Transforming Communication Across Modes and Media: One Child's Experience in a Middle Eastern Early Learning Context

• In Event: 43.053 - Materiality Meets Multimodality: The Forgotten Role of Material Objects in Digital Literacies

Abstract

Objectives
This paper examines the social and material action of children in an early years classroom in Dubai—a classroom richly constituted as multicultural. Through discourse and multimodal analyses it uncovers how one child, as opposed to others, transmediates across multiple modes and media to communicate and make meaning in superior and powerful ways.

Theoretical Framework
The nature of social action in the classroom is structured by contextual social institutions—like rule and regulations, curriculum ideology and resources (Giddens, 1984). The social action in multicultural classrooms is further flavoured by cultural difference (Bhabha, 1994) which plays out to influence how children engage as learners in learning opportunities like play scenarios. Some children are equipped with skill sets that support them to translate meaning across a variety of modes and media, thus enabling them to transmediate and articulate rich meanings across multiple sources (Suhor, 1984). Cultural difference appears to influence this skill set.

Methods and Data sources
The research site was an international school in Dubai. Data—field notes, semi-structured interviews, images, symbols and interactions—were gathered over a period of eight weeks in a foundation classroom where an Australian teacher taught children from ten different nations. A multidimensional approach was used to analyse data. Discourse analysis (Gee, 2011) located the sociomaterial action in a broader global context of the social institutions in which the classroom was embedded while a multimodal interactional analysis (Norris, 2014) examined children’s actions as they engaged with materials as part of play.

Results
In this classroom, where cultural diversity characterises people, materials and ideas, some children are privileged while others are marginalised in the educative process of play. This privileging and marginalisation is influenced by the culturally derived skill sets which children bring to classrooms and manifest in children having different degrees of access to participate in learning.

Significance
The findings of this study have implications for the work of teachers in increasingly globalised and a diversely peopled classrooms. Providing learning opportunities that are more inclusive means that children have greater access to communication and learning.

Author

• Lesley Friend, Australian Catholic University