Engaging with children's graphic ensembles of an archaeological site: A multi-modal social semiotic approach to learning

Sophia Diamantopoulou

doi:10.7146/hjlcb.v21i41.96815

Abstract

Children’s drawings have been widely used in the ﬁeld of museum education as indicators for learning, as well as means for evaluating the teaching that takes place in a museum or a heritage site. This paper employs social semiotics and multimodality as tools for introducing a different perspective when it comes to building a descriptive and an interpretative framework for analysing children’s production, as representative of their learning. The insight into their work is based on the assumptions that learning can be multi-modally mediated through a particular pedagogy and further be made accessible to us through the material realisation of children’s production across multiple modes. The paper aims to explore the implications of this position for generating knowledge about children’s learning. The main argument discussed here is that engaging with a child’s graphic ensemble through a multimodal and social semiotic perspective can enable us, hypothetically, to recover children’s meanings about the archaeological site as well as the aspects of their overall learning experience. Viewing their graphic ensembles as constructions that are interest driven and multi-modally realized could open up more possibilities for accessing the agendas and interests that guide their learning. The paper further uses this visual material as an opportunity to argue that when engaging with children’s learning, multimodality can work not as a theory on its own means, but as the framework that conditions a theory (e.g. social semiotics and discourse) into a direction of encompassing more possibilities for reading their understanding of the world.

Highlights

This paper, informed by a multimodal social semiotic approach to learning, presents two examples from children’s multimodal production as an opportunity to engage critically with what learning in an archaeological site means
Looking at two graphic ensembles as two instances of learning, I endeavour to reflect at one level, on the resources children use to make meanings about the site, and on another level at the resources that a multimodal/social semiotic approach to learning can contribute towards the description, articulation, analysis and interpretation of children’s production, within the ‘view of the world’ that this theory has defined
This consideration aims to show on one hand how an approach to a graphic representation through a multimodal perspective creates new possibilities for generating knowledge about children’s learning; on the other, it aims to discuss the importance of anchoring multimodality, as an analytical perspective, onto a theory with its own descriptive and interpretative language, as in the case of social semiotics and theory of discourse

Summary

Introduction

This paper, informed by a multimodal social semiotic approach to learning, presents two examples from children’s multimodal production as an opportunity to engage critically with what learning in an archaeological site means. In most of the children’s drawings linked to this task, this particular position normally features a representation of the ‘Acropolis’, overarching all other graphic elements This child’s interest in this case dictates a more practical and useful approach to a building that serves the purpose of constructing the site of the Agora as a fun place for a visitor. If we transcribed what a conventional map with a key would normally ‘tell’ in writing, we could come up with something along the lines of: ‘There is a theatre, guest houses, a restaurant...’ or ‘Here is the Agora with the following elements: houses, theatre, parliament, castle etc’ In this particular occasion the numbering on the key in conjunction with the text, adds a different dimension to the possible linguistic utterance, into which a drawing could be ‘transducted’: ‘Start at the guest houses, go the theatre, visit the Flower Street, see or attend a meeting at the parliament, eat at the restaurant and have fun at the castle of terror...’. The analysis here uses multimodality further as an exploratory tool for indentifying discourses materially manifested across the modes

Re-defining the notion of the archaeological site in a drawing

Conclusion