Drawing bodies and spaces in telecollaboration: a view of research potential in synaesthesia and multimodality, from the outside

Abstract

While much scholarship on the multisensory and transmodal phenomenon of synaesthesia seeks to uncover its psychophysiological and neurological bases, recent research in multimodal literacy and language acquisition addresses it largely in terms of agentive processes of meaning-making and design. This paper takes as its starting point the latter’s concern with socially situated learning, but examines data from a university-based, distance French learning project in order to suggest that such research may need to look further. Content and narrative analyses of students’ reflective drawings illustrate their awareness of the complexities of learning and expression in hypermediated environments, where geographic and virtual spaces, mediated and interpersonal relations and embodied and on-screen actions converge – all seeming contradictions that may, when viewed together, offer a new vantage point on the nature of synaesthesia, from the outside.

Keywords:

• embodiment
• foreign language education
• multimodality
• spatiality
• telecollaboration

Notes

^1. Recent reviews of scholarship on the centuries-old fascination with, and research of, people for whom “one type of stimulation evokes the sensation of another”, such as when hearing a sound produces sensations of colour, include Best (2003), Hochel and Milán (2008), Hubbard and Ramachandran (2005) and Ternaux (2003).

^2. I use this term to describe what I intend, and what has become, a hybrid form of academic writing that diverges somewhat in its structure and exposition of ideas from the standard research paper. In doing so, I have in mind Cosgrove’s (2008) description of the essay form in the British university tradition: the essay does not “set out to demonstrate or demolish a previously stated theory or hypothesis. Rather it addresses a question, a curiosity, an event or occurrence, and within a limited space of writing, seems to elaborate this issue, expose its various facets and explicate its implications, all from the perspective of experience, reflection and prior study by the essay’s author” (Cosgrove, 2008, p. 9).

^3. The project website appears at http://w3.u-grenoble3.fr/fle-1-ligne/index.html.

^4. For the remainder of this paper, instead of the term “third spaces”, I prefer to use the “Other places”, primarily due to the existing uses of the former term in contexts of critical language, literacy and cultural studies (e.g. Bhabha, 1994; Kostogriz, 2006; Kramsch, 1993).

^5. Throughout this paper, I employ the term “telecollaboration”, defined by Guth and Helm (2010, p. 4) for language-learning contexts as “Internet- based intercultural exchange between people of different cultural/national backgrounds, set up in an institutional context with the aim of developing both language skills and intercultural communicative competence through structured tasks”. Researched examples of such telecollaborations utilizing Skype include Levy (2009), O’Dowd (2007) and Sykes, Oskoz, and Thorne (2008).

^6. On the analysis of visual artefacts in qualitative research, see, for instance, Berger (1973), Collier and Collier (1986) and Pink (2007).

^7. Content analysis is by now a long-established method in the social sciences for working with collections of advertisements, paintings, magazine covers and other collections of visual documents; it has had particular utility in the analysis of trends and changes in representation in the popular media (Bell, 2000; Rose, 2007; Sturken & Cartwright, 2009). As Bell notes, this method is “a systematic, observational method used for testing hypotheses” in collections of images, one that functions by “quantification of samples of observable content classified into distinct categories.” He continues to point out that “It does not analyse individual images or individual “visual texts”. Instead, it allows description of fields of visual representation by describing the constituents of one or more defined areas of representation, periods or types of images” (Bell, 2000, p. 14).

^8. For the purposes of this discussion, I am including mobile phones, tablets and other mobile devices as “computers”.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

David Malinowski

David Malinowski is a Language and Technology Research Specialist at Yale University, where he conducts research on new media and technology in foreign and second language education. His projects have included an investigation into the changing nature of “foreignness” in Internet-mediated language learning projects, and the development of new tools and teaching resources using the multilingual city as text.