Multimodal meaning-making during play in two Northern Canadian Indigenous kindergarten classrooms

Abstract

This research explores young Indigenous children’s multimodal meaning-making to carry out social intentions in dramatic and construction/materials play settings. The participants are two teachers and 21 children from two Northern Canadian Indigenous communities. Underpinned by social semiotic theory, the research involves inductive analyses of six videos of children’s play. Our findings show a richness in Indigenous children’s meaning-making, as they used verbal and non-verbal modes to carry out 26 specific social intentions that we grouped into four broad social intention categories: Getting Along, Expressing Emotion/Interest, Satisfying Own Needs and Directing. The social intention carried out most frequently was showing interest in an activity. Participating children were more likely to use non-verbal modes, particularly in construction/materials play contexts. They also combined verbal and non-verbal modes to achieve their social intentions, but did not use verbal modes exclusively. When children used verbal modes to any great extent, it was primarily in a dramatic play context where the teacher took a role in children’s dramatic play. Our research indicates a need for greater attention by educators, curriculum developers and researchers to multimodal meaning-making in Indigenous children’s play, given the cultural importance of non-verbal communication and participating Indigenous children’s remarkable multimodal meaning-making during play.     

Ethnic Identity and Social‐Cognitive Maturity in a Multicultural Group Experience

This study examined a multicultural group experience on students' (N= 94) ethnic identity development and social‐cognitive maturity. Although no differences were identified between treatment and comparison group participants, group therapeutic factors scores were predictive of ethnic identity development and social‐cognitive maturity. Implications for counselor educators and future research are discussed.     

An Autoethnographical Study of Culture,Power, Identity and Art Education in Post‐Colonial South Korea

This article reflects my experiences of learning art in the 1970s and 1980s and my teaching career in school art education in twenty‐first century South Korea. This autobiographical reflection shows how I have struggled with my identity as an art teacher in the post‐colonial context of Western influences on Korean society since World War II. There has been greater tension and a greater struggle for different values, practices and identities when new values and practices have been introduced into the particular socio‐cultural context of South Korea. My struggles with particular kinds of pedagogic identity valued within the rapidly changing political, economic and cultural context of Western influences on Korean art education demonstrate the hidden structural mechanism of the relationship between culture, power and identity in the post‐colonial world of globalisation. This study as an autoethnographical research provides critical insights into how identities are produced by pedagogic discourses and practices of art education that are constructed through the specific systems of practice and language which transmit and regulate such identities and values.