In many ways, the four episodes of play featured in the preceding case studies are
unexceptional. They represent the kinds of activity that routinely occur amongst three- and four-year-olds in early years settings every day. Although such activity may be typical, to overlook or dismiss it as unimportant seems to do children a great disservice. The fine-grained analysis central to this study reveals that each moment of play comprises rich and complex multimodal semiotic work, revealing children to be ceaselessly communicating signs of knowing and learning, creatively and with agency. This discussion suggests that viewing play in this way, and giving it respectful committed attention, can offer valuable insights into children’s many forms of meaning-making and their theories about the world, but that this is dependent on developing apt methodological tools which support such recognition.
The study’s key findings can be summarised as follows:
o The children demonstrated semiotic resourcefulness in their play, using unconventional and unexpected resources not typically anticipated in early years education.
o The children readily combined and moved between multiple modes, demonstrating transformative engagement that offered insights into their meaning-making.
o The children demonstrated agency and creativity in their play.
o The play involved complex, multi-layered signs in which messages about the play were expressed multimodally.
o Transcript design shapes what becomes recognised and considered significant in children’s play.
o Multimodal transcription has the potential to illuminate aspects of play which may otherwise be overlooked or taken for granted.
This chapter expands these key findings by making connections between this present study and the existing literature, spanning both the substantive and methodological foci of the research.
The research questions guiding the study were as follows:
o How might multimodal social semiotic theory offer new ways of seeing and understanding child-initiated play?
o How might video and multimodal transcription offer new ways of seeing and understanding child-initiated play?
The first section of this chapter responds to the substantive research question by identifying cross-cutting themes from the four preceding case study chapters. Reflecting on the process of multimodal transcription and the transcripts accompanying the case studies, the second section critically considers transcription as transduction, entailing inevitable choices regarding design,
with consequences for what becomes recognised as meaningful. The significance of such a perspective on child-initiated play and consequences for transcription are considered in the following chapter, where conclusions and implications are proposed for both researchers and educators.
The Multimodal Complexity of Young Children’s Play
Whilst the four case studies included in this research feature different types of play, taking place in different parts of the Nursery, amongst different groups of children making use of different resources and materials, there are nonetheless common threads running through the analysis which can be drawn together for discussion. These are identified as:
o semiotic resourcefulness o transformative engagement o agency and interest
o multimodal framing
These four cross-cutting themes are considered here in turn, addressing the study’s first research question regarding the insights into child-initiated play offered by a multimodal social semiotic perspective.
Semiotic Resourcefulness
A central finding across all four case studies was the children’s resourcefulness as they readily drew on what was available to make signs in their play. In several instances, these were
resources ‘pre-designed’ specifically for teaching and learning which were purposefully provided as part of the classroom pedagogy (e.g. wooden blocks, model insects). However, the children also drew upon less predictable resources which were nonetheless part of the nursery
environment, such as chairs, a window ledge, leaves and branches, demonstrating their “ever-searching eye” for resources for meaning-making, beyond those which adults might see, expect or plan for (Kress, 1997, p. 104). The children used not only tangible material resources, but also their own embodied resources (see Hancock & Gillen, 2007). For example, they gestured the action of fastening a seatbelt, added sound effects to the action of opening an imaginary door, smiled and glanced at one another to convey alliances, and used different voices to enact characters. In instances such as the running game embodied resources (including qualities of the children’s movement such as speed, direction and distance) were particularly central to the organisation of the play.
In addition to tangible and embodied resources, the children also used virtual on-screen resources readily in their play, although not in the ways that might be typically anticipated. Ellie
and Toby’s use of the digital ‘rubbish’ from the 2Simple computer game as props in their pretend play scenario created a hybrid of on-screen and off-screen play, suggesting that the children recognised digital media as presenting new possibilities for multimodal meaning-making, readily incorporating these into their play alongside other resources. This supports the suggestion of Brooker and Siraj-Blatchford that manipulation of symbols and images on computer screens represents “a new form of symbolic play” in which children seem to treat the on-screen items as ‘concretely’ as they do physical items (2002, p. 269)
The findings revealed that a multitude of visual, aural, embodied, tangible and virtual resources were drawn upon and readily combined by the children in purposeful, inventive and highly multimodal ways. Far beyond the traditional ‘educational’ resources often provided for teaching and learning in early years education, this study reveals the resourcefulness children
demonstrate in selecting and combining ‘what is to hand’ in the widest sense, and moving between these forms ceaselessly (Kress, 1997). A particular characteristic of the children’s play was the fluidity and ease with which they moved between and across modes. Joey’s ‘house’
involved careful symmetrical spatial arrangement of blocks, animated by mechanical actions and sound effects, and involving the precise arrangement and movement of carefully selected toy figures. Similarly, the boys’ ‘aeroplane’ in the bushes involved precise positioning of chairs, seated postures, engine-like sound effects, steering-type gestures and discussions about seatbelts, all within a few seconds of play.
In choosing from the many available resources, the children made purposeful selections and demonstrated a precise awareness of design. For instance, in the bushes a straight protruding branch at arm-height was used as an apt signifier for a control mechanism in an imagined aeroplane, and a handful of leaves were used as an apt signifier for food for the journey. In each case, the qualities and affordances of the resource were apt metaphors for that which they were signifying (a strong, rigid branch as being ‘like’ a lever; a handful of organic matter as being ‘like’
food), demonstrating principled choice of materials in their sign-making. Furthermore, the children distributed meaning across available modes. For instance, the sound effects Lucas and Max used in the bushes to emulate revving engines, or the noises Joey used to accompany the opening of his house’s door, conveyed meanings which could not be represented in other modes, such as speech or action. Far from being arbitrary, the children’s choice of resources were revealed to be exploiting the distinct potentialities of the materials and modes available and showed a precise sense of design.
Within such complex sign-making, the children also demonstrated sensitivity to their social environment. Ben and Jake carefully found ways to be close together and accommodate each other in their ‘house’, and the four boys in the bushes jointly enacted different aspects of a pretend aeroplane scenario. The play was open-ended and collaborative, requiring the children to make negotiations about the organisation on a moment-by-moment basis. The case studies
reinforce the suggestion that play can be likened to improvisation (DeZutter, 2007; Sawyer, 2016). In this way, play can be considered multimodal social meaning-making, and through its playfulness, it seemed to support the players to explore the flexibility of resources and to develop an awareness of their capacities as social sign-makers.
These case studies therefore reveal that play can be considered complex social semiotic work, demonstrating resourceful and principled design made in-the-moment in response to ever-changing social situations. Crucially, this research emphasises that children’s semiotic work involves resourcefulness beyond that which educators might typically expect or plan for. Far beyond the resources designed for sign-making which were available in the nursery (e.g. pens, crayons, paper, chalk), or traditionally ‘educational’ resources, the children made signs from a wide and varied assemblage of ‘stuff’, including natural, digital and fleeting ephemeral modes.
This research found that children use unexpected resources in unexpected places in
unexpected ways to make meaning. Because of this, such activity risks being taken for granted, overlooked or dismissed in the ‘busyness’ of an early educational environment, where such instances of learning may not be deliberate moments of ‘teaching’. The moments of play examined in this thesis did not take place in response to adult-led activities planned to address certain curriculum goals, nor did they make use only or primarily of the anticipated resources that early years settings typically provide for ‘learning through play’. This calls for a disposition towards learning which takes every kind of resource as being potentially meaningful and as being capable of being used for meaning-making, from chairs, leaves, smiles, glances, on-screen icons, actions and sound effects to more ‘conventionally’ recognised early years resources.
Transformative Engagement
Across the case studies, the signs the children made in their play were often temporary, fleeting and subject to continual change. For example, in their play in the bushes the children used the chairs in multiple ways: first arranging them in pairs to depict beds in a home, then moments later moving them apart to represent seats at a doctor’s surgery, then re-arranging them linearly to signify the seating in an aeroplane. Carefully and closely tracing sign-making in this way helped uncover the interests of the sign-makers, transformed into multimodal signs. Each transformation offered insights into what the children considered ‘criterial’ to three different social spaces (homes, doctors, aeroplanes). Similarly, in Joey’s play with the blocks, his depiction of doors as barriers with rules for opening and closing offered insights into concepts that seemed to be of particular interest to him around access, power and control. The play offered a way in to examining the children’s processes of ‘transformative engagement’
(Bezemer & Kress, 2016), where attention to the children’s ‘outward’ signs of meaning-making
offered subtle insights into their ‘inner’ meaning-making, including their interests, ideas and theories about the world.
This sign-making can be seen as transformative not only in that chosen resources are
transformed into new signs, but transformative in that through making a sign, meaning-makers re-make themselves (The New London Group, 1996). As Bezemer and Kress note, “with every sign made, the sign-maker’s knowledge is transformed” (2016, p. 50). Through engaging with an aspect of the world in some way, and making choices about how to represent it, the sign-maker’s understanding will inevitably alter, however subtly. Whilst this study focuses primarily on in-depth analysis of short episodes of play, repeated observations of the children’s play over time could be used to consider how transformative engagement indicates the children’s
changing signs of learning. For example, observations of other instances of Jake and Ben creating ‘homes’ using different resources would offer different insights into their meaning-making around this same concept, and observing other constructions built by Joey, in various forms and contexts, may offer further insights into his interest and exploration of concepts such as power and control. In this way, play can be seen as not just a way in which children make evident their thoughts, knowledge, and understandings, but a central means by which children’s thoughts, knowledge and understandings are constructed and shaped. This opposes notions of learning as transmission in which learners copy, receive or acquire meanings presented by others, instead proposing that learning “is the inevitable outcome of any and every engagement with the (socially made) world”(Bezemer & Kress, 2016, p. 37). Such a perspective has
implications for what we consider the value of play to be, and the significance for practitioners seeking to support children’s learning.
Considering play as transformative engagement, this study highlights that the resources available for sign-making have inevitable implications regarding precisely how the world can be engaged with, and so shape the possibilities for meaning-making. If the blocks had not been available to Joey, for instance, or if he had been asked to describe his house, draw it, or write about it, representing it in these different modes would have altered the means of engagement, resulting in different signs, and so different meaning-making. A sound cannot be exactly replicated in an image, just as movement cannot be exactly described in language, and so on.
In creating his house Joey was making decisions about how to make that sign visually, aurally, spatially and through movement. The symmetrical, mechanical action of moving the bricks apart, for instance, demonstrated one facet to the house, as being ordered and systematic. The mechanical sound-effects demonstrated a further aspect, signifying a futuristic house rather than a typical everyday house. The construction’s elevation onto the window ledge, and the further central placement of the ‘captain’ raised onto the window’s handle denoted its particular importance and significance in relation to controlling the house. Since all modes have inherent affordances, moving across modes presents conceptual and cognitive challenges (Kress,
1997). In using multiple modes, each mode offered different potentials for meaning-making, creating different signs of learning.
The ability to move between modes enabled the children to compensate for limitations
experienced in each mode, and to make the most of each mode’s potentials. Pahl suggests that closely observing children’s transformative sign-making is akin to “tracking the flow” of particular ideas and concepts in various incarnations (1999, p. 27). Stein suggests that free play and educational practices that invite, support and recognise the movement between modes are desirable as they “enable learners to play with nameless and wordless concepts and ‘fix’ them in multiple variations” (2003, p. 120). Furthermore, an approach which invites and supports movement between modes can be seen as related to creativity. Hofstadter suggests, for instance, that the crux of creativity is “making variations on a theme” (1985, p. 233). From such a perspective, young children’s meaning-making in child-initiated play is highly creative, drawing upon, and moving between, multiple modes to express a particular theme or concept.
As was evident across the case studies, the children’s play entailed the innovative selection of modes, combined and transformed to exploit their particular potentials to create new signs. It supports Pahl’s suggestion that “multimodality can help extend an understanding of creativity”
since it expands what signs get recognised as being creative (2008, p. 141). A multimodal social semiotic perspective on sign-making recognises that every act of sign-making is creative and innovative, as it inherently involves the creation of a new sign, always in multiple modes.
This therefore positions creativity as entirely everyday, but nonetheless entirely remarkable. As Bezemer and Kress note, in order to understand learning, “Creativity and innovation will need to be seen as the ordinary, banal, constant processes and phenomena that they are” (2016, pp. 6–
7). Seeing all sign-making as intrinsically creative and innovative has resonances with Craft’s work on ‘everyday creativity’ and ‘little ‘c’ creativity’ (Craft, 2002). Moving away from
understandings of creativity as concerned only with the arts, music and drama, or a particularly rare attribute held only by the gifted few, this study highlights the creative capacities of all individuals. Furthermore, through development of apt methodologies, this research emphasises the many materials and resources which can be used in meaning-making and the different potentials and constraints they might offer.
This has implications for how researchers and educators provide for, support and recognise the ways that young children combine and move between modes in their play. The findings of this study suggest that careful consideration of the kinds of materials and environments made available to young children is necessary, reflecting on what is ‘to hand’ for children’s meaning-making in their play. Furthermore, the findings demonstrate a need to recognise and support children acting creatively and with agency. The importance of open-ended resources, flexible environments and supporting children’s agency have been similarly emphasised by Broadhead (2010), who suggests that early years settings might provide a ‘whatever you want it to be
place’ where children can take the lead in transforming their play spaces. Similarly, approaches such as those inspired by Reggio Emilia and Steiner philosophies place particular emphasis on children as active constructors of meaning and the importance of open-ended materials for meaning-making. Free-flow, play-based provision is fairly typical in English early years settings such as the nursery in this study, yet play may be compromised and such an approach does not normally extend beyond the early years, as more formalised learning approaches and
assessments privileging language are given increasing priority (as discussed in Chapter One).
Recognising play as creative transformation raises questions as to whether play-based approaches and the opportunity to explore and ‘fix’ ideas in multiple modes ought to be characteristic not only of early years education, but education more broadly.
Agency and Interest
The case studies have highlighted the many diverse resources the children drew upon and transformed in their play, and within this emphasised children’s agency as sign-makers. Within each episode of play, the individual children brought their own particular experiences of the world to bear on their sign-making. Within a socio-cultural turn in education, it is now widely recognised that children’s motivation to express a particular thought or idea will be shaped by a complex combination of social and cultural factors, and this evidence of children’s interest emerged as a theme in this study’s findings. The play of the boys in the bushes, for instance, incorporated a range of ideas, including homes, doctors, treasure, baddies, chocolate, aeroplanes, emergencies and seatbelts, likely to have been shaped by their family and
community experiences, books, media texts and other encounters with the world. The influence of popular culture on the children’s play was also indirectly evident, for instance in the traces of motifs from science fiction and adventure computer games in Joey’s house. As Opie notes, children’s play is influenced by their numerous intertwined experiences of life which form the
“ingredients” for play (1993, p. 12) and Kress similarly considers the “ancestry” of ideas that are manifestested in the things children create (1997, p. 30).
There was evidence in the case studies that the children’s sign-making was motivated by a range of factors, including the social relationships between the children themselves. Joey’s house design was considered and precise, with its rules of operation and its order having to be
‘just so’ (as Lizzie was to find out). In Ellie and Toby’s play at the computer, Ellie seemed to
‘just so’ (as Lizzie was to find out). In Ellie and Toby’s play at the computer, Ellie seemed to