“BIs forBunny”: Contested Sign‐Making and the Possibilities for Performing School Literacy Differently

Abstract

The tremendous interest in multimodality within the field of literacy education has challenged the verbocentric literacy landscape of schools. Research on multimodality in classroom spaces has suggested that combining and juxtaposing multiple sign systems is a generative act of transforming meanings. Yet, attention to entanglements of pedagogy and power has been rare in the research on students’ engagement with multimodality. In this article, we complicate the research on the generative potential of children’s multimodal sign‐making in school by tracing the ways this process is saturated with power. Using a theoretical mash‐up, performative semiotics, we read a classroom event, situated in a computer lab, in which two kindergartners regarded as successful literacy learners designed digital texts about a bunny that some children reported seeing on a field trip. The multiple meanings of bunny that 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 in their 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.

One Fourth-Grader’s Orchestration of Modes Through Comic Composition

“…Connecting with colleagues in education-adjacent fields such as special and gifted education or teaching English as an additional language may also advance our understanding of how multimodal composition might support the meaning-making work of all students. Theoretical frameworks or mash-ups (Kontovourki & Siegel, 2021) drawn from typically distinct areas of research may operationalize more completely the notion of multimodality as a democratic enterprise that seeks to honor the semiotic labor of all students—regardless of the modes, media, and materials they use (Cowan & Kress, 2017).…”

Vibrancy and stillness in talking school discourse: examining embodied talk in a primary classroom

“…Despite examining the ways in which children's literate bodies are regulated, researchers have nevertheless suggested that looking closely at children's performances in everyday classroom encounters enables seeing these as fragmented, manifold, and thus possible to redefine literacy and literacy learning (e.g. Dyson, 2003, 2008; Henning, 2019; Kontovourki & Siegel, 2022). Focusing particularly on children's talk and noise in an early primary classroom, Dernikos (2020) suggested that the regulation of sounds cites hegemonic, raced and classed discourses but is never fixed.…”

“…Accordingly, one can identify a skills‐based, sequential notion of comprehension; the evaluative workings of literacy teaching; particular definitions of dialogic engagement in learning; the prioritisation of eloquence (regardless of context); and the hierarchisation of mainstream and non‐mainstream varieties. All these work together and onto human and nonhuman bodies to foreground language (oral, written and performed) as the primary object of school literacy and pedagogy, regardless of teachers' attempts to integrate in the assemblage digital tools and media; hence indexing monolingual, monomodal, monocultural notions of literacy that are repeatedly reinforced through official policies and curricula (see Kontovourki & Siegel, 2022 and Mills & Stornaiuolo, 2018 for critiques). As discourses that permeate schooling and literacy in school, these become immaterial forces that regulate and confine being school‐literate.…”

“…Returning to the need to attend both to materiality and discursivity (Beucher et al, 2019), embodied talk thus emerges in human and nonhumans bodies (of children, teachers and knowledges) in historicised becomings that are nevertheless open to redefinition; hence, they are still and vibrant at the same time. This concurrent constriction and possibility may be seen when attention is paid to the ways in which classroom contingency makes sense – means – in terms of established truths about children, literacy and schooling (Kontovourki & Siegel, 2022). The latter renders uncertain whether such redefinition is acknowledged beyond the contingencies of tangible events.…”

Wag the Dog: A Digital Literacies Narrative

“…In 1994, Rowe leveraged semiotics to position preschoolers’ scribblings as meaning-filled written expressions thus laying the groundwork for literacy scholars to embrace multimodal texts (see also Clark, 1990; Leland & Harste, 1994; Short & Kauffman, 2000). In the ensuing years, literacy scholars similarly drew on semiotics to consider the reading and writing that occur when users encounter multimodal digital texts (see Baker, 2000; Gillen, 2014; Kontovourki & Siegel, 2021; Kress, 2010; Serafini, 2014; Siefkes, 2015). In 1995, I observed Sally as she researched Alaska.[To learn about Alaska,] Sally…read her social studies textbook…which incorporated alphabetic text, illustrations, and photographs.…”