Authored assemblages in a digital world: Illustrations of a child’s online social,critical and semiotic meaning-making

Introduction

The growing shift towards new and online literacies in education is being taken up in research and scholarship around the globe. For example, Kate Pahl and Jennifer Rowsell (2005) posit that broader literacy frameworks compiled with a proliferation of accessible digital technologies demand that schools reinterpret what is required for students to emerge as literate citizens. Additionally, Hull and Nelson (2005: 224) state: ‘there are unmistakable signs that what counts as text and what constitutes reading and writing are changing – indeed, have already changed’. And Vasquez (2005: 202) adds that what is especially intriguing is that ‘children, more so than adults, seem to have an affinity with the new communication systems’.

Yet questions continue to be raised about how researchers and educators might analyse and critique the plethora of communication systems that children use. For example, what are the relationships among and between the sites of digital designs, negotiations, productions and disseminations? What are the benefits and limitations of online texts? Additionally, while combining the social and the semiotic is familiar ground in the field of literacy, criticality is often implicit. So how are power relations with situated contexts, access and social identities being woven into the assemblages that humans create? And how might highlighting these particular features together (i.e. the social, semiotic and critical) reveal new insights and discussions? As researchers state, there is a greater need than ever for ‘multidisciplinary theoretical frameworks’ that weave together recent research trajectories, such as new literacies and critical literacies, digital technologies and sociocultural theories (Larson and Marsh, 2005; Stein, 2008).

There are three research questions that guide this case study: (1) How does the six-year-old boy in this study ‘digitally assemble’ an online virtual world within his sociocultural context? (2) How might a multidisciplinary theoretical framework provide new opportunities to understand, transcribe and analyse children’s semiotic, social and critical communication? (3) How might researchers and educators gain new insights into the field of modal literacies by adopting a multidisciplinary theoretical framework – specifically one that integrates new literacies, social semiotics and critical literacy perspectives?

Digital technologies

Labbo and Reinking (1999: 276) defined the term digital as ‘electronic representations of alphabetic and graphic information using binary code’. This coded representation enables computers to transmit and transform text and pictures quickly and fluidly. Thus, the term digital literacies refers to the multiple ways of constructing, expressing and disseminating information through binary-coded representations.

Although technical skills are important, the ability to use digital tools only provides the capability to access representations. Withrow (2004) suggested that the digital mode also requires the ability to navigate, negotiate, visualize (e.g. photographs, videos or animations) and hear (e.g. music or audio narration) in ways that represent critical engagement, personal preference and intent in a digital environment. Thus, those who are truly ‘digitally literate’ not only have technical skills, but can: remix new meaningful materials from existing ones; critique and evaluate the quality and validity of information; and ‘have a mature and realistic understanding of the “rules” that prevail in the cyberspace’ (O’Brien and Scharber, 2008: 93).

Yet, digital literacies are also socioculturally situated practices supported by communities that enable the representation and understanding of ideas using a range of modalities, social networking and critical spaces enabled by digital resources (Lankshear et al., 1997). A child’s world is neither isolated nor de-contextualized. He or she uses digital technologies for particular purposes and approaches each device with his or her own beliefs, knowledge, preferences and agenda. Additionally, digital literacies, like all literacies, are semiotically integrated (e.g. including sounds, images, animation, print) and critically positioned (e.g. ongoing access, opportunities to participate). To illustrate this idea further, a survey by the American Association of Colleges of Teacher Education (2009) reveals that when given access to digital communication systems such as the Nintendo DSI™, even young children (five years old) can text, doodle, digitally alter photos and share with one another electronically, even before they can fully decode and encode printed texts. Arguably, this example suggests that digital literacy is more than a set of learned skills. Rather, it is an illustration of our digital culture – these practices speak to broader ideas such as: who has access to these multimodal tools? how has history shaped our technologies? what semiotic potentials are offered by different multimodal tools? and what digital technologies are children choosing for their own purposeful communication?

Multimodality in out-of-school contexts

A child’s home life is intrinsically connected to his/her multimodal authorship and social worlds. Scholars (Hull and Shultz, 2002; Kendrick, 2003, 2005; Kendrick and McKay, 2004; Pahl, 2009) have stated that the home is not only intimately connected to the meanings children produce, but also shapes children’s in-school learning and the ways in which they see themselves and others as meaning-makers. Additionally, new literacy researchers such as Larson and Marsh (2005) posit that there is a need to reconsider traditional notions of theorizing literacy when we consider children’s out-of-school communicative practices, which involve a wide array of digital technologies such as hand-held devices, computers, DVDs, games, etc.

Burke et al. (2010: 1) draw from the work of Jewitt and Kress (2003) when stating that ‘children cross from their everyday literacy practices into the virtual world of playmaking when visiting an online virtual world/game such as www.webkinz.com, thus demonstrating that their contemporary authorship is informed through the affordances and constraints, which may be found in multimodal spaces’. As scholars and educators we can learn much about the educational value of multimodality by documenting how children naturally interweave play-making and learning within and beyond school contexts (Kendrick, 2003, 2005; Pahl, 2009).

In the narrated case illustrations that follow, a six-year-old boy uses Webkinz™ (an online virtual world) and Webkinz™ pets (plush animals with a secret code that allow access to Webkinz World™ – to shape and communicate his multi-modal literacy practices. Currently, there are only a handful of studies that explore how this particular online world can develop student literacy. Marsh (2011) writes about how children (aged 5 to 11) use Webkinz as a way to negotiate social order and literacy practices in ways that allow for ‘online social cohesion’ (i.e. social, material and cultural structures) between their online virtual worlds and their everyday lives. Similarly we found that Leon (pseudonym) was constantly bringing the semiotic resources and past critical positions that he encountered outside the Webkinz™ game (e.g. experiences from school) to his present sociocultural context, and to the critical positions that he assumed and assigned during his virtual play.

In another study conducted by Burke et al. (2010), Webkinz™ was used to explore the ways in which students negotiate existing at-home literacy practices for the purpose of ‘play’ within the virtual world of Webkinz™. The authors suggest that children negotiate their existing literacies through a conception of their understandings and the constraints of digital multimodal learning spaces. Our study is similarly aligned. Indeed, Leon’s understanding, as well as the benefits and constraints of the Webkinz™ space, informed his play. But extending this idea, we also noticed that the critical positions he assumed and assigned in the past and in the present (i.e. during his online play), to a significant extent, shaped his moment-to-moment decision-making and the overall design of the Webkinz™ movie he produced.

A multidisciplinary theoretical framework

Given the complexity and fluidity of children’s multimodal meaning-making/communication when using digital technologies, how might contemporary scholars or educators bring together rich multidisciplinary theoretical perspectives and practical applications in order to better understand, transcribe and communicate nuanced scholarship?

Throughout the day, children actively engage with and author all types of semiotic meanings by assembling what they know, believe and experience (Pahl, 2009). Their assemblages are authentic and informed by their social encounters, modal choices and power relations (Kendrick, 2005). So rather than focusing only on the social and the semiotic – a well-trodden path in new literacy studies, digital literacies and social semiotics – this theoretical framework also highlights critical perspectives, particularly discursive positioning theories (Davies and Harré, 1990; Holland et al., 1998). This Authorship as Assemblage model (Winters, 2010) considers authorship broadly, it suggests four principles that undergird authorship:

Authors are both external and internal meaning-makers; they include any person who contributes meanings to texts whether they be ‘declared, hidden, or withdrawn’ (Barthes, 1977: 110).

Looking at multimodality and digital technologies through this particular lens reveals nuanced and layered perspectives. Although this poses broader questions about the nature of multimodality – for example recursive thinking, the complexities of social inter(actions) and modal integration, and the ways that children situate themselves and construct power relations – it also gives us a tool we can use to better transcribe and understand how Leon, then a six-year-old boy, assembled his out-of-school world. The case illustration that follows supports what some new literacy studies and critical literacies have suggested: meaning-making and communication (authorship) are always semiotically integrated, socioculturally situated and critically positioned (Barton et al., 1999; Stein, 2008). Here, Leon orchestrates a multiplicity of semiotic modes and resources, conducts social (inter)actions, and discursively positions himself and others within his situational context.

The method and study context

This paper draws from one section of a broader case study. During the summer of 2006 the first author had the opportunity to observe Leon and collect data. She observed Leon for three weeks in and out of school using a side-shadowing interview technique (McClay and Mackey, 2009), whereby she sat next to Leon, making detailed research notes (both in the moment and reflectively), interviewed him, collected documents, took screenshots of his digital productions and video-taped whenever possible. Leon was already familiar with Webkinz™ and had recently learned how to compose ideas through print (i.e. decode and encode words). In this way, Leon guided the study.

Leon is a sensitive and thoughtful Caucasian boy who loves playing with Lego, reading books, gaming on the computer and writing in his journal. At the time of the study, the child’s mother, Kate (pseudonym), was finishing grad school and his father, John (pseudonym), was finishing a training programme to become a registered massage therapist. Together, his parents’ income totalled just over $23,000, well below the poverty line. He lived in an urban environment in western Canada, in a one-bedroom apartment with his mother, father, younger sister Kenzie (pseudonym) and their two cats. Leon’s parents were both very involved with his education as schooling for both their children was regarded as a high priority. The teacher once told John that Leon is at ‘the top of his class in academics’ and that ‘he is a leader on the playground’. His report cards support these claims. Leon has many friends at school, with whom he loves to talk and play, but he is also quite content to play on his own.

Methodology

The section that follows uses a narrative case-illustration research method that illustrates specific moments from the study by moving between first person-narrated field notes, images and academic reflection or analysis. This narrative case-illustration approach allowed the first author to observe from a variety of perspectives (e.g. as participant, observer, collector of data, literacy researcher). This approach enabled us, as researchers, to capture both the minute details of Leon’s online play and the broader social contexts and discourses in which he interacts and, at the same time, explore some of the benefits and challenges of digital authorship.

Following each section of transcribed data, an analytic frame, drawing from theories of literacy such as new literacies studies, social semiotics and critical positioning theories, was applied by the first author. This analytic frame (Table 1), aligned with this paper’s research questions, was also used for coding the data.

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Table 1.

Analytic frame for multimodality

Discursive event/ scene	Principle 1	Principle 2		Principle 3	Principle 4
	External and internal authorship	Modes		Social (inter) actions	Discursive positions of author
Declared	Semiotic resources	Semiotic potential	Designs	Of self	Structured routines (e.g. who is eligible, implicit and explicit rules of engagement)
Hidden or withdrawn	Negotiations	Of others
Productions
Disseminations

Below, each of the terms used in the analytic frame is explained:

Discursive event/scene. Any occasion where multimodal discourse is authored among participants and within concrete situational contexts (Kress and van Leeuwen, 2001).

As humans author assemblages (based on their own social contexts, experience, background, modal choices, and so forth), the four principles undergirding authorship relate to or speak back to one another, weaving meaning and communication that is always fluid, interconnected and recursive. Perhaps a visual metaphor to describe this complex process might be a spiral torus (Figure 1). OPEN IN VIEWER

Ideally, this visual metaphor (http://bugman123.com/Math/Hopf Fibration1-large.jpg) for Authorship as Assemblage should be represented bumping up to and interacting with numerous other tori within a three-dimensional space. However, because we are limited by both the visual complexity of the image and the two-dimensional affordances of the paper or screen, only one torus from one perspective is illustrated in this example.

The black space at the core of the torus and surrounding it represents the possible meanings that are available within any discursive event. The woven doughnut area represents the author’s recursive and integrated process of semiotic, social and critical meaning-making. Looking closer, each whorl of the woven area – which is both internal and external – suggests the ways in which an author (inter)acts with and orchestrates semiotic resources both internally (designing and negotiating) and externally (negotiating, producing and disseminating). Simultaneously, while moving between and among other tori (within communities of practice), authors donate meanings by taking in information and reinterpreting it, by making new connections, by adding to existing texts or storylines, and so forth. Furthermore, while assembling these meanings they assume or assign discursive positions in ways that always interweave with their sociocultural environment.

The torus, as presented here, is one way of visualizing the complex and fluidly-assembled discursive events that children author. To demonstrate these nuances more concretely, we offer narrative case illustrations from a larger case study of a young child’s computer interactions when creating multimedia embedded in a virtual world.

Narrative illustration (data and analysis)

In this section, the first author uses italics for transferred field notes and roman text for analytic reflections described after data were collected.

In the afternoon Leon plays Webkinz™ ( www.webkinz.com ) on the computer. Here, he adopts a pet and takes care of it by buying it food, clothes and furniture.

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Figure 2.

Choosing a movie title and technical features (e.g. setting, music).

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Figure 3.

Hiring the actors.

Next Leon hires his actors (Figure 3).

He chooses a gorilla wearing an armoured knight suit and a cat (that looks a lot like his own pet) wearing a striped tee-shirt and a bow in her hair. I ask him, “Why these characters?” but realize that I am sounding judgemental so I stop myself. Yet, I am curious about the costumes. Perhaps I can ask him later.

Response to the case illustrations

Leon authored assemblages, in a digital world, about what it means to lose a tooth, demonstrating the multiple ‘pathways’ to any one piece of knowledge (Dyson, 1997; Kress, 1997). These case illustrations, which are part of a broader research study, suggest that young children are flexible multimodal authors, who portray and enact the meanings that best suit their intentions within their broader social worlds (e.g. Dyson, 1997; Kendrick, 2005; Kress, 1997; Pahl, 2009). And yet this study also demonstrates that authorship might be even more assembled than has previously been theorized. We suggest that Leon not only moved from mode to mode, realizing multimodal meaning in his social out-of-school worlds, but also fluidly authored a complex range of semiotic resources and drew upon his own dialogic and digital experiences in order to position himself and others within imagined storylines. Not only was meaning embedded within his sociocultural context, it was carried differently by each semiotic resource, giving Leon rich opportunities to assemble meaning through a process of remixing and to re-position himself as an effective and skilled digital designer.

Within digital virtual worlds, authors play out their multimodal under standings intuitively and in non-categorized, embedded and overlapping ways – through play, drama, song, art, language, numeracy – with natural ease, not fretting about which semiotic system they will use first. They mesh together semiotic resources, inevitably drawing on their past connections with the world, their present experience with the sociocultural context, and with the semiotic systems available to them (Pahl, 2009).

Leon demonstrated that authors continually layer, remix, embed and inter animate semiotic resources as they author their sociocultural worlds in order to interpret and actualize particular meanings. His meaning-making was rarely linear; rather, it was recursive and complex, shaped by his in- and out-of-school relationships (with the declared, hidden and withdrawn participants), his own personal narratives and the critical positions he assumed and assigned. For example, he represented both the one who teases and the teased, the teacher and the student. He attended to and utilized a range of semiotic and cultural resources that were made available to him – speech bubbles, camera angles, accompanying music, animation choices and so forth. He continually revisited his ideas and re-contextualized storylines within his at-home contexts while, at the same time, linking his authorship to his larger community. He not only draws on his experiences from the larger society, such as what it means to lose a tooth in Western culture (i.e. a tooth fairy will come and give him a reward), but also remixes new meanings in ways that are meaningful to him within the given context. The assemblage of Leon’s critical positions, social inter(actions) and semiotic resources provides rich and interwoven spaces of meaning-making that emphasize literacy practices, symbolic weaving and discursive positioning. The re-contextualized meanings he created here and over the course of the broader study (three weeks) were realized in both generative and reflective ways (Siegel, 2006). In other words, one idea led to another and then another – they were remixed and recursive. Some of these ideas continued to emerge throughout the larger study.

Literacy scholars have argued for broader, more socially complex and integrated, notions of authorship that consider semiotic design alongside the child’s social and critical contexts (e.g. Larson and Marsh, 2005; Pahl and Rowsell, 2005; Stein, 2008). Clearly these theories or studies would need to be multidisciplinary in order to take into consideration a variety of perspectives, as further demonstrated in this case study. Indeed, it is natural for humans to communicate through more than one mode and, because all authorship is social, semiotic and critical, meaning-making never takes place in isolation (Barton et al., 1999; Stein, 2008). Furthermore, humans relate what is happening in the situational contexts to their own experience, constructing their own storied worlds and critical positions (Holland et al., 1998).

Conclusion

In this paper, we have explored how a six-year-old child assembled a digital world using Webkinz™, an online virtual game. Sharing children’s out-of-school literacy practices has great potential for multimodal literacy scholars and for educators alike for, as we see here, children’s authorship is shaped by events that occur both in and out of school. Our goal was to introduce a theoretical framework that interweaves semiotic, social and critical perspectives in order to expand researchers’ and teachers’ conceptions of digital authorship. Our findings demonstrate that linear and language-focused views of authorship fail to recognize the complexities of today’s authors, and could be disenfranchising children who come to school with complex, layered and integrated ways of making sense of their worlds.

The theoretical frame offered here takes an integrated and multidisciplinary approach to understanding, analysing and critiquing children’s multimodal meaning-making and communication. Thinking about Authorship as Assemblage is significant. First, it puts children front and centre stage, showing the flexible and recursive ways in which they author in order to suit their own sociocultural and critical situations and needs (Stein, 2008). Second, it offers researchers more nuanced and intra-semiotic understandings into children’s authorship and assemblage patterns. Third, it considers the critical ways in which children position themselves in relation to others within situational contexts, offering insights into power differentials, changing circumstances and possible perspectives, and guiding the thoughts/beliefs/assumptions that authors constantly grapple with as they author across various social settings.

Kress (1997) demonstrated over a decade ago that children must use multiple ‘communicative pathways’ to participate in today’s literacy practices. Given that we are in an ever-developing ‘information economy’ (New London Group, 2000) where meanings are pluralized and infused with multiple semiotic resources (words, images, gestures, sounds, etc.), and where technological advances suggest new ways of thinking and living in the world, mono-disciplinary approaches to literacy research are no longer enough – no longer adequate for teachers to fully understand children’s sophisticated literacy interactions and social practices (Larson and Marsh, 2005; New London Group, 2000; Pahl and Rowsell, 2005; Stein, 2008). A child’s world is neither isolated nor primarily print based; this is because literacy and communication are always semiotically integrated, socially situated and critically positioned. To consider it otherwise not only creates a dissonance between children’s in- and out-of-school experiences at the current time (Sefton-Green, 2011), it also underplays the sophisticated relationship between sociocultural contexts and critical dynamics, and underestimates the challenge presented by the increasing range of semiotic options that children and their educators are faced with in today’s interactive and digital information economy (Alvermann, 2010; Hull and Nelson, 2005; Mishra and Koehler, 2006).

The Authorship as Assemblage framework offers a multidisciplinary theoretical approach, which has the potential to look at how multimodal authorship is simultaneously social, semiotic and critical (Winters, 2010). For authorship is greater than the sum of its parts – as shown in this study: there is a constant interconnectivity between all meanings, past, present and future. The model suggested in this study is subtle. Instead of exploring and drawing on individual theories and research (e.g. new literacy studies, digital technologies, critical literacy), this framework affords an interwoven approach, which offers new insights for literacy researchers looking at children’s authorship practices. In addition, this paper suggests that literacy research and scholarship need to reflect the recursive and assembled ways in which authors layer, inter-animate and embed semiotic resources as they move across and within social contexts. Moreover, it proposes that all authorship is critically positioned. For this reason, criticality needs to be included in researchers’ theories and research practices. This Authorship as Assemblage theoretical framework may expand researchers’ and educators’ conceptions and analyses of authorship, so that they can better understand and facilitate students’ abilities to garner, interpret, create and share their ideas through a range of semiotic, sociocultural and critical actions.