Texts as artefacts
120
Texts as artefacts crossing sites:
map making at home and school
Kate Pahl
Abstract
This article compares a child’s drawings at home with
a child’s drawings at school. The drawings were of
maps, which had been a school topic. As part of a
longitudinal study looking at children’s text making
at home and at school three particular homes were
focused on for eighteen months. This article looks at
one home – that of a six year old Turkish boy who
lives with his mother and brother. The case study
illustrates how children can take something learned at
school and transform it at home. The article starts
with discussing the text created in the home, then
compares this to texts created at school. The point is
made that children can activate meaning in a different
way at home than at school. While this is one case
study, it suggests that transforming artefacts across
sites may be something children do that often goes
undocumented.
cases, I was able to visit the classrooms of the child
I was visiting at home, in other cases this was not
possible. The material presented here, a little boy’s
map, included texts from his classroom. I could then
alternate between classroom, home and back again,
and build up a rich picture of how one child made
meaning in different settings. I could then analyse the
process of the creation of one artefact, the map, across
different sites. I was interested in this data because it
threw up questions about where children develop
their meanings, and also how they represent meanings anew, how they transform meaning. The data
enabled me to place similar texts, both maps, made
at home and at school side by side, and see the
difference between the texts. This gave me a starting
point for thinking about the differences in children’s
meaning making at home and at school.
The Map at Home
Introduction
Long term research within homes is still a developing
field. Despite some excellent studies (Gregory and
Williams 2000, Heath 1983) there are still unanswered
questions as to what children make of the pedagogic
tools made available to them through school. Are they
elaborated on at home, or are they silently absorbed,
to be re-integrated once school starts the next day?
Meaning making at home, whether it takes the form
of drawings of favourite Pokemon creatures, made
up stories, or model aeroplanes, is often invisible to
teachers, and remains unexplored.
The data here comes from a longitudinal research
study looking at how three boys, aged 6–7 developed
meanings within their homes. By ‘meanings’ I mean
created texts such as drawings and models, wrote
stories, played games such as Super Mario and
Pokemon, and any other activity which could be
observed. To record the children’s activities I used a
tape recorder on occasion, took fieldnotes every time
I visited, which was every two weeks, asked the boys
to take photographs using a disposable camera, and
I collected and photocopied the children’s drawings
and models.
I also visited classrooms, in order to understand
children’s meaning making within classrooms. In some
I had been visiting Fatih’s household for about a year.
One late December evening I walked in and sat down.
I had brought a tape recorder, and, unusually for the
household, was able to use it, having gained permission from Fatih’s mother, Elif. (All names are
pseudonyms). Elif was originally from central Turkey,
and came over when she was 14 to the UK. The father
did not live with the family. Elif has two sons, Hanif, 9
and Fatih, 6. Fatih had been excluded on a regular
basis from his school and was seen by the school as
both disruptive and in need of help. The family had
been re-housed about two years previously due to
domestic violence, and the flat they now lived in was
situated in North London, but not in a predominately
Turkish area. It stood overlooking a busy road, newly
built. Previous visits to the household had recorded
a period of playing Super Mario on the Play Station.
Fatih began the session by presenting a sheaf of drawings, one of which was the map. Careful inspection of
the map drawing [Fig 1] with the map tape reveals the
text to be a rich multi layered artefact.
I recorded Fatih’s explanation to me of the map text.
The following transcript from the tape should be
‘read’ together with the map text. The talk situates the
map text and vice versa. As he spoke, Fatih’s finger
moved around the piece of paper he held in his hand.
Thus many of the words used to describe the map
# UKRA 2001. Published by Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Rd, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
READING literacy and language
November 2001
121
Kate
Fatih
Kate
Fatih
Kate
Elif
Kate
Fatih
Kate
Fatih
Figure 1.
(this is, here, there) have a deictic quality – they
assume the listener and subsequently the reader will
know what Fatih is talking about. Here, we have to recreate the experience of listening to Fatih and watching him move his finger around his map. I switched
on the tape in response to Fatih bringing me the sheet
of paper which was the map drawing.
Map tape
(Note: I underline words which were emphasized or
stressed
. . . indicates pauses)
Fatih It’s my . . . it’s my house,
Kate It’s my house and what else?
Fatih This is the . . . this is the . . . door . . . the the outside
door . . . to come inside and this is my room . . . and
these Xs are . . . if you fi- if you have to look look
up . . . look through these X’s . . . these two are my
bed and that’s the road and we have to check under
the . . . carpet road . . . and . . . if we see something
there we will be the champion and we go out . . . if
there’s nothing there . . . we go there and that’s the
toilet . . . and that’s the back of the toilet . . . and
there’s a X there. . .there’s nothing in there and you
go out and that’s the sink and you go like that and
you go in here my mum’s room, and you check in
# UKRA 2001
the fringe and there . . . uh if there’s nothing you lift
up the . . . uh fr. . . you lift up the pillows and there’s
nothing in there you go out and you look at the
kitchen (coughs) you look through the carpet . . .
and there’s nothing in there you look here . . .
nothing in there and look here . . . something in there
and . . . you get . . . and you will be the champion.
so it’s like Super Mario . . . is it like Super Mario?
No . . .
No it’s not like Super Mario
a map . . .
a map . . . it’s brilliant.
a game
a game . . . a game
I just crunch it up like that (sound of crunching)
Why did you crunch it up? (laughs)
‘Cos I . . . I ‘cos I didn’t want it new . . .
Fatih begins with a naming clause: ‘It’s my house’. He
sees his environment as a house and not as a flat. The
child confers his own name upon his space. He then
proceeds to guide me through the flat, with the
sentence: ‘This is the door . . . the outside door . . . you come
inside . . . and this is my room’. Fatih indicated the
smaller of the two rooms on the left where he has a
carpet with a road depicted on it, like a toy train track.
Fatih then added a new dimension to the talk with the
introduction of the ‘Xs:‘. . . and this is my room . . . and
these Xs are . . . if you fi . . . if you have to look look up . . .
look through these Xs . . .’ Fatih has drawn two Xs on the
map which are referred to in the oral description. He
has used the Xs as points where you have to look –
like in the original ‘treasure map’ genre the Xs operate
as a sign that something is there. (‘X marks the spot’).
He switches half way through this excerpt from ‘fi’ –
‘find’ to ‘look’ – so that the listener is clear the process
is one of searching. By drawing on the ‘treasure map’
genre Fatih is revealing an understanding of how the
genre of ‘treasure map’ operates while deploying it in
the context of his own flat at home. Fatih also combines this with an enactment of the hypothetical
person seeking the treasure in his bedroom, ‘These two
are my bed and that’s the road you have to check under the
carpet road. . .’ Careful inspection of the map shows at
the bottom left hand in the smaller, lower room, two
Xs side by side with two parallel lines leading from
them (the carpet road). Fatih sees the whole space as a
place of potential – where something may be found.
The concept of the journey and getting to something
lies behind this narrative. There is also the element
of playing a game as here, ‘and . . . if we see something
there we will be the champion and you go out . . . if there’s
nothing there we go there and that’s the toilet and that’s
the back of the toilet . . .’ . The right hand room on the
bottom of the drawing has a round shape with a
round shape above it (the toilet) and a small square
shape with an X in it, (the sink). Fatih takes us on a
journey round his flat and finally to the kitchen and,
‘you look here. . .something in there and you get. . .and you
will be the champion’. It is not clear what the ‘something’ is but the status is clear – you are the champion.
Texts as artefacts
122
The map when presented to me was in a sorry state –
a mass of wrinkles which the photocopy does not
represent. This crunched up state was commented
upon by Fatih: ‘I just crunched it up like that’ and when
I asked him why he said, ‘Because I didn’t want it new’.
Fatih has worked out that generally maps, especially
treasure maps, are old. The use of the sign ‘crumpled’
to indicate ‘old’ is a very complex idea. The map is
also a multi authored text – the writing at the top of
the map –‘Finish’ and Eexit’ comes from his brother –
Hanif, who is nine, as does the bubble writing below
the inscription, ‘MAP’. The varying use of ‘you’ and
‘we’ in the map tape also indicates that the game was
played jointly by the brothers, and the inclusive ‘we’
suggests that they play it together. However, the
drawing and the accompanying oral text on tape, is
Fatih’s. Subsequent questions about the map elicited
further information from the two brothers. Fatih said,
when I asked him about why he had scrunched up the
map, ‘To not make it new. I don’t want it new’. Hanif
explained this in more detail ‘You have to get proper
old ones to know when to find proper gold and all that’.
When I asked about what this object was Fatih was
unequivocal – it’s ‘a map’. I asked about the map’s
origin. Hanif said, ‘I done one first then he done one. I just
thought of doing a map.’ His mother, Elif, called it ‘a
game’. When I asked about how the map was used,
Fatih responded, ‘You have to look around the rooms and
Figure 2.
# UKRA 2001
stuff’. Like Ben in Barrs’ ‘Maps of Play’ (1988) Fatih is
describing action which he has drawn – the map
represents movement, and in Fatih’s case, it represents a game.
The map at school
When I went into Fatih’s classroom after he had
shown me the map I looked through his work and
asked the teacher what she had been doing with the
class. She said they had been looking at maps. In one
of his files – ‘Humanities’ – I found a document by
Fatih called ‘A Map of the Park’ (Fig 2).
This showed a depiction of a tree and some bushes,
roughly drawn and represented pictorially. The
teacher said the whole class had done maps as a
topic two weeks before Fatih had done his home map.
They had visited a local park and had been asked to
draw what they saw. The teacher commented that the
children had responded in very different ways, and
had drawn what they had been interested in. Fig 3
shows Amin, a classmate’s, version of the same map.
The pictures have similarities, being observed drawings of a park with bushes and some swings. Fatih
has foregrounded trees and bushes and a climbing
frame.
Figure 3.
READING literacy and language
November 2001
Figure 4.
Fatih also drew topographical maps at school. Figure
4 and Figure 5 by Fatih and Demi respectively, show
a topographic account of a road from Red Riding
Hood’s house to granny’s house.
Figure 6 is a drawing done by Fatih at school, but
included within the drawing, which is quartered by a
ruler, are some depictions of Fatih’s home, such as the
drawing of the toilet which can be recognized in the
home map.
Fatih has drawn upon the concepts taken from the
school maps when he drew his home map, but has
enriched it, adding the topographic knowledge, the
crosses, and the detailed representation of his flat. He
had also made the map into a sort of game, using the
Xs. I also noticed that Fatih played a lot of games at
school, including snakes and ladders and Ludo. With
the ‘treasure map’ concept supplied by Hanif, the
drawings of his home together with the aerial road
map from school, Fatih has produced the home
treasure map. It stands as a hybrid, complex text,
drawing on a number of different multi modal
practices. When taken together with Fatih’s description of how to play the map, the map becomes
activated as a game.
123
Figure 5.
in the home are classified and his depiction of rooms
as separate reflects the family’s clear demarcation of
space in the home. He has also set up some visual
conventions – the map moves from bottom to top
where the finish is, and from one side to another in
the search for the hidden treasure. Note that Fatih has
not actually used the word ‘treasure’ and leaves a gap
where he says what you find – you simply are ‘the
champion’. The map is activated by the fact that the
brothers actually ‘play’ the map – in further conversations this was borne out by their mother.
The school maps by contrast, are differently rich in
resources. They represent the concept ‘map’ in two
different ways – the map of the park operates as a
map which uses pictures to identify where objects are
whereas the Red Riding Hood map has a more aerial
quality. Both the map of the park and the Red Riding
Hood maps draw on knowledge learned in the
classroom. Fatih’s map of the park has some things
in common with another child, Amin’s, map in layout
and structure. The children have responded to the
Theoretical insights
By placing the school maps together with the home
drawing side by side, the richness of the map made at
home is apparent. The child has drawn on an
immense amount of ‘cultural capital’ (Bourdieu
1977) in order to create the object. He has drawn on
the treasure map genre, the game genre, the Super
Mario journey genre, rhetoric of games on television
(the champion) as well as an understanding of the
topography of his home, and where things are in
the home. He has responded to the way the objects
# UKRA 2001
Figure 6.
Texts as artefacts
124
task and created maps using the resources available to
them. They have ‘seen’ the park and each produced
their own version of the park. The texts can be placed
within the pedagogical structure which created them.
However, unknown to the school the school maps
created another version of ‘map’: the home map. The
home map can be played as a game or recounted as a
journey. It is a transformative artefact.
Placing the map inside the semiotic space acknowledges that every new sign is a transformation,
‘sign making is always transformative; it is always
the making of a new sign, always changing both
the shape of the resources and the disposition of
the individual human subject.’ (Kress et. al. 2000)
Kress here points to a vital part of what I can see
within Fatih’s map – that the making of the sign remakes Fatih’s disposition, his subjectivity, and it also
changes the shape of the resources, the map. It is a
fundamentally fluid moment in the transformation of
the resources and of his subjectivity. Fatih positions
himself in relation to the game both as the person who
set the game up and the player of the game. The game
is both made by him and consumed by him. It is in
that sense how he transforms himself – through the
making and the playing of the game.
By paying attention to the visual together with the
linguistic aspects the sign is activated. It becomes not
static, reified, but a space for potential, for transformation. By placing the map as a visual image alongside
the taped narrative of the child, the artefact becomes a
multi modal object that combines language – in – use ,
discourse, (the invocation of the language of games
and maps) with sign making (the cross, the drawn
carpet, the representation of the toilet). The home map
contains elements of the maps made at school, which
betray its status as an inter-textual object,
‘Children’s semiotic acts, indeed all semiotic acts,
should be seen as part of an intertextual chain,
as stages in an ongoing dialogic process,’ (van
Leeuwen 1997)
By seeing the process of the map making from the
map making at school to games playing at school, to
drawing the map and playing the map game at home,
as part of an inter textual chain, linked, but uniquely
different, the complex differences emerge. The choices
Fatih has made along the way become key moments
which reveal the way he has transformed his resources.
The traces of the choices – back from the crosses to the
carpet road, give us the history of the sign. Watching
the artefact move across sites and then be re-activated
at home gives us a sense of where the child has taken
on a sign, and represented it anew, transformed it.
Fatih has taken a road along the networks of meaning
– from the map as road (Red Riding Hood) to the map
as depiction of parts (the park map, the house draw# UKRA 2001
ing) to the map as game or topography (the home
map). In this map the spoken word and the visual text
‘speak’ together, and can be analyzed in conjunction
with each other.
Conclusion
Fatih’s map making can be understood within a
context which includes representational resources
taken from school (map making, games) home (games
playing, Supermario, treasure map stories) and is a
multi modal artefact, involving a drawing, a piece of
narrative and an action. However, there are imbalances of power across the sites where his meaning
making is deployed. Fatih at that time was having
difficulties with his behaviour at school. His home
map contains a wider use of representational resources in that several types of activity – treasure map
and game playing, are implied. The school maps, ‘A
Map of the Park’ and ‘Red Riding Hood’ by contrast
relate to the specific task of teaching ‘map making’.
With both texts the children simply engage with the
resources they were given. It is the home map where
Fatih draws on the rich ‘cultural capital’ (Bourdieu
1977) at his disposal. The school maps offer potential
to the child, and he seizes it. At home the map can
be used and played with. Fatih’s home map is an
exploration of the space he inhabits, using the map
frame he has learned from school. Fatih has activated
the meaning of the map for himself. He has seen the
map’s meaning potential which he has activated across
sites. Like electric lights across a circuit, the circuit
lights up at particular moments. I was lucky to catch
one such moment in Fatih’s home, tape and record it.
The re-contextualisation of the map at home activates
the map’s potential and meaning. However, it is from
the school that the map concept is taken, and it is to
the school that the child has to turn for curricular
validation. The map text underlines the relationship
between home and school for this child, and leads
us away from the school into the home, and into a
different set of discourses – to do with playing and
leisure. Fatih’s map both transforms and reproduces
conventional practices, in this case, map making. It is
an artefact with a history across domains (school and
home) and across genres (maps and games), speaking
with a number of voices and operating in a number of
modes. It is an inter- textual object, played out over
sites and across rooms, being at once a story, a narration, a type of play, a board game, a computer game
and a map for gold.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Diane Reay, King’s College,
London, for helping me understand the relation of
the map to Bourdieu’s theories of cultural capital
and reproduction and Julie Hill who made helpful
suggestions on a draft of this paper.
READING literacy and language
November 2001
References
BARRS, M. (1988) Maps of Play. In Meek, M. and Mills, C. (eds.)
Language and Literacy in the Primary School. London: Falmer Press
BOURDIEU, P. (1977) trans. Richard Nice Outline of a Theory of
Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
GREGORY, E. and WILLIAMS, A. (2000) City Literacies: Learning to
Read Across Generations and Cultures. London: Routledge.
HEATH, S. B. (1983) Ways with Words: Language, Life and Work in
Communities and Classrooms. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
KRESS, G. JEWITT, C. OGBORN, J. and TSATSARELIS, C. (2000)
Multimodal Teaching and Learning: The Rhetorics of the Science
Classroom. London: Cassell
# UKRA 2001
125
PAHL, K.H. (1999) Transformations: Meaning Making in a Nursery.
Stoke on Trent: Trentham Books Ltd.
VAN LEEUWEN, T. (1997) It was Just Like Magic, Linguistics and
Education, 103 (11), pp. 273–30.
CONTACT THE AUTHOR:
Kate Pahl, School of Education, King’s College,
London, Franklin-Wilkins Building,Waterloo Road,
London SE19NN