Designs for Learning conference 24-26 August 2026

Honorary Senior Research Fellow at UCL’s Institute of Education (IOE).
Link to profile page

Research as Play: Designing Multimodal Methodologies for Research with Young Children

Research with young children can present a range of methodological challenges including involving them meaningfully in the research process and facilitating their authentic communication with researchers. This talk will share experiences of designing and conducting playful ethnographic research with young children that is participatory, giving children an active and agentive role in co-creating data, and multimodal, where communication is understood as involving multiple modes beyond language.

Framed within a multimodal social semiotic theory of communication (Kress 2009), this approach will be illustrated with examples from three projects researching children’s contemporary play practices in a digital (or, arguably, post-digital) age. Firstly, ‘Playing the Archive’, which included an ethnographic study exploring the playground play of children aged 5-11 in two London primary schools using a wide range of creative methods such as drawing, map-making, child-to-child interviews and video recordings of various kinds. Secondly, from ‘The Play Observatory’, a subsequent project studying the play experiences of children aged 0-18 throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, where participatory and multimodal methods were adapted into an entirely online research design, including surveys, online family interviews and children’s film-making. Thirdly, ‘Toddlers Tech and Talk’, a project investigating the home lives and technology use of children aged three and under, and the experience of collaboratively participating in the project’s innovative ethnographic ‘Day in the Life’ methodology, including home video recordings and a parent-child photo diary.

Together these multimodal, participatory ethnographies illustrate an orientation towards ‘research as play’. It will be argued that designing such playful methodologies allows for flexibility and surprise in the research process, supports meaningful co-creation with participants, encourages innovative experimentation with tools and technologies for data collection and reflects the messy vitality of everyday life. Framing ‘research as play’ may therefore be particularly apt for developing empowering and democratic methods with research participants, including but not limited to children. In this way, moments of multimodal meaning-making might shape research design where boundaries between research and play are blurred and blended.

Reference:
Kress, G. (2009) Multimodality: A Social Semiotic Approach to Contemporary Communication. London: Routledge

Professor of Learning and ICT, Dept. of Design, Media and Educational Science, University of Southern Denmark. Link to profile page

Designing for participation and engagement – a situated and phenomenological approach

Designing for participation and engagement is elusive – and theorizing it even more so. Who or what is participation and engagement a requirement of? The individual? The group? The disciplinary subject? The learning environment in which learners work? The educator? All of these – or none of them? (Who and what is to blame when our designs for participation and engagement fail?)

In this keynote, I discuss the different key aspects involved in designing for participation and engagement, focusing in particular on designs addressing critical global challenges such as sustainability, democracy, peace, equality, and rapid technological change. I do this from a perspective inspired by situated learning theory, socio-material accounts of human agency, and the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty. These lines of inspiration combine to a view of human being as embodied and situated, acting in and attuning to the affordances and situational demands of concrete situations, without necessarily being consciously aware of what these affordances and demands are, or indeed, of attuning to or negotiating them in agency.

From this perspective, I analyze participation and engagement as learning objectives. As they are forms of activity in context, they are inherently situated. I thus ask what is required – of learners and of contexts – to facilitate, for instance, appropriate participation to further sustainability or critically reflective Generative AI use? Which combination – or holistic unity – of competence, attitudes, sensitivity, reflectiveness, character formation (Bildung/dannelse) etc. are we aiming for learners to achieve? What is required of the context – which disciplinary, educational, social, material, technological etc. affordances and situational demands should contexts offer to support learners in achieving this holistic unity? How do we design such affordances and situational demands?
I shall present a framework of context-levels for affordances and situational demands, with the levels of domain, activity, life-setting, societal structure, and cultural practices. I discuss how the affordances and demands intermingle and co-determine one another in specific instances, and how we can take that into consideration in designing for participation and engagement in designs addressing critical global challenges.

Professor of Swedish language, School of Humanities, Education and Social Sciences, Örebro University. Link to profile page

Designs for disruption and participation: Tales from the educational landscapes of Sweden, Seychelles and South Africa

Education globally is undergoing significant transitions. These transitions are of different types – and they sometimes move in different directions – but they always affect designs for and in learning (Selander, 2022) in the various contexts. Further, it is often argued that countries like Sweden and many countries of the African continent face totally different educational challenges, which to some extent is true. However, collaboration is also called for (Borrell, 2021), for instance, with regard to the UN Sustainable Development Goals around inclusive education at all levels.

In my presentation I will focus on examples of designs for learning across the global North and South that have the potential to increase participation. More specifically, the aim is to theorize and discuss educational and semiotic designs for increased participation in contexts of digitalization and de-digitalization of schools and more broadly in higher education. Theoretically and methodologically, the presentation draws on insights from Multimodal Ethnography (Björkvall, 2012; Flewitt, 2011) – which combines ethnographic perspectives on, for instance, pedagogical practice with social semiotic perspectives on meaning-making (Kress, 2011) – as well as insights from the Designs for Learning approach (Selander, 2022). One key theoretical assumption is that widening participation and inclusion can be substantially promoted by (re)designing the genres and practices of education. The flip side of this coin is also discussed: that inclusion for many often excludes some (learners). I will here draw on examples from the project Inclusive participation in higher education: A multimodal genre perspective from Sweden and South Africa (IpSSA) which investigates semiotic principles for inclusive design of teaching and learning in Sweden and South Africa. Another theoretical assumption underpinning my presentation is that unnecessary dichotomies in education can be reduced through strategic uses of boundary objects (Star and Griesemer, 1989), connecting domains that were previously separated, such as digital and analogue domains in education. Here, I draw on the DigiPen project (Connecting digital and analog literacy: The potential of the digital pencil for text creation in school), which analyzes the use of digital pencils in processes of de-digitalization (in Sweden) and digitalization (with Seychelles as main example).

References:
Björkvall, A. (2012). ‘Artefakters betydelsepotentialer: En presentation av den sociosemiotiska etnografin som teori och metod’. In Nordisk socialsemiotik: pædagogiske, multimodale og sprogvidenskabelige landvindinger, T.Hestbæk Andersen and M.Boeriis (eds.). Odense: Syddansk Universitetsforlag.
Borrell, J. (2021). Africa and Europe: In the face of common opportunities and challenges, let's build common responses. European Union External Action. https://www.eeas.europa.eu/eeas/africa-and-europe-face-common-opportunitiesand-challenges-lets-build-common-responses_en.
Flewitt, R. (2011). ‘Bringing ethnography to a multimodal investigation of early literacy in a digital age’. Qualitative Research, 11 (3), pp.293-310.
Kress, G. (2011). ‘‘Partnerships in research’: Multimodality and ethnography’. Qualitative Research, 11 (3), pp.239-260.
Selander, S. (2022). Designs in and for learning: A theoretical framework. L. Björklund Boistrup & S. Selander (eds). Designs for Research, Teaching and Learning. A Framework for Future Education, 1-22. London: Routledge.
Star, S. and Griesemer, J. (1989). ‘Institutional Ecology, 'Translations’ and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907-39’. Social Studies of Science, 19 (3), pp.387-420.