Engaging with children's graphic ensembles of an archaeological site: A multi-modal social semiotic approach to learning

Abstract

Children’s drawings have been widely used in the field of museum education as indicators for learning, as well as means for evaluating the teaching that takes place in a museum or a heritage site.
This paper employs social semiotics and multimodality as tools for introducing a different perspective when it comes to building a descriptive and an interpretative framework for analysing children’s production, as representative of their learning. The insight into their work is based on the assumptions that learning can be multi-modally mediated through a particular pedagogy and further be made accessible to us through the material realisation of children’s production across multiple modes. The paper aims to explore the implications of this position for generating knowledge about children’s learning.
The main argument discussed here is that engaging with a child’s graphic ensemble through a multimodal and social semiotic perspective can enable us, hypothetically, to recover children’s meanings about the archaeological site as well as the aspects of their overall learning experience. Viewing their graphic ensembles as constructions that are interest driven and multi-modally realized could open up more possibilities for accessing the agendas and interests that guide their learning.
The paper further uses this visual material as an opportunity to argue that when engaging with children’s learning, multimodality can work not as a theory on its own means, but as the framework that conditions a theory (e.g. social semiotics and discourse) into a direction of encompassing more possibilities for reading their understanding of the world.