The multimodal meaning-making of elementary students in social studies

During their participation in a classroom-based research project, 9-10-year-old students had opportunities to develop their visual meaning-making skills and competences, as well as their aesthetic understanding of and critical thinking about multimodal ensembles. The Grade 4 students read, discussed and wrote about picturebooks during Language Arts, Social Studies and Science, and participated in a range of activities that focused on a selection of elements of visual art and design. For the culminating activity of an interdisciplinary Social Studies unit, which was one component of the case study research, the students designed a multimodal poster to communicate their learning about how interactions between Indigenous Peoples and European explorers lead to change. Photographs of four students’ Exploration posters and excerpts from their written poster descriptions reveal how the students purposefully selected and orchestrated specific semiotic resources of image and layout to represent and express meanings that realized their objectives as sign-makers in a particular context. Indeed, the students designed multifaceted symbolic images that communicated their historical understandings as well as their knowledge about the elements of visual art and design under study. Discussion of the students’ Exploration posters is situated in sociocultural and social semiotics theory, multimodality, and visual competences.