Multimodal Approaches to Research and Pedagogy

Recognition, Resources, and Access

Arlene Archer, Denise Newfield

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317999805
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Adult Education

This book brings together social semiotics, cultural studies, multiliteracies, and other approaches in order to theorize very different learning environments, giving visibility to the modal effect in a range of disciplines. It highlights the ideological nature of discursive practices, examines questions of access, and argues for transformation of these practices, with a constant eye on issues of social justice and equity. Contributors argue that we can harness learners' representational resources through making these resources visible, and creating less regulated spaces in the curriculum in which they can be used. Examples from primary education through to adult continuing education are used throughout the text.

1 Challenges and Opportunities of Multimodal Approaches to Education in South Africa

Arlene Archer and Denise Newfield

A multimodal approach to communication considers language to be only one form of representation amongst others, such as gesture, sound, images, and music. These forms work together in different ways, and with different effects, to create multi-layered, communicational ensembles. The implication of this for educational contexts is that the variety of multimodal text forms must be reflected and recognised in the curriculum. A multimodal approach to pedagogy recognises that teaching and learning happen through a range of modes—image, writing, speech, gesture—and encourages pedagogic tasks that require multiple forms of representation. Stein (2008:121) uses the term ‘multimodal pedagogies’ to refer to “curriculum, pedagogy and assessment practices which focus on mode as a defining feature of communication in learning environments”. As a methodological approach, multimodality offers a systematic way of analysing data. The kind of analytical reading enabled by a multimodal approach gives us a means to understand and manipulate what may otherwise remain at the level of intuitive response (Van Leeuwen & Jewitt 2001). Multimodal textual analysis can show what representations include and exclude, what they make salient.

Interest in multimodal approaches to research and pedagogy is increasing in South Africa. Multimodality as an academic area of study is undertaken by researchers from a wide range of interests and disciplines, including linguistics, literature, communication, visual arts and design, media studies, museum studies, health sciences, engineering, anthropology, jewellery and fashion design and information technology. This book builds on and extends South African work in the field over the last fifteen years. The University of the Witwatersrand initiated the project of multimodality in South Africa through expanding the semiotic consciousness of teachers and learners in its multilingual, diverse classrooms. Their seminal research was published in a special edition of English Studies in Africa 49 (1) edited by Newfield and Stein in 2006, and in Stein’s book Multimodal pedagogies in diverse classrooms, representation, right and resources (2008). The focus in South Africa has been on multimodality and access due to the social and political imperatives of our context. Of particular interest to many researchers and practitioners is the number of ways in which multimodal pedagogy can enable critical access to dominant forms, as well as the extent to which it can create unregulated spaces in the curriculum to enable a range of student resources to emerge. The contexts we are in, and which we research, are highly politicised, which inevitably shapes the work.

The contributors to this book reflect on what multimodality offers education in South Africa, as well as how diverse social and political sites enable us to re-think some aspects of multimodal theory. We have applied a multimodal perspective to a number of educational environments at different levels, within a range of institutions representative of the socio-economic, linguistic, and cultural diversity of the broader society. The aim of doing this is to identify some of the challenges and opportunities of using multimodal approaches to pedagogy in a diverse and developing context, which has relevance for a range of global educational domains. South Africa is thus offered as an instance of a multilingual, culturally diverse educational site in a recently decolonised country in which access to education remains unequal despite an educational policy based on principles of redress and human rights. The book showcases a range of exciting implementations of multimodality, each one recognising South African students’ semiotic resources with a view to enabling access to curricular and disciplinary content, to improved communication, to metacognitive understandings, to confident semiotic dispositions, and to a more secure sense of self in a world that is both local and global. It is hoped that educators in different contexts of political or social transition will find resonances, parallels, or discontinuities that will be stimulating and productive in relation to their own work.

Educational Contexts in South Africa

Although many of the children in the present South African education system were born after the demise of apartheid, it is necessary to remember the discriminatory and separatist principles of the former education system in order to comprehend the degree of transformation that is required. South Africa’s National Party government wanted “no mixing of languages, no mixing of cultures, no mixing of races” (cited in Christie 1991:174). Apartheid education, with its seventeen education departments for different ‘race’ and ethnic groups, separate curricula, and uneven distribution of material and human resources, remained in place between 1953 and 1994. After 1994, the African National Congress government installed a new unitary educational system based on the principles of democracy that inform South Africa’s new Constitution and its educational policy—human rights, equality, empowerment, redress, and multilingualism. New identities, which are intended to build the new South African nation, are envisaged for teachers and learners in the post-apartheid curriculum at all levels. The curriculum seeks to create a lifelong learner who is confident and independent, literate, numerate, multi-skilled, and compassionate, with respect for the environment and the ability to participate in society as a critical and active citizen. Learners are furthermore encouraged to develop knowledge and understanding of the “rich diversity of this country, including the cultural, religious and ethnic components of this diversity” (Department of Education cited in Newfield 2011a:25–26).

The present moment in South Africa’s fledgling democracy, with its struggles towards informed participation and its many problems and yet possibilities, makes the sector of education a particularly challenging one. It is generally held that the ideals of our progressive and humane national policies remain largely unachieved and that a huge gap exists between policy and practice, as well as ideals and their actualisation. Educational achievement twenty years after the demise of apartheid remains persistently unequal. For example, results in the international literacy study, PIRLS (Progress in International Reading Literacy Study) of 2006 and 2011, under the auspices of the International Association for the Evaluation of Education Achievement, show that the average performance of Grades 4 and 5 learners is way below the international average of 500 points, with a discrepancy in the 2006 study that equates to two and a half years of schooling between children from advantaged and those from disadvantaged South African backgrounds (Howie, van Staden, Tshele, Dowse & Zimmerman, 2012). According to Ramphele (2012), educational achievement is disabled by the context in which it finds itself—one of poverty, unemployment, high levels of crime, poor governance, a patronage-driven system, corruption, and inadequate health care. In spite of a massive budget for education, South African education is said to be “in crisis” and “a national disaster” (Bloch 2009). Many schools are characterised by under-prepared teachers; poor student attendance; weak leadership; and lack of desks, toilets, libraries, and textbooks— the ongoing legacy of apartheid education. These factors have contributed not only to the dismal achievement of the majority of South African primary school children in international literacy and numeracy tests, but also to the unsatisfactory matriculation results (Bloch 2009:126–127) and the high drop-out rate at university level (Letsaka & Maile 2008; Mancupe 2013). On the other hand, at this moment of crisis and chaos, motivation for improvement is high and new opportunities for pedagogic and systemic innovation are emerging, as can be seen, for example, in the burgeoning ‘affordable’ independent school sector.

The diversity of language, culture, and ethnicity that characterises South African educational contexts can be viewed either as a productive, if utopian, manifestation of rich texture and potential synergy, or as a manifestation of gaps and inequities in human and material resources and in language proficiency. English is perceived as the language of power and of access to both local and global marketplaces. It has been chosen as the medium of instruction in most educational contexts, even though institutions are permitted to select any one of the nation’s official languages for this purpose— Sepedi, Sesotho, Setswana, siSwati, Tshivenda, Xitsonga, Afrikaans, English, isiNdebele, isiXhosa, and isiZulu. This has serious consequences for the majority of South African students for whom English is not a mother tongue, but rather a second, third, fourth, or fifth language. A multimodal approach has the potential to provide a healthy antidote to monolingual and logocentric approaches to meaning-making, enabling a metacognitive view of semiosis as occurring across languages and modes, as well as, in the view of practitioners represented in this book, a successful way of enabling access to dominant and powerful forms.

Access and Design

Many theorists in South Africa argue that a multimodal approach to teaching and researching educational practices can go some way towards addressing issues of equity, access, participation, and social relations (Stein 2008; Stein & Newfield 2006; Hunma 2012; Newfield 2011b; Newfield & Maungedzo 2006). Stein and Newfield argue that multimodal pedagogy in the classroom can inform a social justice and equity agenda: “Multimodal pedagogies have the potential to make classrooms more democratic, inclusive spaces in which marginalised students’ histories, identities, cultures, languages and discourses can be made visible” (2006:9). Archer argues for theorising the link between multimodality and access by making conventionalised educational practices explicit in order to enable student access to these practices (2013). One way of doing this is, for instance, using symbolic objects in the classroom as a way of eliciting student narratives and highlighting notions of ‘change’ (2007, 2008). Thesen (2001, 2007) acknowledges that multimodal texts in the curriculum raise new questions about power and access, although she argues that they do not necessarily open up access in any automatic way.

It is clear that over the past decade, multimodality has offered South African educators across a range of disciplinary fields a framework within which to contest and work against the narrow, prescriptive ideas of apartheid education. A multimodal approach has provided a range of possibilities for a transformed approach to the semiotic space of the classroom and to student voice—in both historically disadvantaged and privileged sites. Newfield (2013:142–143) lists the core aspects in a multimodal approach that have attracted South African educators as ‘liberation’, ‘diversity’, ‘innovation’, and ‘agency and transformation’. The profound form of semiotic liberation offered by multimodality to education resonates with the sense of political freedom, and freedom of speech and association that permeates the new South African dispensation, as well as with the emancipation of meaning-making from its policing under the former regime. Representation seen as the action of socially located, culturally and historically formed individuals multiplies the notion of culture and makes “multiplicity and multiperspectivity foundational principles of semiosis, instead of singularity and prescription” (Newfield 2013:142). These ideas feed into democratic views of semiotic practice, as can be seen in a number of chapters in this book, for example, those by Harrop-Allin and Reed ( Chapters 2 and 12 ).

We think of access as both material and symbolic. Access in material terms includes access to computers, to books, to teachers, and so on. Access in symbolic terms is about epistemological access to forms of knowledge and meaning-making. In terms of education, access pertains to the discourses and knowledges of the curriculum, as well as formal assessment. However, we wish to broaden the notion of access beyond curricular and institutional demands. We think of access as a disposition to self-reflexivity, access to local and global practices, access to different disciplines, access to diversity, and most importantly, access to a range of semiotic resources.

Closely linked to notions of access is that of ‘design’. A multimodal approach foregrounds the principle of design in the making and production of meaning rather than the acquisition of received knowledge. The notion of ‘design’ recognises the large number and proliferation of resources for meaning-making, and that meaning-making is about choosing and assembling resources according to individual desire and ideological position as well as perceptions of audience and context. In the act of making meaning, “learners produce multiple signs in textual forms across semiotic modes, drawing on different representational resources in order to succeed in that domain” (Stein 2000:333). What South African researchers have responded to is the emphasis on student ‘interest’ and agency in multimodal approaches to meaning-making. This has enabled the construction of a non-deficit view of students and their sign making.

Recognition and Agency

An important feature of South African engagement with multimodality is recognition of resources. Social semioticians recognise and investigate how resources are used in specific historical, cultural, and institutional contexts, and how people talk about them in these contexts (Jewitt 2006, 2013; Van Leeuwen 2005). One objective of mapping multimodal research in South Africa is to explore how we have contributed to the discovery, development, and new uses of semiotic resources in our educational contexts. As society changes, new semiotic resources and new ways of theorising the use of these is needed. For instance, Archer and Stent (2011) have argued that colour can operate on the ideational level given certain socio-political conditions, in this case, the repressive political context in South Africa in the ’80s. Van Leeuwen points out that semiotic change often meets with resistance “because past ways of doing things may be ‘hardwired’ in technologies, or in the layout of buildings, or because people with a vested interest in past ways of doing things see their traditional values threatened” (2005:27).

We conceptualise the notion of recognition in a number of ways. Firstly, it is about noticing or observing or ‘making visible’ semiotic resources. Secondly, it is about theorising and understanding resources through the use of a metalanguage. This means that recognition is not just a perceptual but also a conceptual act. Lastly, recognition involves integrating resources in a range of educational contexts. However, these are not ‘steps’; they do not signal a linear trajectory. Rather, these conceptualisations signal the way recognition permeates the different ‘message systems’ of education (Bernstein 1975), curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment. The opposite of recognition is blindness, an inability to notice resources because of certain ideological frameworks that prevent seeing what is there. Recognition is about opening up regulated spaces in order to widen the horizons of meaning-making.

For the South African educators represented in this book, recognition applies not only to resources, but also to agency. Our assumption is that people choose how to represent meaning from a range of possible options shaped within a particular context. Therefore, we see both teachers and students as designers of meaning. Once they recognise the available resources, they are able to utilise them in design. This may mean drawing on resources that were previously unnoticed or devalued since they seemed inappropriate in an educational setting. The meaning-maker can select and assess the value and appropriateness of resources for the immediate contexts,...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Routledge Studies in Multimodality
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Plates
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Challenges and Opportunities of Multimodal Approaches to Education in South Africa
• Part I Recognising Resources Multimodal Texts and Practices
• Part II Redesigning Resources Multimodal Pedagogies and Access
• Contributors
• Index