Focal social actions through which space is configured and reconfigured when orienting to a Finnish Sign Language class
Introduction
Traditional academic spaces—physical environments designed for educational purposes such as lecture halls and seminar rooms—afford students and teachers resources for interaction. Such environments communicate to us preferable actions; for example, when listening to a lecture or participating in group work (Leijon, 2016). Entering a space is a moment that invokes recognition of norms and expectations of activities that “belong” to a place. People “recognise place as such-and-such-a-place” and act accordingly (Blommaert, Collins, & Slembrouck, 2005; Blommaert & Huang, 2009). However, one should recognise the complex dynamics firstly, of space as “already there,” as a normative agent about which exist presuppositions regarding actions that occur within its confines (Blommaert & Huang, 2009); and secondly, of space as inhabited, appropriated, configured, and reconfigured by the activities of people (Baynham, 2012, Crabtree, 2000, Cresswell, 2004). Leijon (2016) examines the interplay between space, interaction, and learning sequences in the context of higher education, and the analysis attends in particular to focal episodes in which participants use space as a resource in their meaning-making process. This article focuses on actions participants take in order to configure and reconfigure a space to suit visual-embodied interaction involving Finnish Sign Language (FinSL).
From a viewpoint of interaction and language use, a space as an environment suggests or does not suggest the use of certain linguistic repertoires and modalities (Blommaert et al., 2005, Blommaert and Huang, 2009). In other words, space is a crucial actor in organising regimes of language (Blommaert et al., 2005).1 For example, a lecture hall with a permanent furniture arrangement—such as with chairs bolted to a sloped floor—suggests a platform event for a speaker and audience (Goffman, 1983, Leijon, 2016). Moreover, such a room poses restrictions on embodied interaction, as do many traditional lecture halls in university buildings, by directing the faces and bodies of an audience towards a platform event. The speaker and space reserved for a blackboard or a white screen often present multimodal texts. These settings enable students to attend to the spoken comments of their fellows. However, engaging visually with each other as a group is either impossible or requires substantial effort. Students’ visual-embodied communication is accessible only to the speaker and to those who can adjust their bodies to allow for a line of sight to the interlocutor initiating a comment. It follows that, in their physical layouts, such spaces suggest a dominance of spoken and written language modalities, marginalising visual and embodied communication—including interaction in signed languages. That dominance does not present a surprise, since very few institutions of higher education have a signing community of practice that has had sufficient time to impact permanently the architectural specifications of learning environments (see however Edwards & Harold, 2014 on Gallaudet University).
This article details a study of one of such community of practice. At the University of Jyväskylä, Finland, FinSL is a fully-fledged subject offering studies from minor to PhD degree level on sign-language linguistics, and on the culture of the Finnish signing community. The teaching of FinSL began at the university in 1992 and the Sign Language Centre was opened eighteen years later, in response to an assignment from the Finnish Ministry of Education mandating that the university be tasked with research and higher education in FinSL (Keski-Levijoki, Takkinen, & Tapio, 2012). One can describe the University of Jyväskylä and its FinSL study programme as a ‘nexus of intersection' between long-established traditions of higher education and language use norms. Academic discourses encounter members of signing communities, members from a diversity of educational and linguistic backgrounds. However, does such an environment with a lengthy history in higher education afford FinSL users multilingual, multimodal semiotic resources? Do such academic spaces enable FinSL signers to harness the visual-embodied semiotic practices of signing communities towards active participation in academic discourses, creating opportunities for new, innovative practices to emerge?
This article examines the actions or interactions of a group of students and a teacher of a FinSL study programme in a traditional lecture hall at the start of a new academic year. Drawing on ethnographic data including video recordings, field notes, interviews and a reflective group discussion, I analyse the minutes before a university class begins, when participants enter a lecture hall. By examining the mediated actions of the students when entering the hall before class—defining mediated actions2 as ‘social actions taken with mediational means or cultural tools' (Scollon, 2001a, Scollon, 2001b, Wertsch, 1998)—I aim to discover how students appropriate, configure, and reconfigure a space; and the types of action those students view as applicable to that space. One may also see such presumed actions as component parts of larger social structures. In other words, one can regard mediated actions as linked directly to larger sets of ideologies and values that surface in university teaching and learning (Scollon & Scollon, 2004).
The second reason for choosing to examine ‘entering a lecture hall’ arises from interest in a practice called a “conversation circle” (Bauman, 2012) or “the semicircular classroom seating configuration” (Bagga-Gupta, 1999), which researchers have addressed as a practical example of “a set of premises about the nature of the Deaf community and Deaf culture” (Edwards & Harold, 2014, p. 1354). The Finnish National Agency for Education's “Viittomakieliset oppilaat perusopetuksessa” [Signing students in basic education] document, published in 2016 as a guide for Finnish teachers and educators, praises semi-circular seating explicitly, stating, “Istumajärjestys puolikaaren muodossa varmistaa sen, että oppilaat näkevät toistensa viittomisen” or, “A semicircular seating arrangement ensures that students see each other's signing” (The Finnish National Agency for Education, 2016, p. 10).
In the context of visually oriented arenas in education (Bagga-Gupta, 2004), the semicircular classroom seating configuration is considered as a practice for facilitating lines of sight, offering the potential to accomplish visual language practices (Bagga-Gupta, 1999). The activity in question was captured on video and published at the University of Jyväskylä for teaching purposes in the EU project “Signall 3–Working with the Deaf community,” during which first and second year students on the FinSL study programme strived to attract attention to this practice (Signall 3). However, the negotiation process and arranging of semicircular seating has never been examined as it occurs in situ. Also, research has not discussed situations in which sign language users do not arrange their seats according to the presumed “Deaf norm.” One may consider the act of rearranging or not rearranging the seats of a university lecture hall into a semicircular configuration before a sign language lesson a focal social action that contests groups of norms on different levels of discourse (see Section 3). I will set out therefore to examine in detail the moment at which such an arrangement is expected to occur.
Section snippets
Space: a normative actor
Recently, studies of sociolinguistics and discourse have expressed a growing interest in space and place in relation to language use, discourse, and how people organise themselves spatially in social interactions (see for example Scollon & Scollon, 2003 on geosemiotics; Cresswell, 2013 on human geography; Blommaert et al., 2005, Keating and Mirus, 2003). Sociolinguistics, discourse studies, and interactional sociolinguistics in particular are experiencing a “spatial turn” (Baynham, 2012;
Mediated discourse analysis: broader social issues grounded in the micro-actions of social interaction
The unit of analysis of this study is mediated action (Scollon, 2001b). Mediated action is always carried out by actors and by mediational means through which sociocultural and historical processes enter everyday actions (Jones & Norris, 2005, p. 50; Scollon, 2001b, p. 14Scollon, 2001bScollon, 2001b, p. 14). Mediated Discourse Analysis (MDA) analyses mediated action as an intersection of three aggregates of discourse or social spaces (Jones, 2010); namely, interaction order, historical body,
Ethnographic data and the process of finding the focal mediated actions
Multiple data offer the privilege of triangulation, which, state Scollon and Scollon (2004), may be accomplished by collecting four types of data: one, members’ generalisations; two, neutral or objective observations; three, the individual experiences of the different members of the community of practice being studied; and four, the researcher’s own personal interactions with members of that community (Scollon & Scollon, 2004). Interaction with members of a community of practice involves
Analysis
Both explicit and implicit negotiations of seating arrangements and spatial organisations of people and furniture occur at the beginning of the classes observed. Such negotiations are made to establish or maintain a line of sight between the participants. Actions for rearranging the furniture—in other words, pulling, pushing, moving and sliding tables and chairs—occur. People also sit sideways on the chair, lean forward or backward, remain standing or step backwards to view a person signing or
Discussion
This paper focused on how students and a teacher organised themselves spatially in social interactions before a class in which FinSL was the language of instruction. I aimed to discover how participants orient themselves to a coming class; in other words, to examine the type of social space towards which students orient themselves. My starting point was to see space as a concrete, physical location and a social construct. I also emphasised space as a normative actor with historical trajectories
Acknowledgements
I would like to acknowledge the University of Oulu and members of the COACT (Complexity of (inter)action and multimodal participation) research community and its grassroots writing group for comments; the researchers of the Multimodal Research Centre at Auckland University of Technology and the Centre for Applied Language Studies at the University of Jyväskylä for their comments in data sessions, and the researchers at the Language and Superdiversity research project of the Department of
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