RELACIÓN DE CONCEPTOS

The main aim of social semiotics is ‘to look systematically at how textual strategies are deployed to make certain meanings’ (Aiello, 2006:90). Social semiotics concentrates on practices of meaning-making and considers how we make meaning using various semiotic resources, modes and their affordances. What is developed by Kress and van Leeuwen’s (1996) and van Leeuwen and Jewitt (2001) is how we can use social semiotics as an analytical tool to access these meanings by drawing on the contexts and cultures of its production and how we as individuals assign meanings to our texts through our prior knowledge, exposure and use of semiotic resources and modal

79 affordance in our communicative practices. Therefore, social semiotics allows us to access the meanings which children create through semiosis, embedding their image making or ‘visual design’ within the contexts and cultures of their creation. Iedema (2001:200)suggests that systematically deconstructing text (in whatever form) offers a means of critically analysing meaning thus providing, ‘a means to understand and manipulate what might otherwise remain at the level of vague suspicion and intuitive response’. But how does one know how to ‘deconstruct’ visual texts in a systematic manner if a guided tour is not offered and no example provided using data specific to your own research? When faced with a child’s drawing, which may be as simple as a blue circle, how do we, as researchers, systematically analyse this image, ensuring rigour and validity of our interpretations? Bazalgette and Buckingham (2012) raise a similar point when reviewing multimodal social semiotic approaches to analysis offered by Kress and van Leeuwen

Needless to say, this approach works exceptionally well with the examples Kress and van Leeuwen provide, but as is often the case, attempts to apply the grammar to other examples do not work out so neatly. (Bazalgette & Buckingham, 2012:4) Other authors such as Iedema (2003:30) raise important analytical issues regarding how we manage data produced by multimodal communication

…multimodal analysis should be complemented with a dynamic view on semiosis. Often oriented to finished and finite texts, multimodal analysis considers the complexity of texts or representations as they are, and less frequently how it is that such constructs come about, or how it is that they transmogrify as (part of larger) dynamic processes…the inevitably transformative dynamics of socially situated meaning-making processes require an additional and alternative analytical point of view.

80 Iedema reinforces the complexity of using social semiotics to analyse drawings due to the situated nature of children’s meaning-making process. As a result, the construction and meaning of representations will vary across different social contexts, and to serve different social purposes. One of the main issues regarding examples of social semiotic analysis is that children’s motivations and interests are used to infer the meaning conveyed through these drawings. In other words, examining the ‘visual design’ and ‘visual grammar’ to understand the child’s signification rather than basing it on the child’s descriptions and explanations of the meanings they are trying to convey. This is an adequate approach if we are examining the ways in which children make meaning through images using the social or semiotic resources available to them; for instance, this could be applied to the scrapbooking methodologies referred to in section 2.7. Nevertheless, difficulties arise when we are using children’s drawings as a research tool to explore their perspectives on a particular topic. The main issue of concern is: why base children’s meanings on speculation when we can use methodologies and analytical approaches which allow us to gather information during the actual creation of the drawing?

A number of studies use social semiotics to analyse children’s drawings. However, whether these interpretations are based on adult speculation or the children’s actual descriptions and explanations of their drawing is not necessarily made explicit. For example, Eleftheriou et al. (2012) use social semiotics as an analytical framework in their study. They provide a detailed account of their categories of analysis; however, they do not give an explicit account of the analytical procedure. Consequently, there is little evidence of how these categories of analysis were applied to a child’s drawing and used to facilitate their interpretations.

81 Another study adopting a social semiotic framework is Hopperstad (2010). The study used social semiotics to interpret children’s drawings (aged five to six) within a school context by applying Halliday’s terminology of ideational, textual, and interpersonal meaning. Many of the descriptors relate specifically to representations of people, and the relationships between human figures and the remainder of the scene or objects. For this reason, it is difficult to replicate her approach to drawings which do not contain human figures. She does however reiterate the important contribution of Kress and van Leeuwen, and that is providing researchers with ‘an analytical framework within which to “read” and discuss visual meaning’ (2010:431). For this reason, social semiotics ought not to be viewed as a fixed template to which all images should fit but rather, a framework or even toolkit which researchers can draw from to analyse children’s drawings. The ways in which we apply it will inevitably be dependent upon the questions we want answered and what we hope to explore through children’s drawings. Therefore, if my objective is to seek children’s perspectives on play through their drawings, then I require an analytical technique which would access this data.