Mapping Modes in Children’s Play and Design: An Action-oriented Approach to Critical Multimodal Analysis

Abstract

And so, a fork becomes a wrench. As children represent the world through their play, writing, drawing, and construction, they simply and flexibly use whatever “comes to hand” and seems apt for their particular message. Kress (2003) suggests that children as players and designers strategically emphasize salient features of objects to represent essential aspects of the surrounding reality: Daniel emphasized the lever function of a fork and exploited its potential as a stand-in for a wrench by simply using it to pry at the metal faucets, a transformation bolstered by his sink-fixing supine position and a strip of language, “I’m fixing the sink!” From this four-word utterance, a twisting gesture, and two legs poking out of a sink cabinet context, Ayeesha immediately recognized the fork as a wrench and took up her own fork/wrench without an explicit explanation. Ayeesha and Daniel along with Mitchell, Jack, and Stephen, whom you will meet later in this chapter, were students in a kindergarten classroom that I studied for one school year. In their classroom, I examined how the children’s play and design1 activity transformed materials in ways that shaped their classroom participation and peer power relations. While Ayeesha and Daniel used play to transform plastic forks for their imaginary plumbing scenario, other children used design to transform art materials into paper toys. Mitchell, Jack, and Stephen regularly sat together at the kindergarten art table where they experimented with new ways of handling tools such as scissors and tape and engaged in friendly competitions such as who was the best “draw-er” or who knew the “hardest” math facts. Multimodal analysis of the boys’ activity at the art table reveals how making a SpongeBob SquarePants puppet allowed Mitchell to demonstrate his status as a 6-year-old design expert to his tablemates.