Teaching Primary Students to Design Viewer Perspective and Interactive Meaning in Their Animation Stories

Abstract

Meaning-making is at the heart of all literate practices. Teaching students how to make meaning through creating multimodal texts is increasingly important as digital, screen-based technologies extend everyday communication practices beyond traditional print literacy to incorporate complex new semiotic knowledge. This case study, undertaken in an Australian primary school, examines the implementation of a pedagogy for teaching primary students how to design visual meaning in creating animation stories to gain more authorial control over their storytelling. Positioned within a critical gap between the potential afforded by new communication technologies, and the scarcity of empirical evidence for supporting teachers to plan and deliver quality instruction in teaching meaning-making in different modes, this research is both significant and timely.<br/> Informed by systemic functional semiotics (SFS), this study identifies a systematic theorised account of the semiotic content knowledge teachers need to teach students to effectively design interactive meaning and viewer perspective in visual storytelling, using still and moving image semiotic resources. This specialised 'content knowledge' of what to teach was combined with teacher 'pedagogic knowledge' of how to best teach this as 'pedagogical content knowledge' (PCK). Three iterative pedagogical interventions were undertaken with different iterations of upper primary classes in the school over eighteen months, with informed, explicit, and scaffolded instruction around students creating their own animation stories. Evaluation of each intervention was based on the impact on student learning of the semiotic design content taught, judged through analysis of animation stories and interviews from a small sample of student exemplars identified for each intervention (ten in total). Based on these findings, the PCK was evaluated and refined across each of the interventions.<br/> Evidence from this small case study suggests that explicitly teaching students to design interactive meaning and viewer perspective in their moving image stories can provide students with greater creative mastery over their storytelling. By the second intervention, students in the small sample examined were able to make informed and creative semiotic choices to achieve particular effects on their viewer, and to talk about why they made these design choices. In this emergent area of inquiry, the semiotic design knowledge developed through this case study contributes to the development of urgently needed pedagogic guidance for teaching primary school students how to make meaning in composing moving image texts.