nature of the circuit components. It is recommended that the pedagogical affordances of different representations are considered and therefore teachers should consciously plan to support learner experiences with naive representations before introducing abstract, disciplinary-accepted representations such as the circuit diagram.