Kate Cowan

In this chapter we sketch some features of the present landscape of communication; we provide some examples of children's meaning-making; we attempt to show how the principles of their meaning-making become evident. Our aim is to understand children's principles of meaning-making as a means for insight into their approach to and sense of writing.

This is an English version of a chapter published in a Danish volume:

Kress, G., & Cowan, K. (2017). From making meaning to meaning-making with writing: Reflecting on four- year-olds at play / Fra at skabe mening til meningsskabelse med skrivning: Refleksioner over børns leg. In D. Østergren-Olsen & K. Friis Larsen (Eds.), Literacy and Learning in Primary School / Literacy og læringsmål I indskolingen. Copenhagen: Dafolo.

This thesis considers child-initiated play from a multimodal social semiotic perspective, giving close attention to the ways in which children collaboratively make meaning in play in a multitude of ways. Such a perspective resists instrumental, developmental perspectives on play, and comes at a time when play-based approaches are in tension with increasingly formalised learning agendas and changes to early years assessment. In order to explore the multimodality of child-initiated play, apt theories and research methods are necessary for attending to the ways children make meaning in multiple modes. The study consists of video-based observations of child-initiated play collected through an ethnographic, teacher-research case study carried out in a nursery school in England. A particular challenge in multimodal research is developing forms of transcription which account for multiple modes in fine-grained detail, with the conventions developed for transcribing language proving insuffic...

Young children’s everyday lives are increasingly permeated by an array of digital tools that are rapidly changing the forms in which they make meaning. Yet the use of digital media in early childhood education is much disputed, with debates often polarised between strongly negative rejections and unquestioning positive endorsements. Alternative perspectives are necessary in order to recognise the significance of digital media in young children’s lives and to develop respectful pedagogies which support meaning making in multiple forms. This article highlights practice with digital tools in three Stockholm preschools influenced by the Reggio Emilia approach to early childhood education. The settings used the Reggio Emilia concept of ‘the hundred languages of children’ as a foundation for their use of digital media, resulting in an approach which embraced and embedded digital tools in everyday practice alongside other materials. The insights from the preschools demonstrate ways in whic...

This article takes as its starting point a recognition of play as meaning-making, and the playground as a rich and dynamic ‘meaning-makerspace’ where children draw moment-to-moment, rapidly and readily on the multiple resources available to them to make signs of their interest evident. These resources are drawn from their own lifeworlds, folkloric and site-specific imagination, transmitted game forms from the past, and their pleasure and affective response to contemporary media. The playground is, therefore, a dynamic site for making and re-making, reflecting the concept of ‘makerspace as mindset’, where creative, collaborative meaning-making occurs ceaselessly in a range of modes. To illustrate this position, we share findings from ‘Playing the Archive’, an ‘Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council’ funded project exploring archives, spaces and technologies of play. Building upon the Iona and Peter Opie Archive of play from the 1950s–1960s, the project involved ethnograph...

Young children’s play is highly multimodal, with gesture, gaze, movement and speech often combined simultaneously in collaborative meaning-making. This article argues for a multimodal social semiotic per- spective on play, recognising that this requires representation of data that brings multimodal elements into careful consideration. In this article, multimodal transcription is used to examine a video recording of three and four-year-old children playing a chasing game in an English nursery school. Map-like transcripts, including an animated transcript, are used to document an instance of their play, drawing particular attention to placement in space over time. Whilst such moments of play may at  rst appear  eeting and chaotic, multimodal transcription reveals the communicative, creative and agentive capacities of young children in a multitude of forms. The transcripts highlight and make evident the ways in which roles and rules of play are carefully negotiated moment-by-moment in multiple modes. In this way, map-like multimodal transcripts are presented as devices to highlight meaning-making where it may not normally be looked for, seen or recognised.

The aim of this paper is to critically review how social semiotics has contributed to the study of reading and to develop an agenda for further research. We consider the theoretical and methodological resources that social semiotics has developed to account for multimodal text in the contemporary semiotic landscape, and explore how they can be used to teach critical reading skills to young people to support their participation in different social domains. We reflect on the possibilities and limitations of different analytical frameworks, highlighting barriers and possibilities for advancing social semiotic scholarship on reading and beyond. We end with a sketch of a new research agenda for social semiotics, in the light of technological change and its implications for reading.

Children's playworlds are a complex interweaving of modes, with the border areas between the digital and non-digital often becoming increasingly blurred. Growing in popularity and prevalence, multimodal technologies blending digital and non-digital elements present novel opportunities for designers of toys and play-spaces as well as being of interest to researchers of young children's contemporary play and learning. Opened in Denmark in September 2017, LEGO House defines itself as the 'Home of the Brick', a public attraction aiming to support play, creativity and learning through multiple interactive LEGO experiences spanning digital and non-digital forms. Offering a rich context for considering multimodal perspectives on contemporary play, this article reports on a range of multimodal technologies featured in LEGO House, including digital cameras, scanners, and interactive tables used in combination with traditional LEGO bricks. Three LEGO House experiences are considered from a multimodal social semiotic perspective, focusing on the affordances of multimodal technologies for play, and the process of transduction across modes, in order to explore the liminal border-areas where digital and non-digital play are increasingly mixed. This article proposes that LEGO House presents an innovative 'third space' that creates opportunities for playful interaction with multimodal technologies. LEGO House can be seen as part of a growing recognition of the power of play, both in its own right and in relation to learning, acknowledging that meaning-making happens in informal times and places that are not positioned as direct acts of teaching. Furthermore, it is suggested that multimodal technologies embedded into the play-space expand opportunities for learning in new ways, whilst highlighting that movement between digital and non-digital forms always entails both gains and losses: A matter which needs to be explored. Highlighting the opportunities for meaning-making in informal, play-based settings such as LEGO House therefore has the potential to recognise and give value to playful meaning-making with multimodal technologies which may otherwise be taken for granted or go unnoticed. In this way, experiences such as those found in LEGO House can contribute towards conceptualisations of learning which support children to develop the playfully creative skills and knowledge required for the digital age.

Young children's everyday lives are increasingly permeated by an array of digital tools that are rapidly changing the forms in which they make meaning. Yet the use of digital media in early childhood education is much disputed, with debates often polarised between strongly negative rejections and unquestioning positive endorsements. Alternative perspectives are necessary in order to recognise the significance of digital media in young children's lives and to develop respectful pedagogies which support meaning making in multiple forms. This article highlights practice with digital tools in three Stockholm preschools influenced by the Reggio Emilia approach to early childhood education. The settings used the Reggio Emilia concept of 'the hundred languages of children' as a foundation for their use of digital media, resulting in an approach which embraced and embedded digital tools in everyday practice alongside other materials. The insights from the preschools demonstrate ways in which Sweden is fostering an early childhood pedagogy that critically evaluates the affordances of digital tools whilst considering their limitations and relationships with other materials. In this way, a multimodal approach to young children's digital meaning making is being developed, prompting consideration of the possibilities for similar approaches to digital literacy beyond Sweden and beyond early childhood education.

Video is an increasingly popular data collection tool for those undertaking social research, offering a temporal, sequential, fine-grained record which is durable, malleable and sharable. These characteristics make video a valuable resource for researching Early Years classrooms, particularly with regard to the study of children’s interaction in multiple modes, which might include gaze, facial expression and movement in addition to language. Collecting video and carrying out multimodal analysis presents both possibilities and challenges, not least because multimodal methodologies are still in relative infancy. One particular challenge is developing forms of multimodal transcription. This paper seeks to reflexively explore the effect of applying different transcription conventions to the same section of video to investigate how two children interact at a computer in an Early Years classroom. It is suggested that the modes to which the researcher attends, and how these are (re)presented in transcripts, shape the analytical and rhetorical interpretations of children’s interaction, with multimodal transcription potentially enabling particular insights into patterns within and between modes as they are orchestrated in interaction.

• Play is an important part of children’s lives. Yet adults find defining and understanding play a challenge. It has received considerable attention from a number of perspectives over time, including philosophy, psychology, biology, education and anthropology.
• This narrative literature review, commissioned by the Digital Futures Commission, considers different theories and insights about the nature of play and asks how and why play matters for children aged from birth to 17.
• The review focuses particularly on the concept of free play, where children have a high degree of choice and control. Free play is valued particularly for its role in children’s cognitive, social, emotional and physical development, for fostering creativity, imagination and problem-solving skills, for education and learning, and for supporting health and wellbeing.
• Despite the evident benefits, play’s significance often remains overlooked. Children’s right to play has been considered a ‘forgotten right’, often constrained by factors such as negative adult attitudes to play, lack of play spaces and limited time for play.
• There are both synergies and tensions between children’s own views on what free play is and why it matters to them, and the values of adult-directed play, or free play ‘put to use’ by adults, for instance in education, therapy or tied to social initiatives relating to physical and mental health.
• The review identifies prototypical qualities of free play, rooted in children’s experiences and multidisciplinary research on the value of play for children. Recognising that these are not necessarily exhaustive, absolute or universal, it concludes that these qualities encompass:
• Intrinsically motivated
• Voluntary
• Open-ended structure
• Imaginative
• Stimulating
• Social
• Emotional resonance
• Diversity of forms
These important qualities of free play can guide an agenda for providing and nurturing play, including play in a digital world.

Observations of play in early childhood education have typically been documented in paper-based formats (e.g. scrapbooks, written notes, printed photographs) as part of assessment practices. However, there is a growing trend in early childhood education towards using commercial software to record learning in digital formats, where video, audio, photographs and writing can be combined. These multi-media forms of ‘digital documentation’ offer new possibilities to recognise, represent and value children’s multiple signs of learning in new ways, and to share these narratives with parents and children. Yet there is little research-based guidance on digital documentation, so early education assessment practices run the risk of being guided by commercial drivers rather than by child-centred learning theories.

In this study, we worked with educators to develop an early childhood pedagogy of observation, documentation and assessment that brings Froebelian principles of the ‘uniqueness of every child’s capacity and potential’ and ‘holistic nature of development’ to documentation practices in contemporary early years settings. Fieldwork included case studies of children aged 3-5 years living with disadvantage and/or in the early stages of learning English in three diverse multicultural early years settings in London. The study design was framed by a multimodal social semiotic perspective on learning (Kress 2010) and an ethnographic approach to social science enquiry. Data generation included video recordings, examples of documentation of children’s learning, interviews with educators, parent questionnaires and video-prompted discussions with children. Thematic and fine- grained multimodal analysis of video extracts resulted in rich findings regarding the opportunities and constraints of different approaches used by the participating settings in their observation and documentation of young children’s learning.

This report summarises my DigiLitEY-funded research visit to the University of Stockholm and Swedish preschools. It considers potentials and challenges within the concept of 'digital languages' through discussions with leading academics working in the field of digital technologies, multimodality and Reggio Emilia. Meetings and workshops with the Stockholm Reggio Emilia Institute highlighted the strong conceptual foundation for digital technologies within a 'hundred languages' approach and the ongoing support and training being offered to educators. These knowledge exchange activities were enhanced by visits to three Reggio-inspired Swedish preschool settings to observe and discuss their use of digital technologies in practice. The preschool visits revealed a multitude of ways in which educators are embedding digital technologies in their everyday practice and using the digital in combination with traditional forms. The teachers I encountered were enthusiastic about new possibilities of digital technologies, saw them as additional forms for exploration and meaning-making, used them in combination with non-digital materials and were thoughtful and articulate about their potentials and constraints. The Reggio Emilia concept of children's 'hundred languages' seemed to provide a rich foundation for using digital technologies to support young children's multimodal meaning-making. In Stockholm this was underpinned by a broad, Reggio-inspired, play-centred curriculum to the age of 6, teacher training which introduces the concept of 'multimodality', ongoing professional development opportunities, school networks and research collaborations focusing specifically on the digital.