Abstract
Building on the argument that practices between teacher and learners in classrooms may differ (Scollon and Scollon, 1981; Brice Heath, 1983 [1996]; Street, 1984; Gee, 1996; Barton and Hamilton, 1998), I look at how literacy focused school classroom teaching/learning practices instilled into an individual have a long-term effect. Using a multimodal (inter)action analytical approach (Norris, 2004, 2014) and the site of engagement as my analytical tool that brings together concrete actions, practices and discourses as a coherent whole, I examine actions, practices and discourses produced and reproduced by an art teacher and a new art student in a small private art school in Germany. While the art teacher draws on and re-produces the practice of painting, the new art student draws on and reproduces the practices and discourses that she learned in formal schooling, forcing her to produce and understand modal configurations that do not align with the creative practice that she is learning. This paper has potential educational and social ramifications as it illustrates that formal schooling may have a negative effect upon creativity by focusing the schooled individual upon results and on language/listening. These foci directly translate into modal behaviour which disadvantages the individual when trying to learn a creative practice, where the process and showing/seeing are emphasised. As the world becomes more multimodal and creative, we may want to engage in more research to rethink what and how children are taught.
About the author
Sigrid Norris is director of the Multimodal Research Centre at Auckland University of Technology in New Zealand. She is the author of Analyzing Multimodal Interaction (2004), rosarot und schwarz. Gedichte (2008), and Identity in (Inter)action (2011); the editor or co-editor of Discourse in action (2005), Multimodality in Practice (2012), and Interactions, Images, Texts: A Reader in Multimodality (2014); and the editor-in-chief of the international journal Multimodal Communication. Sigrid’s main interests are the theoretical and methodological development and the practical application of multimodality.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the participants for their engagement and the Faculty of Creative Technologies at Auckland University of Technology for their financial support of the project. I would also like to thank Elina Tapio, Jarret Geenen, Jesse Pirini, and Najma Al Zidjaly for their comments on an earlier draft.
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