Practices of visual communication in a primary school classroom: digital image collection as a potential semiotic mode

Abstract

‘One-to-one’ computing projects in which learners work with individual laptops or tablets across subjects are rapidly increasing in number. One aspect of this is that as the laptops give access to the Internet; digital images and texts – potentially from all over the globe – move into the classroom in an unprecedented manner. The paper presents an analysis of specific classroom practices involving seven- to eight-year-olds: the collecting of digital images and their use as semiotic resources in the creation of multimodal texts. The aim is to describe the children’s digital image collections as more or less mode-like – that is, as a more or less systematically organised set of resources for making meaning. The methodology is described as social semiotic ethnography, combining semiotic analysis of images and texts with ethnographic understandings of the personal histories and interests of participants. The paper concludes that there are obvious practices in the classroom in which the children use their image collections in a mode-like way, such as categorising images according to semantic criteria, using them for display of identities in the classroom and systematically using them when designing multimodal texts, expressing both simple denotational meanings and more complex connotational semiotic potentials. Another conclusion is that the children’s image collections have untapped learning potentials, for example regarding critical reflections on how images create meaning, which could form the foundation for concrete learning activities in the classroom.

Keywords:

• digital image banks
• collecting
• digitalisation
• multimodality
• ‘one-to-one’ computing
• semiotic mode
• semiotic resources
• visual communication
• young children

Notes

1. The results presented in the paper come from the project ‘Separate worlds? Text activities at home as a resource for learning in school’, financed by the Swedish Research Council (2008–2012).

2. Google, as a sort of image bank, shares properties with commercial image banks like Getty, Cordis or the Scandinavian Scanpix, but there are also obvious differences: the detail of the semantic tagging of search words, the types of visual representations in the image bank, copyright and control over the professional standard and quality of the images.