Contested Sign-Making and the Possibilities for Performing School Literacy Differently

• In Event: Transmediation in Motion: New Directions for Theory and Inquiry on Multimodality in School Spaces

Abstract

The generative potential of multimodality was a prominent theme in early research on multimodality in school as it provided evidence that children knew and understood more than words alone revealed, thus challenging the labels assigned to children who did not demonstrate control over written language. Yet, attention to the institutional power circulating in the generative moments of multimodality is rare. The purpose of this paper is to present a theoretical mash-up that examines entanglements of pedagogy and power, by tracing the generative potential of multimodality in relation to the disciplinary power of “schooled literacy” (Cook-Gumperz, 1986). By laminating this approach to power onto analyses of children’s sign-making, we recognize classrooms as dynamic spaces of interaction that are regulated but always in motion. That is, the discourse of schooled literacy appears fixed, but can also be transformed as it circulates through the actions, interactions, bodies, and things that constitute multimodality in school literacy.

To explore this, we turned to Suhor’s (1981, 1984) definition of transmediation, Peirce’s theory of semiosis (Eco, 1976), and Butler’s poststructural theory of performativity (1997a, 1999) to read a classroom event situated in a school computer lab, in which two kindergarten children created digital texts about a bunny seen during a field trip. Our analysis was guided by two questions: How did the focal children perform schooled literacy as they produced chains of sign-making in the computer lab? How was this sign-making both generative and regulated?

Data were produced during Spring 2004 school year in a kindergarten classroom in a school that followed a reading and writing workshop curriculum. The site for the study was P.S. ABC, a PreK-5 public elementary school located in a predominantly bilingual community in a large metropolitan city in the United States. When the study began, the school served approximately 600 students, 92% of whom qualified for free lunch. Observations recorded in fieldnotes and videotape, supplemented by artifacts and informal conversations with children and teachers were the primary sources of data.

Using a theoretical mash-up, “performative semiotics,” we read a classroom event, situated in a computer lab, in which two kindergarten children regarded as successful literacy learners designed digital texts about a bunny. The multiple meanings of ‘bunny’ the children negotiated are theorized as chains of contested sign-making that are performative. In tracing both sign-making and performativity, the analysis makes visible the politics of schooled literacy and the way children’s performances appear fixed yet are destabilized at each turn in children’s interactions, thus complicating the assumption that multimodality is a generative process that can transform schooled literacy. This analytic mash-up also focuses attention on the instability of classroom interactions and shows how this provides openings for performing literacy differently even as they remain bound to normalized and naturalized ways of being literate in school. Thus, we argue that claims about multimodality require attention to the way both fixity and instability produces school literacy performances.

Authors

• Stavroula Kontovourki, University of Cyprus

• Marjorie Siegel, Teachers College, Columbia University