Movement and Semiotic Orchestrations of Meaning in Early-Years Classrooms

• In Event: 64.060 - Participation in Interaction: Multimodal Understandings of Interaction in a Range of Education Settings

Abstract

Objectives
This presentation provides a close examination of the multiple ways that meaning emerges through semiotic orchestrations during children's spontaneous and self-initiated activity in an early literacy classroom. It draws upon data generated during an ethnographically informed research study that examined four and five year-old children's moment-to-moment meaning making (AUTHOR, 2018),
Theoretical Perspectives
The discussion offers a theoretical framework for observing young children's activity, focusing on their bodily movements. The application of the post-structural concept of emergence (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987) reveals the communicative and affective flows of meaning that unfold moment-by-moment (Massumi, 2002). This re-focuses attention to the ongoing dynamics and speed of movement of children's bodies and the affective atmospheres (Ehret and Hollett, 2016) that are generated by and interrelated with the production of meaning. Here young literacy learners are seen as bodies in a state of continual movement within a continually changing classroom environment.
Methods
As a year-long ethnographically informed study, methods involved observation and video recording of children during self-initiated activity. Observations were made as children were free to move around the classroom and undertake activities of their choosing.
Data sources and analysis. Data generated involved field notes, film footage and the mapping of children's movements. Multimodal analyses of filmed episodes were transcribed and analysed (Norris, S. 2004, AUTHOR, 2014). Analysis also included an examination of children's hand movements and patterns of individual and collective walking movements.
Findings
This presentation illustrates how children's movements and patterns of movement, from the gesturing of their hands as they shape, re-purpose and re-shape to the pathways they forge through walking, are seen as mutually implicated within the moment-to-moment meanings that emerged. Furthermore, these meanings were radically shaped by the spatial/material affordances of the early years' classroom.
Significance
The meanings that were made were co-constructed by children across moments and were influenced by, and generative of, children's novel communicative practices. Flows of bodily movement are seen as holding a powerful semiotic significance. This work has significance for how we might conceptualise young children's early literacy learning in early years' classrooms. It is demonstrable that early literacy is far from a sedentary or individual activity, and children's free movement is facilitative of child-produced sites for participation through which semiotic repertoires and early literacy practices emerge.

Author

• Karen Dianne Daniels, Sheffield Hallam University