Inquiry #13

How Are Modes Making Space?

Critical multimodal analysis of the modes ... revealed the ways that power relations and discourses kept [some children] at the center and [other children] at the periphery of the classroom community. [One child was] able to negotiate tensions between multimodal and developmental perspectives that enabled his design exploration and a skills mastery perspective that kept [another child] “on task” but prevented collaboration with the other boys. Critical multimodal analysis provides a way for teachers to see how the tangible everyday aspects of familiar classroom activity matter (e.g., how cutting tape for a paper sack puppet) links to discourses and power relations that operate in the background, and how making small changes in the arrangement of furniture, in the availability of modes and media, and in daily classroom interactions could make a big difference in children’s opportunities to learn. (Wohlwend, 2011, p. 263)

Interaction Orders

Guiding Questions: What identities/roles are expected and valued here? How do these roles relate to one another?

Map environmental modes such as proximity to others or embodied modes such as shared gaze to track who’s with whom. In the example of makerspace play above, the boys' shared gaze produces a collective space where children are working together. But the makeshift carrel in the layout of materials in the room creates both a physical and social barrier that closes off opportunities for interaction. The child behind the screen is a single, working alone on a monitored task while the children in front of the screen are what Goffman called "a with"--people intent on maintaining a shared activity, audible in their talk and visible in their proximity and mutual gaze on one another's projects under construction. Together, the interplay of environmental modes in the classroom and children's embodied modes create insider/outsider boundaries that produce distinct social spaces.

Historical Bodies

Guiding Questions: Which frequent practices are backgrounded (beneath notice but highly important in structuring the activity)? How does attending to modes make naturalized practices and unwritten rules more visible?

Map embodied modes such as speech, posture, facial expression, and gaze to track how bodies automatically carry out routine practices that are expected or valued. What might be contested if made visible and which modes could be changed to enable broader participation?

Discourses in Place

Guiding Questions: How do the materials position people as insiders/outsiders or authorized/unauthorized users of the space? Who belongs here? Who gets access? Who doesn’t? What cultural spaces are being produced and how are these maintained or bounded in part by the things in the environment? Who decides which materials belong here? Which discourses authorized the rules and roles that govern access to materials, meanings attached to things, and use of modes here?

Map environmental modes such as proximity or physical layout (e.g., of furniture) to see how boundaries and differential access are legitimated by discourses and maintained by materials in a space. Map textual modes such as images, colors, shapes, and textures of things to see how discourses become embedded in the designs of artifacts.

Mapping Modes with Digital Tools

To create modal maps from digital photographs or screenshots (stills of video clips), you can draw on shapes, lines, or boundaries to represent gaze, posture, movement, spaces, and so on. Digital markup tools to annotate modes are available in paint programs in everyday software--PowerPoint and Google Drawings are a few examples.