Multimodality, ethnography and education in south america

Promoting diversity and inclusion in public service announcements: a critical multimodal analysis of public campaigns

Giuseppe Balirano

University of Naples “L’Orientale”
[e-mail]

Sole Alba Zollo

University of Naples “Federico II”
[e-mail]

Public communication campaigns are an essential part of our life. We live in the era of the “permanent campaign” (Perloff 2003), where campaigns are undertaken to influence people on every topic, ranging from personal to social issues.

Nowadays, hundreds of websites are devoted to campaign issues; therefore, the analysis will be conducted on a corpus of videos collected from the websites of some British and American non-profit organisations which create and promote public service announcements focusing on critical social issues.

As stated by Dozier et al (2001: 232) “public communication campaigns may be viewed as strategies of social control because one group has taken it on itself to affect the beliefs or behaviors of another group”. As a result, a critical analysis of multimodal discourse (van Leeuwen 2013) will allow us to investigate how diversity and inclusion (disabled people, immigrants, minorities, LGBT people, mentally ill persons) are represented in the collected videos and to what extent these announcements contribute to raising awareness, changing public attitudes and behaviour towards social issues.

Public campaigns can employ various communicative techniques and different materials, but they are all based on the art of persuasion relying on “argumentation, sloganeering, and emotional appeals in an effort to mold public attitudes” (Perloff 2003: 303). Since “language is an integral aspect of the persuasive transaction, with nonverbal behavior coming into play as an instrument for reinforcing the meaning and/or credibility of verbal messages” (Miller 2002: 5), this study will focus on the linguistic and visual manifestations of argumentation looking at the way in which they interact to produce a persuasive message. Against the theoretical framework of multimodal critical discourse analysis (Machin 2013; van Leeuwen 2013) and visual argumentation (Birdsell/Groarke 1996; Blair 2004; Roque 2012), the research aims to explore how national organisations promote diversity and inclusion through verbal and visual argumentative-persuasive techniques and to what extent these strategies interact in the campaign material, also allowing for an expansion of the theory of multimodality.

Keywords: Multimodal critical discourse analysis, visual argumentation, public service announcements, diversity and inclusion

References

Birdsell D. and Groarke L. (1996) ‘Toward a Theory of Visual Argument’. In Argumentation and Advocacy 33(1): 1-10.
Blair J. A. (2004) ‘The Rhetoric of Visual Arguments’. In Hill C. A. and Helmers M. (eds) Defining Visual Rhetorics, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, pp. 41-61.
Dozer D. M., Grunig L. A. and Grunig J. E. (2001) ‘Public Relations as Communication Campaign’. In Rice R.E. and Atkin C. K. (eds) Public Communication Campaigns (3^rd ed.). Thousand Oaks, California: Sage, pp. 231-248.
Machin M. (2013) ‘What is multimodal critical discourse studies?’. In Critical Discourse Studies 10(4): 347-355.
Miller G. R. (2002) ‘On Being Persuaded: Some Basic Distinctions’. In Dillard J. P. and Pfau M. (eds) The Persuasion Handbook: Developments in Theory and Practice. London: Sage, pp- 3-16.
Perloff R. M. (2003) The Dynamics of Persuasion: Communication and Attitudes in the 21st Century (2^nd ed.). Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Roque G. (2012) ‘Visual Argumentation: A Reappraisal’. In van Eemeren F. H. and Garssen B. (eds) Topical Themes in Argumentation Theory. Dordrecht, New York: Springer, pp. 273-288.
van Leeuwen T. (2013) ‘Critical Analysis of Multimodal Discourse?’. In Chapelle C. A. (ed.) The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics. Blackwell Publishing Ltd, pp. 1-5.

Picture books at college: a multimodal reading experience

Vânia Soares Barbosa, PhD

Universidade Federal do Piauí/Universidade Estadual do Ceará, Brazil
[e-mail]

Antonia Dilamar Araújo, PhD

Universidade Estadual do Ceará, Brazil
[e-mail]

In spite of not being produced for instructive purposes, picture books (PB) have been largely used in formal educational environments to help children develop their communicative skills in their first years at school. Going beyond this aspect, researchers, such as Unsworth (2013), Serafini (2014) and Painter, Martin and Unsworth (2013), to mention a few, have showed PB’s potential to provide a useful understanding of social relationship when readers integrate words and pictures in a multimodal reading performance. That potential also suggests that considering picture books as literature for children only may turn out to be a considerable misconception, which means different audiences are expected to engage with reading this multimodal genre in spite of their age. This presentation will discuss four undergraduate students’ reading performance and meaning-making production when reading the pictures books Outside over there, by Maurice Sendak, and Fox, by Margareth Wild and Ron Brooks. The aim of this discussion is to show possible influences in which viewing and reading integration skills may have for the development of their visual literacy. Grounded in multimodality theories (KRESS, 2010; JEWITT, 2009) and some ideas from the Grammar of Visual Design (KRESS; VAN LEEUWEN, 2006), the analysis of the results achieved showed a shift from reading the text only to reading the image and the text, which means students performed a multimodal reading by integrating different modes and semiotic resources and also started to use different semiotic resources to produce meaning. As a possible implication for teaching and learning English as a foreign language, in a Brazilian context, we suggest viewing as a skill that can be developed while reading multimodal texts, and therefore, should be included in language curricula; and we also positively evaluate the Grammar of Visual Design as a tool that can enhance and facilitate that kind of reading.

Keywords: Multimodality, visual literacy, reading, viewing

References

JEWITT, C. (Ed.). The Routledge handbook of multimodal analysis. London: Routledge, 2009.

KRESS, G. Multimodality: a social semiotic approach to contemporary communication. London: Routledge, 2010.

KRESS, G.; VAN LEEUWEN, T. Reading images: the grammar of visual design. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, [1996], 2006.

PAINTER, C.; MARTIN, J. R.; UNSWORTH, L. Reading visual narratives: image analysis of children’s picture books. London: Equinox, 2013.

SERAFINI, F. Reading the visual: an introduction to teaching multimodal literacy. London: Teachers College Press, 2014.

UNSWORTH, L. Re-configuring image-language relations and interpretive possibilities in picture books as animated movies: a site for developing multimodal literacy pedagogy. Ilha do Desterro, Florianópolis, n. 64, p.15-47, 2013. Disponível em: <https://periodicos.ufsc.br/index.php/desterro/article/view/2175-8026.2013n64p15/25078>. Acesso em: 25 jan 2017.

The Grammar of Visual Design at College: teaching future teachers to read images

Vânia Soares Barbosa, PhD

Universidade Federal do Piauí/Universidade Estadual do Ceará, Brazil
[e-mail]

Antonia Dilamar Araújo, PhD

Universidade Estadual do Ceará, Brazil
[e-mail]

Over the last twenty years, educators have been discussing the advances in communication and information technologies' impact on educational practices. Due to the increase in production, consumption and spread of multimodal texts, special attention has been given to the understanding of how text and images can be integrated. The Grammar of Visual Design (GVD), by Kress and van Leeuween ([1996] 2006) has been one of the most useful and used tools to read images so far. Different studies have analyzed a variety of texts, such as advertisements, newspapers and teaching materials, among others, to show the grammar’s potential to enhance visual literacy. However, fewer studies have focused on the meaning-making production of its users while reading those texts. Grounded in multimodality (KRESS, 2010) and multiliteracies (THE NEW LONDON GROUP, 1996), this presentation discusses the meanings made by eight undergraduate students while reading an advertisement before and after being exposed to the GVD categories and their consciousness development of their own visual literacy as well as their evaluations of the Grammar. That reading performance was part of a multimodal reading workshop, in the Brazilian English as a foreign language (EFL) teaching training context, in which the students were introduced to some GVD categories and engaged in visual analysis of different multimodal texts and shared their interpretations. At the end, the participants were asked to evaluate the Grammar as both a tool to read images and to be used in EFL classes. The results showed that students became aware of their visual literacy as they started adopting the GVD metalanguage to talk about multimodal texts, although resistance to some of its categories could be identified. They also evaluated the Grammar positively and indicated their intentions to use it as a tool to be used to teach their future students to read images.

Keywords: Multimodality, visual literacy, the grammar of visual design

References

KRESS, G. Multimodality: a social semiotic approach to contemporary communication. London: Routledge, 2010.

KRESS, G.; VAN LEEUWEN, T. Reading images: the grammar of visual design. 2nd ed.London: Routledge, [1996], 2006.

NEW LONDON GROUP. A pedagogy of multiliteracies: designing social futures. Harvard Educational Review, v. 66, n. 1, p. 60-93, Spring 1996. Available at:<http://newarcproject.pbworks.com/f/Pedagogy%2Bof%2BMultiliteracies_New%2BLondon%2BGroup.pdf>. Last viewed: 25 jan. 2017.
Risk, indexicality and affordance at the international airport

Anders Björkvall, Örebro University, Sweden

[e-mail]

Gustav Westberg, Södertörn University, Sweden

[e-mail]

Sara Van Meerbergen, Stockholm University, Sweden

[e-mail]

Eric Borgström, Örebro University

[e-mail]

This paper explores international airports as semiotically highly regulated spaces for local and global flows of people. A key symbol of the postmodern world of constant transit (Fuller, 2002: 239) and institutional reflexivity (Giddens, 1991), airports are multimodally designed to simultaneously create flow through constant movement and to avoid potential risks and “what if”-scenarios. From this perspective, we approach the semiotics of international airport as colonized by the reflexive awareness of potential and unwanted future scenarios and failures (cf. Beck, 1992).

Our analysis draws on the concepts of indexicality (Scollon and Scollon, 2003) and affordance (Gibson, 1977; Ledin and Machin, 2018). As pointed out by Scollon and Scollon (2003: 22) “an index points to its meaning”, and the paper discusses how semiotic resources – with specific affordances – are employed in airport design in order to point to preferred paths of movements through logistic and commercial spaces, but also through the architectonically and experientially open – potentially dangerous – spaces that define modern airports.

Our data from 2017 consist of approximately 200 photos from four international airports in Europe. Through an analysis of the affordances of various semiotic resources in the design of these airports the paper explores 1) how resources with specific affordances are employed for indexically creating flows of human bodies through the commercial, security- and control-related airport spaces and 2) how a continuous movement between ‘unbound’ and ‘bound’ spaces (Stenglin, 2008) is instrumental to different kinds of risk management.

The paper ends with a discussion of how verbal, visual, and tactile recourses encourage a place-specific alacrity of travellers to govern themselves through flows. We suggest that the reflexive awareness of potential risks can explain why travellers stay loyal to the design instead of rebelling against the prisonlike (cf. Foucault, 1977) encapsulation in time and space of the modern international airport.

References

Beck, Ulrich (1992). Risk society: Towards a new modernity. London: Sage

Foucault, M. (1977), Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage Books.
Fuller, G. (2002), ‘The Arrow – Directional Semiotics: Wayfinding in Transit’, Social Semiotics, 12:3, 231-244.
Gibson, J. (1977), ‘The theory of affordances’, in: R. Shaw and J. Brandsford (Eds.), Perceiving, Acting, and Knowing: Toward an Ecological Psychology. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Pp. 62–82.
Giddens, Anthony (1991). Modernity and self-identity: Self and society in the late modern age. Cambridge: Polity press.
Ledin, P. and Machin, D. (2018), Doing Visual Analysis. London: Sage.
Scollon, R and Scollon, S. W. (2003), Discourses in Place: Language in the Material World. London: Routledge.
Stenglin, M. (2008), ‘Binding: a resource for exploring interpersonal meaning in three-dimensional space’, Social Semiotics, 18:4, 425-447.

The smallness of small. The role of small texts and text elements in a big world

Mona Blåsjö

Department of Swedish Language and Multilingualism, Stockholm University
[e-mail]

When literature on visual meaning-making deals with salience, non-salience is often regarded as something negative (e.g. Van Leuween 2006, Bell 2001). Salience in a design is making meaning of importance, so how could non-salience be important? Still, we all know that tiny text elements such as a cross in the right or wrong box in a web form can have great importance. Also, making something small can in itself make meaning such as “small print” in a contract which one party does not want the other to read (cf. Schröter 2013). Small text elements have been important throughout history, from brands and other types of signatures on ancient artifacts to tweets and like-marks in the digital society. The function of packing several linguistic elements into more concentrated grammatical metaphors (Martin 1993) could be one possible way of studying smallness. Mainly focusing on ethnographic video data from a so called pulse-meeting at a workplace, where the participants use magnets on whiteboards, this presentation will include a discussion on possible meaning-making potentials or discursive powers of the smallness of texts and text elements.

The preliminary results indicate that smallness can have a function in relation to mediated actions (cf. Scollon & Scollon 2004). If a literacy event is to be performed swiftly, the text element associated with it often needs to be small, to focus and make possible the quick act of clicking, signing etc. Also other events in relation to small text elements serve as a confirmation or finalization of e.g. a process, such as putting a magnet in a certain area of the whiteboard. The presentation argues for ethnographic approaches to understanding texts.

References

Bell (2001). Content analysis of visual images. In: Van Leeuwen & Jewitt (Eds.), Handbook of visual analysis. London: SAGE

Martin (1993). Life as a noun: Arresting the universe in science and humanities. In: Halliday & Martin: Writing science: literacy and discursive power. London: Falmer

Van Leeuwen (2006). Towards a semiotics of typography. Information design journal 14(2)

Schröter (2013). Silence and concealment in political discourse. Amsterdam: John Benjamins

Meme as a Tool of Political Manipulation: Cross-Cultural Aspect in Multimodalilty

Prof. Ievgeniia V. Bondarenko

Vasyl Karazin Kharkiv National University, Ukraine
[e-mail]

In a national consciental warfare that accompanies any social crisis, propaganda plays a pivotal role in shaping a favourable response of the community or its part to the actions of one of the opposing actors (Kofman & Rojansky 2015). The latter’s stance of an addressee requires a non-trivial approach to win the fight for public opinion. One of them is psychological manipulation, i.e. social influence that aims to change the behavior or perception of others through abusive, deceptive or underhanded tactics (Braiker 2004: 7).

This comparative case study focuses on the Internet meme (Dawkins 2006) as an efficient multimodal tool of political manipulation by public opinion at the background of social crises triggered by Brexit in European Union and Ukrainian Revolution of Honesty in 2014-2015. Two corpora of the Internet memes are considered as integrated texts, whose parts (modes) are “interacting with and affecting one another” through the interrelated systems of information value, salience and framing (Kress & von Leeuwen 2006: 177).

The compared information value of corresponding memes proves similar (with top/bottom and left/right layouts preferred) due to the universally immanent nature of the meme as simple and easily digestible. Culture-specific differences are more obvious in terms of salience of precedent personalities and images. Moreover, whereas British memes manipulate with their national values, Ukrainian memes have an object of imposing new worldview on their target audience. In both corpora, the role of the semiotic code of colour is crucial as national shades are widely used. Compared in terms of framing, British and Ukrainian memes also differ. In British memes, verbal elements support visual code or make it explicit. The verbal elements of Ukrainian memes modify the initial familiar (memetic) meaning of visual information.

References

Braiker, Harriet. B. 2004. Who's Pulling Your Strings? How to Break the Cycle of Manipulation. New York/Chicago/San Francisco: MsGraw-Hill.

Dawkins, Richard. 2006. The Selfish Gene. 30^th Anniversary ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 189–202.

Kress, Gunther & van Leeuwen, Theo. 2006. Reading Images. The Grammar of Visual Design. 2^nd ed. London and New York: Routledge.

Kofman, Michael & Rojansky, Matthew. 2015. A Closer Look at Russia’s “Hybrid War”. Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. https://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/7-KENNAN%20CABLE-ROJANSKY%20KOFMAN.pdf (accessed 9 February 2018)

Computer based composition: modes and their meaning in a secondary school music classroom

Julie Byrne
Bath Spa University, UK
[e-mail]

My doctoral research explored two secondary school pupils’ (aged 14) multimodal experiences of how they engaged in composing music while using computer technology. Defining how different modes – visual, notating music, musical sound, action and gestures – were used, interpreted and mediated by the pupils in the process of composition was key. Further, my research considered pupils’ verbal silences, which meant exploring meaning-making at the computer when the pupils were actively engaged in doing something other than talk and contributing new knowledge to an under-researched area. Camtasia ™ – a computer screen capture program - was used to capture and record two pupils’ conversations, music and computer work during four sequential music lessons. A smaller camera offered a different visual perspective and videoed pupils’ interactions with the computer, musical equipment and each other. A reviewing process selected up to three silent episodes (each a minimum of 10 seconds long with no upper limit) which were used in the individual one-to-one interviews to delve deeper into decisions behind compositional and multimodal processes. Audio recordings of these conversations provided transcripts for thematic and multimodal interactional analysis. It has emerged that there are several combinations of modes that interact with the different stages of the musical composition and that using computer technology does not necessarily translate into musical understanding. In particular the pupils stated that the computer mouse was the most significant tool in completing the task which provided a platform for interpreting the action mode. The discussion will elaborate on these points by sharing pupils’ narratives that have been generated from their silent moments. Framing analysis from a musical and multimodal stance places the pupils’ narratives at the forefront of ‘what really goes on in music lessons’ and aims to support the teacher with curriculum planning using a multimodal perspective that can enhance musical learning.

Digital technologies in initial teacher education: shifting the focus from ‘the digital’ to ‘multimodality in contexts’

Ed Campbell

University of Cape Town, School of Education
[e-mail]

Recent publications have tended to focus on the integration of digital technologies in South African teacher education. Professional teachers are expected to harness the benefits of these technologies in their teaching practice increasingly. However, poor uptake, outdated school and curriculum policies, as well as unequal access to technology have resulted in an unexpectedly slow adoption of technologies that could potentially increase student learning.

This issue in professional teaching practice could be addressed by exposing pre-service teachers to the kinds of digital technologies benefiting teaching and learning, during initial teacher education. However, the varied ways in which pre-service teachers engage in practices involving these technologies, the vast disparities between school contexts, and the anxieties and barriers connected to the digital in the classroom, present serious challenges during integration. These challenges could be addressed by refraining from focusing explicitly on ‘the digital’. Focusing on the digital, as was the typical practice in ‘computer literacy’ approaches, tends to decontextualize the digital, framing practices involving digital technologies as sets of transferable skills. The pre-service teacher is then expected to ‘master’ these skills without considering the classroom context and/or the learners. Emphasising the digital could also elevate anxieties and barriers.

Focusing on multimodality, rather than digital technologies per se, foregrounds teacher creativity and the consideration of learners’ agency, recognition of resources, access to academic discourses and design, within specific classroom contexts, while implicitly exposing pre-service teachers to the digital technologies relevant to the classroom. Multimodality thus alleviates decontextualisation and barriers, while fostering good teaching practices. This presentation will showcase some of the projects completed by English pre-service teachers during an integration attempt in 2017. These projects, ranging from videos to posters for classroom use, display traces of the consideration of modal affordances within specific South African contexts, as well as confident engagement with digital technologies.