Space exploration
Space affects the social practices and shapes individual’s identities and relationships within it (Allan & Catts, 2014). Spatial distances between individuals are socially and culturally defined (Hall, 1966). As Jewitt (2008: 262) observes,‘how teachers and students use gaze, body posture, and the distribution of space and resources produces silent discourses in the classroom that affect literacy’.The teacher’s use of classroom space has implications on the production of social capital (Allan & Catts,
2014), the shaping of power relations between teachers and students in the classroom (Lim et al., 2012) and the improvement of student engagement and performance in the classroom (Bouchard, 2017).The spaces in the classroom in which the teacher moves and occupies are meaningful. The meanings in these spaces are influenced by the types of discourses and the nature of interaction between the teacher and students, as well as being shaped by the furniture and layout arrangements.
In this chapter, we have examined the meanings in the classroom spaces and described a typology' used to map the meanings of these spaces. While the meanings in these spaces have been regularised over time due to conventional usage, they can still be redefined by the types of discourses made by the teacher in the use of the space. Meanings in the classroom spaces are negotiated statically through the teacher’s positioning and dynamically through the teacher’s movement through pacing. As such, a study of the teacher’s use of classroom spaces can reveal their spatial pedagogy. For teachers, an awareness of how classroom spaces, as a semiotic mode, can be used with aptness and fluency, to help them design various learning experiences for their students.
This chapter also explored the possibilities offered by digital technology in the coding and visualisation of multimodal data. The collection of multimodal data in the classroom often produces a very large corpus, and the visualisation of these data is helpful to identify patterns and trends for analysis. In Chapters 2 and 3, we have introduced the use of Cytoscape, an open source software that can visualise the coding made of the data as network graphs. The usefulness of the network graphs in aiding in the comparisons between the teachers’ lesson microgenres and their spatial pedagogy is illustrated with an analysis of the data from two teachers.
O’Halloran (2009: 113) observes that ‘multimodal analysts from the social sciences appear to have much to gain by understanding and utilizing the expanded meaning potential afforded by computer technology to further multimodal analysis theory and practice’. For the educational researcher interested in the study of embodied semiosis, the use of computer technology as a tool for visualisation has become a necessity. With the advancement of technology', the automated annotation and basic analysis of big data is also fast becoming a reality (see e.g. Wiedemann, 2013; Bateman et al, 2016; Manolev et al., 2018). As such, educational researchers can possibly overcome the seemingly daunting amount of data collected in a multimodal corpus on embodied semiosis in the classroom by harnessing the affordances of new technologies in visualising, analysing, and explicating the semiotic choices made by the teachers.
REFLECTION QUESTIONS
- 1. How do the various spaces in the classroom which the teacher occupies express specific meanings?
- 2. How can teachers use the various classroom spaces in your lesson to design unique learning experiences for students?
