Confidentiality

A central ethical aspect is the confidentiality of the participants, and the participants were informed about this issue. I have in different ways tried to keep the identity of the participants confidential; I have created fictive names for them, not mentioned the name or location of the school, and the transcriptions do not reveal linguistic variation or dialect typical of a certain region. In the presentation of the findings and excerpts, everything has been translated from Swedish to English, which is a noticeable act of confidentiality. The photos presented have been blurred to secure personal integrity. I have chosen not to report the exact time of the data production, noting only that it was in the autumn of 2010.

I have stored video recordings, digital videos, consent forms, and other documentations where others do not have access to them. I am the only researcher who has made use of the data. During the video recordings three different research assistants assisted me and they were all informed about confidentiality and research ethics. None of them had access to the research data.

On seminars and conferences I have only presented examples of the group of students who granted their permission for this (the first alternative in the consent form). This is the group of students that is ultimately analysed in this study. As described in the section on produced data (4.3.2), I initially gathered empirical material from three groups, but ended up analysing only one. One of the teachers organised the students into focus groups and this organisation was partly based on which alternative the students’ parents had chosen in the consent form. The result was that in one of the three groups (group A) all students had chosen the first alternative in the consent form, giving their consent to participate in the research project and agreeing that the data may be used as examples in research conferences, in teacher education, and for teacher in-service training.

5 FINDINGS

This chapter presents the findings of the analyses. The findings build on data analysis of the students’ videomaking process and digital video as described in Section 4.4. The first section (5.1) aims at answering the first research question: what characterises the students’

transmediation process regarding their use of semiotic resources as a means to negotiate their interpretation of the poem? Excerpts from the students’ videomaking process are presented to exemplify each essential finding. The second section (5.2) presents the findings of the analysis of the digital video and aims at answering the second research question: how do the students, in their digital video, use semiotic resources to represent their interpretation of the poem?

Screen shots from the students’ digital video are presented to expand the understanding of it.

In the genre of scientific writing there is an established procedure in both the research process and the presentation of findings to verbalise the process in written form. Yet, different approaches are developing that are challenging the prevailing ways of presenting and conducting research.³³ A notable challenge in working with digital, multimodal data is to use a print-based mode to explicate digital design features.

In this thesis the prevailing approach of verbalising the analysis is used. I do, however, acknowledge several limitations and difficulties

33 An example of such an approach is arts-based educational research (see e.g.

Barone & Eisner, 2012; Knowles & Cole, 2008).

with this “translation”. To some extent this could be addressed by, for example, linking to a server where the students’ digital video could be viewed. This is, however, not possible because of the ethical requirement to secure the anonymity of the participants in the study.

To some extent I have addressed this issue by including still images as examples of the students’ digital video and by describing the multimodal designing process and students’ digital video carefully to ensure the trustworthiness of my analyses.

The students participating in this study, Catrin, Linda, Casper, and Philip (all names are pseudonyms) worked with the poem I want to meet…³⁴ by the Swedish poet and novelist Karin Boye (1900–1941).

The poem was first published in The Hearths (Härdarna) in 1927.

I want to meet …

Armed, erect and closed in armour forth I came –

but of terror was the mail-coat cast and of shame.

I want to drop my weapons, sword and shield.

All that hard hostility made me cold.

I have seen the dry seeds grow at last.

I have seen the bright green spread out fast.

Mightier than iron is life's tenderness,

driven forth from the earth's heart without defence.

The spring dawns in winter's regions, where I froze.

I want to meet life's powers weaponless.

34 The poem was originally written in Swedish and named Jag vill möta… The English translation used here is by David McDuff. See Appendix 6 for poem in the original Swedish.

The students’ choice of poem was made collectively in the group. The students had individually, as an assignment by the L1 teacher, chosen a poem beforehand that in some way spoke to them. They were able to make their individual choice based on a selection of poems assembled by the L1 teacher in a booklet. The students shared their poems with each other by reading them out loud and giving a short explanation why they had chosen this poem. They were to agree on one poem to work further with, and they settled on the poem by Karin Boye rather quickly. Their choice was not particularly substantiated or discussed, however, Casper acknowledged the message or statement of the poem as a criterion, which suggests an interest in establishing their work on a discursive level. The students did not further elaborate the message of the poem at this point, and the final choice of the poem I want to meet… was chosen without further discussion, but with what seemed to be common agreement.