The Missing Tooth: Case Illustrations of a Child’s Assembled, Out-of-School Authorship

Kari-Lynn Winters

doi:10.26522/brocked.v22i1.304

Abstract

Case illustrations of a six-year-old boy’s adventures with a missing tooth are used in this paper to re-define a broader notion of authorship. Drawing on theories of social semiotics, New Literacy Studies (NLS), and critical positioning, this notion of authorship not only interweaves the boy’s preferred modes of meaning-making and communication, but also considers his sociocultural environments. Findings suggest that each mode of meaning-making (linguistic, symbolic, musical, etc.) has its own semiotic potential (both affordances and limitations) and that all authorship needs to be framed critically, within social contexts, in order to better understand and facilitate young children’s abilities to garner, interpret, design, and communicate ideas across a range of semiotic systems.

Highlights

Research suggests that children create and communicate by using a range of multimodal systems within their social contexts (Dyson, 1997; Jewitt & Kress, 2003; Pahl & Rowsell, 2005; Ranker, 2006)
While Peirce’s tradition of semiotics does suggest a combination of the social and the semiotic, the social is often implicit. Scholars such as Vygotsky (1980), Hodge and Kress (1988), and Van Leeuwen (2005) have critiqued Peirce’s model, arguing that semiotics should not be and can not be devoid of the socio-cultural contexts in which they are embedded, because meaningmaking and communication never occur in isolation. These more recent theories extend the field of New Literacy Studies, a field that emphasizes that semiotic resources are not composed in silos, but rather, within various and situated communities of social practice (Kress, 2010; Pahl & Rowsell, 2005; Larson & Marsh, 2005; Rogers & Winters, 2010)
What is important about contemporary notions of multimodal authorship and to this paper is how knowledge is always simultaneously constituted and communicated on multiple levels: (1) through specific semiotic modes and resources; (2) by individual or groups who come with their own values, beliefs, and so forth; and (3) within social practices and situated contexts

Summary

Introduction

Research suggests that children create and communicate by using a range of multimodal systems (e.g., drawing, singing, writing, talking) within their social contexts (Dyson, 1997; Jewitt & Kress, 2003; Pahl & Rowsell, 2005; Ranker, 2006) Within these environments they build critical power relations with others (Larson & Marsh, 2005; Lewis, 2001; Marsh & Millard, 2001; Moss, 2003). Authors help to shape the communicational situations they encounter, co-constituting the social and modal interactions that are assembled (Janks, 2010; Kress, 2010; Rogers et al, 2010)

Methods

Discussion

Conclusion