Making Video: Imagining Socially Productive Work in Schools

• In Event: Digital Mediation and Language Learners: Imagined Identities and Placed Resources

Abstract

Objectives:We engaged in videomaking projects with English language learners in: 1) Canada, with Punjabi-speaking children; 2) India with Tibetan-speaking children; 3) Mexico with Spanish-speaking children. We asked: a) if videomaking afforded these second language (L2) learners enhanced possibilities for representation of their complex multilingual and multicultural identities and communities, and b) if and how schools might consider multimodal literacy instruction to be as important and appropriate in schools as print literacy instruction.
Theoretical framework: Scholarship in sociocultural and actor-network theories (ANT), and the New Literacy Studies (NLS), offers nuanced and complementary understandings of learning, and literacy, and of how assemblages of material as well as human ‘things’ produce effects on the world. For socioculturalists, learning occurs when participants engage in activities with others and develop expertise. NLS scholars see literacy not as a particular skill or set of skills learned by individuals and thereafter universally applicable, but rather as “a repertoire of changing practices for communicating purposely in multiple social and cultural contexts’ (Mills, 2010, p. 247). Such scholars argue that school literacy practices should build on children’s community literacy competences. More recently, scholars observe the availability of multimodal, symbolic/representational systems, including language but also images, video, gesture, sound (and blends of modes), and urge instruction in such literacies in schools. Creating multimodal texts have been argued to afford learners possibilities for more sophisticated personal and collective representation than they are able to produce in written language alone. Despite widespread interest, developing such literacies in schools is sporadic, with government-sponsored literacy tests arguably constructing literacy as “homogenous packages of functional skills” (Clarke, 2002) that privilege print over all other types. ANT offers possibilities for understanding this privilege, as it urges attention to how material, discursive and cultural practices collaborate to produce understandings of legitimate literacies. We use ANT to identify where interventions might be made to legitimize videomaking as language and literacy activity in schools.
Methods: For analysis of our video data, we used visual discourse analysis (van Leeuwen, 2008) to examine what kinds of meanings child L2 learners were able to express in their video productions. We examine how children depict themselves, what language(s) they use, what local and global cultural resources they represent, how they construct story arcs and so on.
Data sources: Short videos created by children for children in the other locations. Their instructions were: “Show children in (Canada, Mexico and/or India) what your lives are like”. As well, we interviewed instructors.
Results:Analyses demonstrate the sophistication and complexity of the meanings these children convey in their videos, and their exploration of their multilingual identities and outside-school knowledge. As well, the children positioned themselves imaginatively as producers of socially useful objects. Our ANT analysis suggests that material objects, prevailing curriculum discourses, and school practices create a network that makes problematic school multimodal literacy activities. By articulating elements of the networks, we identify possibilities for creating alternatives that support multimodal literacies.

Authors

• Kelleen Toohey, Simon Fraser University

• Diane H. Dagenais, Simon Fraser University