Berättandets möjligheter : Multimodala berättelser och estetiska lärprocesser

Sammanfattning: The purpose of this study is to investigate meaning-making in pupils' multimodal narratives that have emerged in aesthetic learning processes. To, with the support of ethnographic methods and theories of narrative and multimodality, study the resources and strategies used by the pupils. The study also examines how teachers and educators make use of aesthetic learning processes and multimodal narrative in practice-based reality. The empirical material is based on four cultural and narrator projects that have been conducted in a collaboration between nine-year compulsory schools and Kulturskolan (School of Culture) in a municipality in northern Sweden. The projects included pupils from the preschool level up to and including 5th grade in the compulsory school level. These projects were monitored for a total of three semesters. The pervading goal in all projects was to stimulate language development and language use with the help of imagination and creativity, where the pupils' own creation was the key focus. The empirical material consists of observations, log book entries and interviews with teachers, educators and pupils, as well as the pupils' own pictures and texts. The results show that the pupils exemplify from the fictional world. Although they do not directly say that they draw inspiration from computer, television and film media, this is made visible in and embodies their narratives. The pupils' multimodal narratives show that they create meaning by mixing fiction with a world recognisable to them, where fictional characters live a life that they can identify with. The meaning-making strategies that emerge in the pupils' narratives are: identification, gender stereotypes, humour, structures from the horror and fairy-tale genres and remediation. In the interviews with the teachers it is noted that the use of narrative has declined in teaching. Reasons cited include a lack of time and the stress of everyday life, as well as the individualisation which has led to a reduction in the collaboration between pupils and thus the use of narrative. The teachers, however, expressed great enthusiasm for providing pupils with the tools to develop different narrative forms, a way to create meaningful contexts for the pupils.