Abstract:
This paper reports on a single, embedded case-study (Yin, 2009), which investigates why students need to be able to purposefully design meaning in creating multimodal digital texts; and how we can teach them to do this. This is a pedagogically motivated response to new literacy practices, shaped by digital communication technologies. While ‘creating’ multimodal and digital texts is recognised in the ‘Australian Curriculum: English’, there is, as yet, little pedagogic support to show what ‘creating’ means in literacy practice; or systematic guidance for how to teach meaning making across a range of communication modes, other than linguistic. Within this gap, the study investigates teaching one aspect of the complex mix of semiotic resources involved in a moving image text. The focus is the visual mode to further develop a visual grammar (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006) for use with student multimodal authors. In particular, students were taught how to manipulate their viewer’s visual perspective at different times throughout their story, using knowledge of visual focalisation to create different interpretive possibilities. This is approached through social semiotic theory (Halliday 1978, Halliday and Hasan 1985, van Leeuwen, 2005), and focalisation theory (Bal, 2004; Genette, 1980); and is further informed by recent work with visual focalisation (Painter, Martin, & Unsworth, 2013). A design based research approach (Cobb, Confrey, diSessa, Lehrer, & Schauble, 2003) with iterative cycles of intervention and revision, was undertaken with three classes of Year Six students creating animation narratives, in a Melbourne primary school. The study consisted of a series of scaffolded, progressive teaching interventions, where learners were explicitly taught the content and the processes identified for successful learning in this context (Martin & Rose, 2005; Rose, 2009); and then built on this in their own storytelling. The research is described and contextualised with examples of data analysis including student animations. Finding show these student authors were aware of the potential semiotic impact of different visual focalisation choices taught. Students were able to purposefully use this knowledge to manipulate viewer perspective, in relation to characters and events as the stories unfolded, to enrich their storytelling.