Spatial and embodied theoretical turns provide an imperative for collecting multimodal data, but video recording may be perceived as invasive in school settings. In this study, screen recordings allowed for multimodal analysis of translingual writing, while also providing participants with control in sharing data. Ethical and analytical implications are discussed.
Research on translingual communication increasingly emphasizes embodied, spatial, and distributed dimensions (Canagarajah, 2018; Kusters et al., 2017; Li Wei, 2018). A methodological implication of this theoretical development is the need to gather multimodal data such as video, in which connections between language and other semiotic resources become visible and thus available for analysis. However, video recording can be perceived as more invasive than many other forms of data collection, and in classroom studies, opportunities may be constrained by students’ variable willingness to be appear on video. Navigating such concerns becomes all the more complex when relating to regulatory regimes like the General Data Protection Regulation. This presentation reports on a linguistic ethnography of in-school translingual writing practices, where screen recordings were adopted as a means of balancing the analytical advantages of multimodal data with ethical imperatives to respect varying degrees of participation among students. In each of five classrooms, up to three students reserved themselves completely from participation, while other students declined recording while consenting to other forms of participation, and still others consented to video- and screen recording. The researcher found that, in combination with other data sources such as field notes, texts, selected audio recordings, and interviews, screen recordings provided opportunities for analyzing translingual writing as alignment of environmental resources (Canagarajah, 2013) where video recording was not possible, while also providing participating students with significant ongoing control in making decisions about how to share data. The presentation concludes that an “ethics of care” (Edwards & Mauthner, 2012) will necessarily influence which forms of data gain prominence in linguistic ethnographies, and this may in turn influence the theories of language and communication that we construct.
