Multimodal Literacies and Emerging Genres

8. Writing, Visualizing, and Research Reports

183 C h a pte r 8 Writing, Visualizing, and Research Reports Penny Kinnear This chapter examines what happens when an instructor attempts to correlate two theoretical frameworks to conceptualize and practice instructional goals and activities in an undergraduate research and writing class. Literacy and writing have been theorized as multimodal design activities by the New London Group (Cope and Kalantzis 2000). Language and other signs were theorized as mediational means in learning by Lev Vygotsky and subsequent sociocultural theorists. Together these ideas could inform the development of a course to take advantage of signs and tools in addition to text to conduct and present research. This chapter focuses on a visualization activity used in a class to facilitate data analysis and research conceptualization (fig. 8.1). Vygotsky (1978) argued that human experience is always mediated. It may be mediated by signs, tools, or experiences. Signs and tools are developed and produced by people. These can be both material and symbolic. The symbolic tools include language, symbol systems such as numbers, musical notation, formal aesthetic principles, and various writing systems 184  Penny Kinnear Figure 8.1. Consumer savvy: developing brochures and online campaigns in a professional writing research course. and images. With regard to reading and writing, material tools can include various writing implements, computers, brushes, inks, paper, and books. This mediated activity can be the basis of learning. It is imperative to understand mediation and mediational means, as these are the terms through which I theorize writing. According to Alex Kozulin (1996, 105), Vygotsky, in his 1978 treatise “The Prehistory of Written Language,” “brought together such seemingly disparate phenomena as gesture, symbolic play, and children’s drawing and writing in an attempt to show that they all are but steps in the process of mastering symbolism and conventionalism, which are essential for the development of written language.” The child’s or learner’s experiences and thoughts thus are mediated by all of these material and symbolic tools. This process intertwines with the concept of Tätigkeit, or socially meaningful activity where symbol systems and their conventions “are imposed on an individual’s behavior, shaping it, and reconstructing it along the lines of the sociocultural matrix. The concept of activity thus was perceived as an actualization of culture in individual behavior, embodied in the symbolic function of gesture, play, and speech systems” (Kozulin 1996, 106). Writing, Visualizing, and Research Reports  185 The actions of writing and speaking engages an individual in the activity of expressing thoughts. According to Vygotsky (1986 [1934], 251), this is not merely a transfer of completed expressions from the mind to an externally expressed form—oral or written—but rather “in his mind the whole thought is present at once, but in speech [or writing] it has to be developed shedding a shower of words. Precisely because thought does not have its automatic counterpart in words, the transition from thought to word leads through meaning. . . . thought does not express itself in words, but rather realizes itself in them.” Most people have had the experience of searching for words to express something that seems so clear “in their heads.” The language(s) an individual has access to mediates the meaning he or she attempts to make and it is only in this mediated process that the thought is realized, that the meaning is made. That meaning takes a form in words, sentences, a discourse, or in a visual grammar and syntax . It becomes concrete and public, an artifact. One of the goals of the course was to have students understand that research meant creating new meanings from the data which they collected and that using language in their research journals, in their note taking, in their analysis notes, created those meanings not just recorded a reformulation of someone else’s meanings/words. The mediational means used in this process is also a product, an artifact of social interactions. Language is a systematic, codified artifact of a culture that is continually being reshaped and reformed. Mikail Bakhtin (1981, 277) described this eloquently when he wrote: “The way in which the word conceptualizes its object is a complex act—all objects, open to dispute and overlain as they are with qualifications, are from one side highlighted while from the other side dimmed by heteroglot social opinion , by an alien word about them. And into this complex play of light and shadows the word enters—it becomes saturated...