Abstract
This paper explores a common educational dilemma, namely that of how to resource meaningful teaching and learning experiences, and the research challenge of how to represent the multimodal complexity of pedagogic intentions and instantiations. We share the sociocultural view of talk as a central tool in meaning making, aligned with attention to how teaching and learning conversations are mediated by communicative cues and interactions orchestrated across modes. We present extracts to exemplify the benefits of combining sociocultural discourse analysis (SCDA) and multimodal analysis, to explore classroom data at different levels of detail and temporal range. The context for the data collection was a series of lessons on the Great Fire of London with a Year 2 class (6–7 years). Lessons were part of a project using dance and interactive technologies to support understanding. We highlight the purposeful use of different analytic foci, enabled by SCDA and multimodal analysis, and explore what this can add to researchers' understanding of the contextualised nature of meaning making, building and weaving over time, in often unexpected ways. The original contribution of this paper is in offering an innovative mixed-methods approach to explore the complex detail, development and multimodal array of educational interaction. • Innovative mixed-methods approach to researching educational interactions • Combining sociocultural discourse analysis and multimodal analysis • Acknowledging the use of classroom talk and multimodality in meaning making • Exploring breadth and depth of classroom interactions toward meaningful learning
Highlights
Researching an educational dilemma: How to resource meaningful teaching and learning experiences
Within the methodological approach we present in this paper, we build on our previous work calling for a similar need to attend to the complexity of unfolding interactions (Twiner, 2011), that predates but reinforces Rasmussen & Damsa's (2017) call, by combining multimodal and sociocultural discourse analysis
On the basis of this review of existing approaches and challenges, in this paper we address the research question: How can a combination of sociocultural discourse analysis and multimodal analysis allow researchers to effectively attend to detailed interweavings and development of multimodal unfolding classroom interaction, in the co-construction of meaning? we outline the background and process of SCDA and multimodal analysis, before exemplifying the added scope of insights made possible by combining these already powerful tools
Summary
Researching an educational dilemma: How to resource meaningful teaching and learning experiences. A further development of this work could be to explore the in-depth analysis of classroom interaction enabled through combining SCDA and multimodal analysis, with learning outcomes of the activities It could be argued, that verbally-expressed understandings are themselves valid learning out comes – as pupils create and re-voice meanings in their own words. Qualitative analysis element The qualitative element of SCDA is based on the assumption of the central role of language as a cultural and psychological tool in making and negotiating meaning This implies a focus on language within the social context in which it occurs, and so on the joint activity, content and structure of talk between participants: how knowledge is jointly constructed or disputed. Rationale and process for the components of SCDA, we do the same for multimodal analysis
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