Elever erfar och representerar världen visuellt : en utforskande studie om hur mellanstadieelever skapar mening genom fotografi

Placed within language and literature didactics this qualitative practice-based study with a multimodal perspective aims to explore the potentials for meaning-making through photography. Despite that, the digitization of society has facilitated access to various modes of meaning-making and has had a major impact on how we communicate and learn, new possibilities for meaning-making using for example film or photography are poorly explored in both research and education. This justifies a broad aim and an explorative study. In aiming for an explorative methodology, cooperation was initiated with a group of interested teachers, and the design of the cooperation and the data collection was inspired by educational design research. Meaning-making processes through photography, editing, and discussions about photographs were explored with pupils aged 10-12 years in social science, religion, Swedish, Swedish as a second language, and English. The data comprises video documentation, observational notes, and the pupils’ photographs (and some films). The pupils used apps on iPads as tools for taking photographs and editing. A central concept in the study is affordance. The analysis focuses on what affordances for meaning-making pupils realize in their photographs and edited images and in literacy events when they take photographs, as well as edit and discuss photographs. With an ambition to contribute to a deeper understanding of the interplay between literacy events and realized affordances used for meaning-making an analytical model is created and used in the study based on social semiotic theory. The key for this model is the literacy event as an analytical unit within which semiosis as an iterative movement is emphasized. These literacy events are also analyzed with a focus on how the pupils move between different positions and perspectives. An important finding is that pupils show a high level of agency in using different semiotic resources. Affordances related to bot