The tremendous interest in multimodality within the field of literacy education has challenged the verbocentric literacy landscape of schools. Research on multimodality in classroom spaces has suggested that combining and juxtaposing multiple sign systems is a generative act of transforming meanings. Yet, attention to entanglements of pedagogy and power has been rare in the research on students’ engagement with multimodality. In this article, we complicate the research on the generative potential of children’s multimodal sign-making in school by tracing the ways this process is saturated with power. Using a theoretical mash-up, performative semiotics, we read a classroom event, situated in a computer lab, in which two kindergartners regarded as successful literacy learners designed digital texts about a bunny that some children reported seeing on a field trip. The multiple meanings of bunny that the children negotiated are theorized as chains of contested sign-making that are performative. In tracing both sign-making and performativity, the analysis makes visible the politics of schooled literacy and the way children’s performances appear fixed yet are destabilized in their interactions, thus complicating the assumption that multimodality is a generative process that can transform schooled literacy. This analytic mash-up also focuses attention on the instability of classroom interactions and shows how this provides openings for performing literacy differently even as they remain bound to normalized and naturalized ways of being literate in school. Thus, we argue that claims about multimodality require attention to the way both fixity and instability produces school literacy performances.

中文翻译：

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“B代表兔子”：有争议的标志制作和以不同方式进行学校识字的可能性

扫盲教育领域对多模式的巨大兴趣挑战了学校以语言为中心的扫盲格局。对课堂空间多模态的研究表明，组合和并置多个符号系统是一种转换意义的生成行为。然而，在关于学生参与多模态的研究中，很少关注教学法和权力的纠葛。在这篇文章中，我们通过追踪这个过程被权力饱和的方式，使关于儿童在学校的多模态标志制作的生成潜力的研究复杂化。使用理论混搭、表演符号学，我们阅读了一个位于计算机实验室的课堂活动，其中两名被认为是成功的识字学习者的幼儿园学生设计了关于一些孩子报告在实地考察中看到的兔子的数字文本。的多重含义孩子们协商的兔子被理论化为具有表演性的有争议的标志制作链。在追踪符号制作和表演性方面，该分析使受过教育的读写能力的政治以及儿童的表演看起来固定但在他们的互动中不稳定的方式变得可见，从而使多模态是可以改变受过教育的读写能力的生成过程的假设变得复杂。这种分析性的混搭也将注意力集中在课堂互动的不稳定性上，并展示了这如何为以不同方式进行识字提供了机会，即使它们仍然受制于在学校识字的标准化和自然化方式。因此，我们认为关于多模态的主张需要关注固定性和不稳定性产生学校读写能力的方式。