Dialogic intervisualizing in multimodal inquiry

Abstract

Problem-based learning (PBL) designs are addressing the demands and potentials of an information-saturated era where accessing inquiry resources and new information is reconfiguring tutor-facilitated dialogues. Unclear is how incorporation of CSCL tools and the rich digital multimodal resources they collaboratively access and generate are re-shaping the traditional problem-based cycle of inquiry and intersubjective sense-making. This study in higher education adopts Interactional Ethnography (IE) as a logic-of-inquiry to examine how a group of medical undergraduate students and their facilitator (n = 12) collaborated to access, review, appropriate and devise multimodal digital and visual texts within and across one problem cycle (three face-to-face tutorials and self-directed learning). Drawing on concepts of ‘multimodality’ and ‘intervisuality’ from literacy theory, we extend theoretical understandings of how multimodal texts become actors within a developing PBL event, not just objects of study or cultural tools. Through this multi-focal approach, we make visible how what occurs at one point in time with these texts in the developing dialogic space is consequential for what students can and do undertake in subsequent engagements with such texts in and across one bounded cycle of learning activities. Arising from this analysis, we propose the concept of dialogic intervisualizing to characterize the dynamic interplay between and among information problem-solving processes, textual negotiations and purposeful, facilitated dialogue for deep knowledge co-construction within and across collaborative, computer supported learning activity in an inquiry cycle.

Appendix 1. Transcribing developing texts: Operating principles

Guided by Bucholz (2000) argument that, in the process of transcribing, the researcher constructs the “other”, i.e. the people in interaction, we turn to a brief description of the analysis system that grounded our tracing of the developing talk, discourse, interactions and activity. The transcription process is guided by the sociolinguistic approach of Gumperz and Herasimchuk (1972) that framed the concept of contextualization cues in the construction of meaning. This argument was adapted by Green and colleagues (Green and Wallat 1981; Kelly and Green 2019) to show the developing texts of classroom talk. These cues include: pitch, stress, pause, juncture, kinesics, proxemics, gesture, eye gaze, lexicon and grammar, which signal meanings to participants. Adding Fairclough (1992) argument, we see that each utterance is a tripartite process: a text, a discourse practice and a social process, or a saying, a making, and a doing of interaction. He further argues that when a text is proposed, what happens next is shaped by the utterance/discourse practice/social process and in turn shapes what occurs next. These conceptual arguments converge with, and yet differ from, other forms of discourse analysis (e.g., conversation analysis, i.e. the Jeffersonian Transcript; see also Cameron 2001). This approach to transcription provides a grounding for tracing the developing instructional text (i.e. the PBL case design) and for identifying developing textual and intertextual information being referenced and oriented to by participants.

Bloome et al. (2005) framed the following logic central to this approach to analyzing the developing texts. They argued that in interaction, participants propose, recognize, and interactionally accomplish what is significant to know, understand and do in this event. Through this process, participants construct not only academic information but also identities, social relationships, textual relationships as well as power relationships. Underlying Bloome et al. (2005) and guiding an IE logic-of-analysis is Bakhtin (1979/1986) argument about speaker-hearer relationships that:

Sooner or later what is heard and actively understood will find its response in the subsequent speech or behavior of the listener. In most cases, genres of complex cultural communication are intended precisely for this kind of actively responsive understanding with delayed action. Everything that we have said here also pertains to written and read speech, with the appropriate adjustments and additions (pg. 69).

Based on these theoretical frameworks and the understanding among these theorists of speech/discourse, we further recognize that, in these developing moments, there are traces of other texts that form the need to trace the histories of these developing understandings across times, events and configurations of actors in particular cycles of learning. That is, as Bakhtin 1979/1986, pg. 84) argued, “Any utterance is a link in a chain of speech communication.” Included in the excerpts are also hesitation phenomena and repeated bits of talk that make visible the speaker as hearer and how the speaker is monitoring their own talk. This aligns with arguments by Frederiksen and Donin (2015) that analysts (and by extension hearers) cannot see into the head of speakers but rather can only analyze what is made visible in the talk/speech and actions.