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

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

National Gallery ‘Picture in Focus’ : evaluation of the national roll-out

This report builds on The National Gallery ‘Picture in Focus’ Project: A Research Evaluation by Dr Dominic Wyse and Laura McGarty (who were at the time from the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge) completed as part of their work for the National Gallery. Their work included two other research evaluations: 1) The National Gallery Initial Teacher Education Cultural Placement Partnership: A Research Evaluation, and 2) Evaluation Report: Out of Art into Storytelling. The current report is contextualised in the literature covered in these previous reports so doesn’t repeat this material. A key element across all these evaluations is the ways that art can be used as a stimulus for teaching and learning across a wide range of curriculum subjects and thematic areas

Seeing and Being Seen: The Multimodality of Museum Spectatorship

This article argues that museum visiting and the act of ‘spectatorship’, both of which are often assumed to be ocularcentric, are multimodal events. Anchored in Goffman’s dramaturgy and frame analysis theory, as well as Kress’s multimodal and social semiotic theory of representation and communication, this article presents an apposite interpretative and methodological framework to account for what has not been widely addressed by museum studies; that is, the multimodality of the museum experience. By drawing upon audio-visual excerpts of museum encounters, this analysis brings to the fore the embodied visiting and viewing practices of visitors in museum galleries. Specifically, this article highlights the range of modes of communication and representation, beyond gazing and looking, which are employed, negotiated and regulated within the social context of the visit. The article suggests that visitors’ experiences are embodied and performative interactions with the exhibits and other visitors.Key words: embodiment, multimodality, museums, social interaction, visitor

Children’s ‘eye views’ of an archaeological site: A multimodal social semiotic approach to children’s drawings

This paper presents eight-year-old children's ‘eye views’ of the archaeological site of the Agora in Athens, Greece, based on drawings made during an educational programme on site. Complementing a significant body of research on drawings, we introduce a multimodal social semiotic perspective to explore drawings as ‘designed’ accounts of children’s ‘eye views’. We argue that each account arises as an agentive response to their interests and prompts in the environment framing their experience, such as features of the site and the educational programme. Based on four drawings, we identify salient elements of children’s experience in their representations which we analyze as material realizations of (i) their interests and agency, (ii) their visual and embodied engagement with the archaeological site, and (iii) the framing of the educational task and overall programme. Our findings contribute to research on the importance of visual in learning

Museum encounters: a choreography of visitors’ bodies in interaction

By viewing the museum experience as inextricably linked to an interactive nexus of bodies and objects arranged in the museum space, this paper foregrounds the significance of movement in the shaping of museum encounters. Informed by the fields of dance, symbolic interactionism and multimodal social semiotics, it introduces a conceptualisation of visitors’ movement as choreography unfolding either in compliance with the museum ‘script’ (scripted choreographies), or in response to prompts from other visitors sharing the same space (improvised choreographies). Attending to visitors’ positioning and alignment as key resources of movement, the analysis of video data from two London galleries illustrates how visitors oscillate between performing ‘scripted choreographies’ and ‘improvised choreographies’ through shifts in positioning and alignment, while being spectators of other visitors’ choreographies. Both kinds of choreographies are continuously shaped in interaction with the ‘scripted’ museum stage and other visitors’ ‘scripted’ and ‘improvised choreographies’

Using a social semiotic approach to multimodality : researching learning in schools, museums and hospitals

The aim of this paper is to show how a substantive area of social research –learning– can be investigated using a multimodal social semiotic approach. We apply the approach to three different institutions – a school, a museum and a hospital, illustrating key concepts and addressing issues around pedagogy and technology in contemporary society. A multimodal social semiotic approach focuses on meaning-making, in all modes. It is a theoretical perspective that brings all socially organized resources that people use to make meaning into one descriptive and analytical domain. These resources include modes such as image, writing, gesture, gaze, speech, posture; and media such as screens, 3 D forms of various kinds, books, notes and notebooks. All of these modes and media are also used in environments designed for learning. That makes a multimodal social semiotic approach particularly apt for studying learnin

The G<i>⁵¹⁶</i>T <i>CYP2B6</i> Germline Polymorphism Affects the Risk of Acute Myeloid Leukemia and Is Associated with Specific Chromosomal Abnormalities

<div><p>The etiology of acute myeloid leukemia (AML) underlies the influence of genetic variants in candidate genes. The CYP2B6 enzyme detoxifies many genotoxic xenobiotics, protecting cells from oxidative damage. The <i>CYP2B6</i> gene is subjected to a single-nucleotide polymorphism (G<i>⁵¹⁶</i>T) with heterozygotes (<i>GT</i>) and homozygotes (<i>TT</i>) presenting decreased enzymatic activity. This case-control study aimed to investigate the association of <i>CYP2B6</i> G<i>⁵¹⁶</i>T polymorphism with the susceptibility of AML and its cytogenetic and clinical characteristics. Genotyping was performed on 619 AML patients and 430 healthy individuals using RCR-RFLP and a novel LightSNip assay. The major finding was a statistically higher frequency of the variant genotypes (<i>GT</i> and <i>TT</i>) in patients compared to the controls (<i>GT</i>:38.8% vs 29.8% and <i>TT</i>:9.3% vs 5.3% respectively) (<i>p</i><0.001). More specifically, a significantly higher frequency of <i>GT+TT</i> genotypes in <i>de novo</i> AML patients (46.6%) and an immensely high frequency of <i>TT</i> in secondary AML (<i>s</i>-AML) (20.5%) were observed. The statistical analysis showed that the variant T allele was approximately 1.5-fold and 2.4-fold higher in <i>de novo</i> and s-AML respectively than controls. Concerning FAB subtypes, the T allele presented an almost 2-fold increased in AML-M2. Interestingly, a higher incidence of the <i>TT</i> genotype was observed in patients with abnormal karyotypes. In particular, positive correlations of the mutant allele were found in patients carrying specific chromosomal aberrations [-7/del(7q), -5/del(5q), +8, +21 or t(8;21)], complex or monosomal karyotypes. Finally, a strikingly higher frequency of <i>TT</i> genotype was also observed in patients stratified to the poor risk group. In conclusion, our results provide evidence for the involvement of the <i>CYP2B6</i> polymorphism in AML susceptibility and suggest a possible role of the <i>CYP2B6</i> genetic background on the development of specific chromosomal aberrations.</p></div