Design and Redesign of a Multimodal Classroom Task – Implications for Teaching and Learning

Digital technologies are increasingly implemented in Swedish schools, which impact on education in the contemporary classroom. Screen-based practice opens up for new forms and multiplicity of representations, taking into account that language in a globalized society is more than reading and writing skills. This paper presents a case study of technology-mediated instruction at the primary-school level including an analysis of the designed task and how the teacher orchestrated the digital resources during three introductory classes. The aim was also to explore the pupils’ redesigning of advertising films based on teacher’s instructions and available digital resources. Sequences of a learning trajectory were video recorded and analysed from a multimodal perspective with a focus on the designed task and the processes of how pupils orchestrate meaning through their selection and configuration of available designs. The findings show a distinction between the selection of design elements in the teacher’s orchestration of the laptop resources during instruction and the pupils’ redesigning of the task. Pupils’ work developed from the linguistic design provided by the teacher towards visual design and the use of images as the central mode of expression in the process of creating advertising films. The findings also indicate a lack of orientation towards subject content due to the teacher’s primary focus on introducing the software.

"This study indicates that there are strong traditions in school and the findings here indicate that the teacher used the linguistic mode in preference to other modes during the instruction les- sons. The findings would seem to support our hypothesis about the print-based tradition and its impact on the ways the teacher orchestrates digital resources in the classroom, despite the teach- er’s previous experience with digital resources in daily teaching. However, the most interesting aspect of the findings relates to the research questions concerning how various modes of expres- sion are orchestrated during a technology-mediated learning task.... Despite the teacher instructions, the pupils transformed the print-based task into a digital multimodal product combining several modes of expression. The pupils thus demonstrated that they have a knowledge of a range of modes for expression that they manage to orchestrate in a meaningful way and that their commu- nication is not limited to the linguistic mode or the traditional medium of paper". (Authors, 156)