An interactive dialogue-oriented creative experiences – stories that evoke place: Using Visual Culture as a teaching tool

An interactive dialogue-oriented creative experiences – stories that evoke place: Using Visual Culture as a teaching tool

“With Magpie clinging to his back, he races through the scrub, past stringybark, past clumps of yellow box trees and into blueness. He runs so swiftly. It is almost as if he were flying” (Wild & Brooks, 2000, p. 6). When reading this extract from “The Fox” by MargaretWild and Ron Brooks, our imagination can transport us into a different world. Assisting the reader in exploring this imaginary world is multimodal literacy (Cope and Kalantis, 2000; Kress, 2010) where images represent visual codes on pages to capture the essence of the story. It becomes a place where colour, line, shapes and spaces bring the ideological world of the artist/author to life. The multimodal approach also involves embodiment: Œæoral, gestural and spatial modes where opportunities exist to include physical interaction and foregrounding the role of the body to create communication, collaboration and learning. As a lecturer in early childhood and primary education, I am interested in the semiotics between the visual culture, dialectology and embodiment of multimodal texts, and how multimodality can signify the interrelationships between these modes to create meaning for the reader.Of particular interest to me are the stories of place and how we negotiate our sense of location in the 21st century though unlocking these modes to create storylines. The aim of the workshop is to consider a selection of multimodal texts to unearth stories of place in the 21st century where the elements of modality join forces to create and communicate meaning. The dialogue of the workshop invites the participants to be included in deconstructing and interrogating multimodal representations in a series of visual images from picture books. Through connecting and relating to the images, the participants are encouraged to draw on vocal sound, movement and gestures to tell stories and produce a composition to make meaning of the text

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