There is a common agreement between scholars (see for example, Clark and Moss, 2005; Hall, 2008; Mavers, 2011, 2007b; Ormerod and Ivanic, 2002; Pahl, 1999b) that young children are “meaning-makers par excellence” (Wright, 2008, p.1). They are creative and resourceful meaning-makers where they represent their understandings effectively and skilfully by choosing from whatever “channels of communication” (Wright, 2010b, p. 75) are available to create complex, rich and detailed representations that are impregnated with multiple layers of meaning. Kress (1997) has shown how very young children “act multi-modally, both in the things they use, the objects they make, and in the engagement of their bodies; there is no separation of body and mind” (p. 92). For young children, “meaning is an act” (Eisner, 2013, p. 14), where the meaning of an activity lies within the activity. They use each resource, mode and medium available to create a sign and convey their meaning. By switching between different forms of representation and moving across different modes, children conceptually create compositions of texts or artefacts, as symbols of their interests and understanding where they come up with new combinations of form and a multitude of meanings and interpretations which can be regarded as their way to act in the world (Mavers, 2011, 2009b; Ormerod and Ivanic, 2002; Wright, 2011).
In their multimodal text creations, children make constant choices of how they can “bring[ing] meaning into being” (Kress, et al., 2001, p. 70). They decide which meanings to create and how those meanings are made. Their choice of media and modes depends on their availability, appropriateness and affordance to suit the need of representation and meaning-making of that particular sign (Mavers, 2011). Focusing on children’s ordinary everyday experiences, Mavers, (2011), investigated “what might be taken for granted” (p. 10), to bring out “the remarkable” (Mavers, 2011, p. 10) in the children’s everyday “unremarkable” (Mavers, 2011, p.10)
___________________________________________________________________ 41 experiences of drawing, writing and mark-making. Mavers (2009b) claims that children’s experiences are laden with serious semiotic processes and meaning- making, where, as Pahl (1999b) suggests, in their representations children “play within meanings they recognise and construct new meanings from material they already use” (p. 83).
Various researchers (Kenner, 2000; Kress, 1997; Kress and Jewitt, 2003) have explored how children use signs to create meaning. In their study, Anning and Ring (2004) claim that when children, for example, make cut outs from their drawings, magazines or greeting cards, cardboard, fabric, or from any other resources they find in the house to glue to their 2D representations, they would be using and mixing different modes in interplay with each other to simultaneously bridge, transform and create multi-layered meanings. While choosing and making use of the modes and resources available, they are also putting together their own and conventional knowledge to create a unique design, and hence form a particular meaning. Conforming to this, Mavers (2011) brought the example of Kerry who transformed a piece of tractor-feed paper into a-shaped-pierced-heart-with-an-arrow artefact. The heart, which is a conventional sign of love, is made with a mixture of her knowledge of colours, as well as conventional writing to construct and convey her meaning. Another example is provided by Kress (1997), who referred to his son’s drawing to show how he used his knowledge of cars and their ‘wheelness’ to produce an image of a car represented by circles. The process of meaning-making allows children to develop their understandings through the use of different modes, sign-making and interpretation (Ranker, 2009).
Pahl (1999b) claims that if adults watch children working at their creations and listen to their narrations that accompany and explain the meanings behind their texts, they would be able to uncover the complex and intriguing ways of how children receive, translate and transform ideas into different designs. This is supported by Kress (1997) who observed that children use and interpret things in multiple and different ways where an object is “always more than one thing” (p. 141). As Mavers (2011) advises, the process of analysing children’s meaning-making experiences is therefore a challenging task for any adult to keep track and understand. Kress (1997) argues that the real challenge lays in the fact that frequently adults fail to recognise the
___________________________________________________________________ 42 children’s perspectives and do not understand the many forms and modes children use to make meaning. Kress (2003b) maintains that while both adults and children use the same means to make and transform meaning, yet, there is a significant contrast between their different ways of meaning-making. Adults use conventional ways of meaning-making that are based on the “correct use of culturally ready-made resources” (p.154); contrastingly, children’s means for meaning-making are based on their need to realise and express what they would like to represent, which in turn are guided by their interest of the moment. Wright (2010b) suggests that in an environment which embraces children as meaning-makers, adults should be sensitive to the children’s “processes of textual production” (Chandler, 2007, p. 210) and to their “authorial intentions” (p. 198), to be able to understand their representations. This implies that adults should go beyond what is represented at the surface level and focus on how children produce a text and present their understandings and why (Hodge and Kress, 1988); hence, as Pahl (1999b) suggests, there should be an attempt to uncover the meanings, while taking into consideration the history, the context and influences behind a representation. This resonates with Wright’s (2011, 2010b) perspective, who suggests that adults should not only try to understand the children’s representation by interpreting the content drawn by the children, but should extend their analysis to the symbolic form that is being communicated. This calls for a co- construction of meanings between adults and children that enables the former to bridge the gap between the internal, subjective, meaning-making processes of the latter and the external, inter-subjective level of communication and interpretation of the readers in the community (Davis, 2005; Hall, 2008). This can only be achieved if, as Clark (2007) postulates, children’s representations become the focus of an exchange of interpretations and meaning-making between children, practitioners, families and researchers.