How can a digital tool as the camera app be used to widen and deepen pupils’ possibilities to make meaning and develop their literacy? 

The digitization of society has made a range of different modes more accessible for meaning making and has had a major impact on how we communicate and learn (Jewitt (Ed.), 2014; Selander & Kress, 2010; Kress, & van Leeuwen, 2021). In my PhD study, I have chosen to explore one of the possibilities that the digitization has made more accessible: photography. 

In close collaboration with a group of teachers and their pupils aged 10–12 years, I explore the potentials for meaning making when pupils experience and represent the world through photography. The study has a multiliteracies perspective and is framed by social semiotic theory. The empirical data consists of field notes, video documentation and the pupils’ photographs when they visually answer questions like: What is geography?; What is a noun?; Where is your favourite place in school?; What is power?; What is faith?, and when the children create storybooks, document their work during lessons and argue visually. In my material I identify ‘visual literacy events’ when children photograph, edit and read photographs, and in the analytical process I explore the children’s meaning making with121‘strata’, ‘metafunctions’ and ‘positions’ as analytical tools (Arvedsen & Illeris, 2011; Illeris, 2012; Kress & van Leeuwen, 2001, 2021).

The preliminary findings show that when pupils experience and represent the world through photography different kinds of practices are established with different potentials för meaning making. At ICOM-11 I will discuss the potentials for meaning making of these practices under the headings ‘experience’, ‘agency’, ‘perspective’ and ‘epistemological commitment’ in relation to literacy. 

Keywords: photography, meaning making, agency, visual literacy event and literacy 

References

Arvedsen, K. & Illeris, H. (2011). Visual Phenomena and Visual Events. SomeReflections around the Curriculum of Visual Culture Pedagogy. Research in Arts and Education, 2011(2), 44-63. https://doi.org/10.54916/rae.118750

Jewitt, C. (2014). The Routledge handbook of multimodal analysis. Routledge.

Kress, G. & van Leeuwen, T. (2001). Multimodal discourse: the modes and media of contemporary communication. Arnold.

Kress, G. & van Leeuwen, T. (2021). Reading images: the grammar of visual design. Routledge.