What is power? How can liberty be portrayed? What and why would you like to change in the classroom? How does it feel to be photographed? What is going on in this photograph?

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 (Erixon (Ed.), 2014; Jewitt (Ed.), 2016; Kress & Selander, 2017; Kress, & van Leeuwen, 2021). But while young people today gain a lot of their experiences in multimodal environments, schools provide learning environments dominated by verbal modes (Kress, 2000:159).

In Sweden, a lot of schools provide their students with computers or tablets as resources, showing the impact of digitization in society today. The technical devices are used for writing, searching information and to some extent making presentations (SOU 2014:13), but the new possibilities for using different modes as tools for meaning making are poorly explored (Erixon (Ed.), 2014). And in situations where pupils represent their understanding using other modes, for example visually or audibly in a multimodal text, teachers assess only the oral or written parts (Godhe, 2014; Åkerfeldt, 2014; Hernwall m fl 2016; Borgfelt, 2017).

With my phd project I want to contribute to a deeper understanding of how different modes can be used as tools for meaning making and learning, in order to widen the possibilities for teachers to let their pupils use multimodal experiences and computers/tablets as resources in school. The aim of the study is to explore how pupils make meaning and learn when they experience and represent the world through one of the new possibilities: photography.

As ‘the photographic mode’ has mainly been shaped outside a school context and not used as a tool for meaning making and assessment in schools, I have chosen to work closely with a group of teachers and their 10-year-old pupils in an EDR-inspired study. The study has a multimodal and social semiotic perspective. Video documentation of lessons is an important material category together with the children’s photographs.565At NERA I will use the preliminary results to describe how the pupils use different resources in their meaning making when they photograph and interact around each other’s photographs. I will also explore the potential for meaning making and learning focusing on the high degree of involvement and interaction between the children, especially when they edit their photographs.

Central references

Erixon, Per-Olof (Ed.) (2014). Skolämnen i digital förändring. En medieekologisk undersökning. Lund: Studentlitteratur.

Kress, Gunther & Leeuwen, Theo van (2021). Reading images. The grammar of visual design. Third edition. London & New York: Routledge.

McKenney, Susan & Reeves, Thomas C. (2012/2018). Conducting educational design research. London: Routledge.