Multimodal Literacy Practices in the Indigenous Sámi Classroom: Children Navigating in a Complex Multilingual Setting

Abstract

This article explores multimodal literacy practices in a transforming multilingual context of an indigenous and endangered Sámi language classroom. Looking at literacy practices as embedded in a complex and shifting terrain of language ideologies, language norms, and individual experiences and attitudes, we examined how multilingual Sámi children navigate and appropriate meaning-making resources available for them while designing their own picture books. We adopted a discourse ethnographic approach to analyse these multimodal picture books and found three different but interrelated orientations to the making of the books, each organising and valuing multimodal resources in his or her own way. We conclude with a discussion of the value of repetition and creativity in multimodal literacy practices in a changing multilingual minority language context.

Keywords:

• multimodal literacy practices
• multilingual indigenous Sámi children
• Sámi classroom
• nexus analysis
• creativity
• repetition

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This Article is produced in a context of two research projects: Northern Multilingualism (www.northernmultilingualism.fi) and Peripheral Multilingualism (www.peripheralmultilingualism.fi), both funded by the Academy of Finland. The authors thank Brigitta Busch for her generous help and input in the subproject and Leena Huss for collaboration in designing the data collection in Sámiland. Our warmest thanks go to the pupils, teachers, and parents.

Notes

¹While all the children worked in the task within the genre of the children's picture book, some of them were more true to the conventions of the genre than others, to the point of reproducing the prototypical characteristics of the genre. This is what we mean by genre orientation here.