Multimodality
Multimodality (also known as social semiotics), at its most basic level, is descriptive—it describes how people use language to create meanings and explores potential meanings that people could have created if they had used different meanings or if they had been in different social settings. In other words, multimodality researchers and educators are concerned both with what was taken up as possible and what could have been taken up as possible but wasn’t in any given social interaction. This is incredibly useful in accomplishing the two main goals in my research. The first is to find a way to describe what is occurring with all the different modes (visual, oral, written) in youth produced videos. There have been some attempts to describe these processes, many of them quite good (see Burn & Parker’s Analysing Texts (2003), for example), but we can go further in our understanding of how to describe just what is going on in youth videos and in the pedagogy that is used to teach it. The second is to trace the power dynamics in the relationships between the youth and the facilitators, between the facilitators and the organization, and between the researchers and youth, facilitators, and the organizations.
Multimodality is a collection of theories that will help me to accomplish both goals. In multimodality, it is language itself that creates learning. With multimodality, though, the analysis goes beyond linguistic analysis: language use not only constructs learning, it also constructs how relationships are created and maintained. This is vital because often marginalization is classified under the general categories of race, class, gender, and disability, and learning is classified under those categories as well. This is understandably difficult to trace. However, with multimodality, I can understand how relationships are created and how learning is happening by tracing how language is used (in all its modes) by the adults and the children as the youth learn media literacy. Multimodality will help me to answer some of the difficult questions around marginalization and empowerment by seeing what voice is allowed and what voice is expressed.
