3. Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) - All submissions
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Item Exploring the impact of multimodal composition on the learning and composing of creative writing(2019) Vally Essa, FatimaThis research explores the impact that multimodal composition can have on the learning and composing of creative writing. A key element of this research is to use a culturally relevant pedagogical approach to identify the impact and effect of using multimodal composition as a tool to work with epistemological resources, identities and languages that learners bring into the classroom by means of creative writing and multilingualism. The study uses a qualitative approach to conduct the research. The research tools used for collecting data included a textual and multimodal writing intervention with a group of grade 7 learners. The intervention was conducted over a limited time of two weeks in every English period allocated to the participating class. The participants consisted of one grade 7 class, all between the ages of 12 – 13 years old. They were selected based on having a multilingual repertoire and they all came from low to middle income households. Once the multimodal intervention was completed, questionnaires and a focus group discussion was used to explore learners’ perceptions and choices made during the writing process. Theoretically and empirically, this research has attempted to bring together creative writing, multimodality and a culturally responsive pedagogy. The main findings of this study suggest that creative writing pedagogy requires a shift towards the performance/ dramatization modes. It had the potential to encourage multilingualism through oral modes whereas the textual mode was associated monomodally with English and reproduced anglonormative ideologies. Unlike the textual mode, the performance genre generated more vivid and engaging stories due to drawing on creative elements. The performance genre created opportunities for embodiment by constructing and exploring multiple identities. A limitation of this study is that the learners’ did not select a range of modes to work with as they all chose the performance mode which influenced the data collected. Hence, I am not able to make broad conclusions about multimodality, but only about the performance modes. This research was a call for all educators to question if their pedagogy and approach to teaching creative writing is indeed creative at all.Item Lord of the Flies as graphic novel: multimodal pedagogies for prescribed literature in high schools(2017) De Jager, NicholasIn this study, the affordances of a multimodal pedagogy for teaching the prescribed novel, Lord of the Flies, are investigated. The research site is a Grade 10 Visual Art classroom, with six learners serving as the core group. It involves a five-week teaching intervention, whereby participants are required to re-design or re-semiotise a particular scene from the novel into a comic book, or any multimodal narrative that includes both written and visual textual features. Participants’ works are analysed in terms of their modal features − size, shape, colour, contour, texture, written text and overall design − and their semiotic relationship to the original, print-based novel. Finally, the researcher determines which textrelated meanings or interpretations are gained, lost or transformed during this process of resemiotisation, and discusses the possible implications of these for classroom practice. This research may be described as classroom ethnography (Bloome, 2012) within the qualitative paradigm, offering an account of participants’ actions in a real-life, everyday context. Data is collected through ethnographic techniques such as field notes, diary entries, artefact collection and, most crucially, interviews which are conducted before and after the re-semiotisation process. To analyse this data, the researcher draws extensively from literature in the fields of multimodality and social semiotics, particularly the seminal works of Kress (1993; 2000; 2005), Newfield (2009; 2014) and The New London Group (1996). Emphasis is placed on how participants use semiotic resources − in this case, materials acquired in the classroom, from the internet or other domains − to re-shape written texts so that they become more meaningful and accessible for learning. Finally, the findings chapter presents the multimodal pedagogy as a useful outlet for learners’ “own desires, fantasies and interests in the semiotic chain” (Stein, 2003, p. 115). Since participants are positioned centrally within the semiotic space, they can become selfregulated and active agents of meaning making − discovering a canonical text’s themes, symbols, character relations or other sub-textual nuances in and through the visual mode. In the interests of continued research and application in the classroom, a label method is suggested to both track participants’ gains and losses in meaning − upon completion of the entire process − and to determine their level of engagement with the novel’s content. This involves presenting each learner’s artefacts visually, with several labels pointing to the features that speak back most clearly to the source text. Keywords: ● multimodal pedagogy ● social semiotics ● re-semiotisation ● chain of semiosis / meaning-making ● visual and written modes ● literature teaching and learning