This article provides an overview of the results of our project "The Kindergarten Room: A Multimodal Pedagogical Text". Our major initiative was to investigate what the multimodal texts in kindergarten represent and the extent to which they reflect and provide attributions to the children's activities. In addition, we wanted to investigate whether kindergarten walls and floors can be called 'pedagogical texts', and the extent to which texts on walls and floors establish a particular text culture. The study is being carried out in Norway. Our analytical approach is situated within the theoretical framework of Michael Halliday's social semiotics and systemic functional linguistics. A kindergarten room is a composite design that spatially utilises the co-deployment of various semiotic resources, such as architecture, language and visual images, and is thus viewed as a multimodal text. Our multimodal analysis is primarily based on the work of Kress and van Leeuwen. Our research is a qualitative study of three kindergartens. The material consists of video observations, photographs, field notes, documents and interviews with teachers and children. We believe that our analysis contributes to the body of knowledge regarding texts in the kindergarten room, the purpose of these texts, and thus the factors that influence the composition of kindergarten rooms.
We analysed a set of medical certificates to investigate how GPs portray patients who seek disability benefits in Norway, focusing on patient centredness, agency and involvement. We performed a qualitative linguistic analysis of 33 medical certificates collected throughout Norway that were strategically selected based on the patients' sex, age and diagnosis. We found that patients were represented as passive carriers of symptoms, in whom agency was low, failed, conditional or non-existing, or as passive objects of the actions of impersonalised others. Conversely, symptoms were foregrounded as independent and powerful actors. The patient's experience of illness was sometimes reported, but the perspective of the GP tended to be doctor oriented, rather than patient centred. The policy of the social services, which emphasises patient involvement, patient centredness and work, rather than social benefits, was almost completely absent from these medical certificates. If medical certificates are to be a valid basis for decisions within the social services, we suggest that doctor paternalism in these documents must give way to considering the patient as an involved and co-responsible individual in the processes of disability assessment.
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