Lord of the Flies as graphic novel: multimodal pedagogies for prescribed literature in high schools

[摘要] In this study, the affordances of a multimodal pedagogy for teaching the prescribed novel,Lord of the Flies, are investigated. The research site is a Grade 10 Visual Art classroom,with six learners serving as the core group. It involves a five-week teaching intervention,whereby participants are required to re-design or re-semiotise a particular scene from thenovel into a comic book, or any multimodal narrative that includes both written and visualtextual features. Participants’ works are analysed in terms of their modal features − size,shape, colour, contour, texture, written text and overall design − and their semioticrelationship to the original, print-based novel. Finally, the researcher determines which textrelatedmeanings or interpretations are gained, lost or transformed during this process of resemiotisation,and discusses the possible implications of these for classroom practice.This research may be described as classroom ethnography (Bloome, 2012) within thequalitative paradigm, offering an account of participants’ actions in a real-life, everydaycontext. Data is collected through ethnographic techniques such as field notes, diary entries,artefact collection and, most crucially, interviews which are conducted before and after there-semiotisation process. To analyse this data, the researcher draws extensively fromliterature in the fields of multimodality and social semiotics, particularly the seminal works ofKress (1993; 2000; 2005), Newfield (2009; 2014) and The New London Group (1996).Emphasis is placed on how participants use semiotic resources − in this case, materialsacquired in the classroom, from the internet or other domains − to re-shape written texts sothat they become more meaningful and accessible for learning.Finally, the findings chapter presents the multimodal pedagogy as a useful outlet forlearners’ 'own desires, fantasies and interests in the semiotic chain” (Stein, 2003, p. 115).Since participants are positioned centrally within the semiotic space, they can become selfregulatedand active agents of meaning making − discovering a canonical text’s themes,symbols, character relations or other sub-textual nuances in and through the visual mode. Inthe interests of continued research and application in the classroom, a label method issuggested to both track participants’ gains and losses in meaning − upon completion of theentire process − and to determine their level of engagement with the novel’s content. Thisinvolves presenting each learner’s artefacts visually, with several labels pointing to thefeatures that speak back most clearly to the source text.Keywords: ● multimodal pedagogy ● social semiotics ● re-semiotisation ● chain ofsemiosis / meaning-making ● visual and written modes ● literature teaching and learning

[发布机构] University of the Witwatersrand