Multimodal communication and identities options in an intergenerational art class

Abstract

This case study of multimodal pedagogies within an intergenerational (IG) art class addresses questions about the learning opportunities that were created therein and what the fixing of participants' ideas within a semiotic chain said about their facility with communicative modes and media, interests, and identity options. Key findings include: when compared to the adults' work, the children's use of media was more elaborate, experimental, and less inhibited and their designs more complex; the content of the children's communication was multifaceted, and future-looking while some of the adults' were constrained by limited identity options related to their position in the life course; and the class's multimodal pedagogies provided occasion for the exploration of modes and media with support for working through key communicational decisions. My life as a child in an Italian-Canadian family was defined by intergenerational (IG) relationships where there was no great differentiation between immediate and extended family members. People lived intergenerationally with grandparents sometimes being primary caregivers and children in turn learning about responsibility to family. Today, however, trends common to many industrialized societies such as geographic dispersal and the increase in the use of out-of-home care for children (McCain and Mustard, 1999) and older adults (Jarrott and Bruno, 2007) have reduced IG opportunities. Much can be lost when people of different generations are segregated. Within the literacy literature alone, children have been found to develop important literacy practices through IG interactions (e.g. Gregory et al., 2004) which contribute to their communication and identity options. In North America in the early 1960s in response to the loss of familial IG opportunities, systematically planned IG programs emerged (Larkin and Newman, 1997). IG learning programs, an offshoot of general IG programs, cropped up shortly thereafter and focused specifically on providing learning opportunities within IG contexts. Benefits of IG learning programs include increased appreciation for diversity (Jarrott and Bruno

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