Mapping multimodal interaction in classroom spaces: Views enabled through the geosemiotic

Multimodal interaction analysis has provided insight into the diverse ways plurilingual students engage in science practices and meaning-making. In this presentation, we share an approach to exploring the embodied, material ways students interact in and through science by incorporating an analytical approach that enables views of space and place. Through multimodal interaction analysis, coupled with geosemiotic analysis of space and place, we explored the structures that allowed for student engagement in science practices, grounded in situated views of the multimodal ensembles formed through interactions in space and time. Contextualized views on how semiotic resource were mobilized by whom, when, and subsequent tracings of how semiotic ensembles travel (or not) among spaces of science engagement will be shared. We show how diverse ensembles of semiotic resources were mobilized by students and teachers through open-ended science explorations of living organisms in an early-childhood multilingual classroom, in ways that were anchored in space and time. With this work we step towards expanded notions of science literacy in ways that are multimodal, embodied, and situated. Implications for primary science teaching, along with a pointed discussion of how integrating geosemiotic explorations of space adds insights into critical questions of semiotic resource availability, uptake, and mobilization during science meaning-making will be discussed.