In this paper we focus on the lived and affective realities of children’s engagement with language and schooling by exploring everyday understandings of spelling. We draw on co-produced film data from a research project that took place in an elementary school in the North of the UK.
In this paper we focus on the lived and affective realities of children’s engagement with language and schooling by exploring everyday understandings of spelling. We draw on co-produced data from a research project that took place in an elementary school in the North of the UK. We focus on how children (9-10yrs) perceive the implications on their lives of not being able to spell, and how they enact this understanding through their affective engagement with an assemblage of people, places and things. We explore how working with data produced with participants, about the nuanced social values that they attach to language use, and created through film-making, raises a number of methodological, theoretical, and ethical challenges. We explore the affordances that multimodal transcription and analysis provides for attending to both the socially semiotic, affective, and material elements that come together in the unfolding of action from which these films emerge. We discuss how our explorations with data visualisation, through the use of comics, provided us with ways of attending to both the embodied and material modes through which the children materialised what they felt were the embodied implications of not being able to spell. We argue that orienting towards what our participants privilege in their films, traces a complex understanding of spelling and prescriptivism that is situated in an everyday ontology. We consider multimodal transcription, not as an attempt to reduce these affective and material-social elements to the representational logic of transcription, but in an attempt to try and illustrate how transcription, drawing, and comic making, have served as heuristics with which we have explored the 'chaotic' elements of our data, through which we feel our participants materialised part of their embodied understanding of prescriptivist ideologies.
