Browsing by Author "Kendrick, Maureen"

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Closing the HIV and AIDS “Information Gap” Between Children and Parents: An Exploration of Makerspaces in a Ugandan Primary School
(MDPI, 2020-07-23) Kendrick, Maureen; Namazzi, Elizabeth; Becker-Zayas, Ava; Tibwamulala, Nancy Esther
In this study, we address the research question: “How might child-created billboards about HIV and AIDS help facilitate more open discussions between parents and children?” The premise of our study is that there may be considerable potential for using multimodal forms of representation in makerspaces with young children to create more open dialogue with parents about culturally sensitive information. Drawing on multimodal literacies and visual methodologies, we designed a makerspace in a grade 5 classroom (with students aged 9–10) in a Ugandan residential primary school. Our makerspace included soliciting students’ knowledge about HIV and AIDS as part of a class discussion focused on billboards in the local community and providing art materials for students to explore their understandings of HIV and AIDS through the creation of billboards as public service announcements. Parents were engaged in the work as audience members during a public exhibition at the school. Data sources include the billboards as artifacts, observations within the makerspace, and interviews with parents and children following the public exhibition. The findings show that, for parents and children, the billboards enhanced communication; new understandings about HIV and AIDS were gained; and real-life concerns about HIV and AIDS were made more visible. Although these more open conversations may depend to some degree on family relationships more broadly, we see great potential for makerspaces to serve as a starting point for closing the HIV and AIDS information gap between children and parents.
Experiments in Visual Analysis: (Re)positionings of children and youth in relation to Larger Sociocultural Issues
(2007) Kendrick, Maureen; Rogers, Theresa; Toohey, Kelleen; Marshall, Elizabeth; Mutonyi, Harriet; Hauge, Chelsey; Siegel, Marjorie; Rowsell, Jennifer
One of the most distinctive features of the 21st Century is the dominance of the visual and its relationship to multiple modalities of communication. Human experience is more visual and visualized than ever before (Mirzoeff, 1999). Visual communication is becoming less the domain of specialists, and more and more crucial in the domains of public communication (Kress & van Leeuwen, 1996), particularly as dominant modes of communication shift from page to screen (Snyder, 1997). Generating information about children’s and youth’s knowledge, and perceptions of their own lives and learning typically involves language-based modes, which may not build access to the multiple layers and complexities of their knowing. Visual representations have been utilized by researchers in various fields such as psychology and anthropology to learn more about participants’ constructions of their worlds (e.g., Adler, 1982; Diem-Wille, 2001; Koppitz, 1984). Siegel and Panofsky argue literacy studies have taken a semiotic turn: “the unsettled status of the field appears to be a productive moment of experimentation, invention, and problem-posing as researchers design analytic approaches that draw on a range of theoretical frameworks relevant to their research interests, purposes, and questions... analyzing multimodality requires a hybrid approach—a blend or ‘mash-up’ of theories” (2009, p. 99). Similarly, Pahl and Rowsell assert that, in accessing the underlying meanings of multimodal practices, “we need not only to account for the materiality of the texts, that is, the way they look, sound, and feel, but also have an understanding of who made the text, why, where, and when” (2006, p. 2).
Meeting the Challenge of Health Literacy in Rural Uganda: The Critical Role of Women and Local Modes of Communication
(Diaspora, Indigenous, and Minority Education, 2007) Kendrick, Maureen; Mutonyi, Harriet
This article seeks to better understand the relation between local and traditional modes of communication and health literacy within the context of a rural West Nile community in Northern Uganda. Drawing on social semiotics (multimodality) and Bakhtin’s notion of the carnival, the focus is on a group of women participating in a grassroots literacy program and their use of local modes of communication to address the endemic problem of malaria in the West Nile region of Uganda. The argument is that women and local modes of communication can serve a critical role in disseminating primary health care information in particular and in community health care development in general. This article also makes a case for adopting a more holistic approach to health literacy promotion; one that brings together local and new modes of communication and knowledge with desperately needed health care services and trained personnel.
Multimodality and English education in Ugandan schools
(English Studies in Africa, 2006) Kendrick, Maureen; Jones, Shelley; Mutonyi, Harriet; Norton, Bonny
In all societies children have many layers of representational resources Ia vailable to them. Play, movement, song, drama, language and artistic activity are but some of the modalities by which they learn to make sense of their world (Short, Kauffman and Kahn 160). The concept of multimodal ways of communicating, however, although very much in vogue in literacy studies, is not a new model within the Ugandan communities in which we work. In many parts of Uganda, indigenous knowledge and ways of communicating have been integrated into non-formal learning contexts, particularly in Freirean-based adult literacy programmes such as UPLIFTUganda (Pokorny 10-1 1) and REFLECT (Attwood, Castle and Smythe 137- 158). Within the formal school system, however, teachers are often constrained in their ability to recognize alternative or indigenous modes of representing and communicating knowledge due to a strong emphasis on examinations, teaching to the curriculum and a lack of resources and teacher training, particularly in rural areas.