Children's emotions and multimodal appraisal of places: walking with the camera.

Mills, Kathy ; Unsworth, Len ; Bellocchi, Alberto 等

There is little attention in research to the everyday observable and implicit ways in which connections between place and emotions function in children's lives (Jones, 2002). Rather, there are romanticised constructions of childhood and places based on symbolic legacies about urban, rural, or suburban places that are suitable or unsuitable for children's life and growth (Jones, 2002). In this research, attention is given to how children feel about and appraise the world through their communicative and representational interactions with place through filmic media.

A number of theoretical paradigms have been applied to original research of children's multimodal text production, looking particularly at filmmaking. Critical sociology, for example, has proven generative in examining relations of power in digital filmmaking and the multiliteracies classroom, providing understandings of how access to digital media literacies is more accessible to children from the dominant, white middle class (e.g. Mills, 2006, 2007, 2008a, 2009, 2011a).

Other theorists of digital filmmaking with Ranker, J. (2008). children have considered children's use of local knowledge in filmmaking (Brass, 2008). Children's filmmaking has been interpreted as curatorship of self (Potter, 2010), while others have examined children's use of kineikonic or moving images in film (Burn, 2009; Burn & Parker, 2003; Mills, 2011c). Ranker (2008) has examined how digital video can be used with inquiry projects for learning, and how children used semiotic resources across modes in their meaning-making with film.

Theories of transmediation (Siegel, 1995; Suhor, 1992) have been applied to understanding how young children shift meanings across sign systems during stages of media production, such as from two-dimensional storyboard drawings to filming action and creating sound in movies (Mills, 2011b). New understandings of the dynamic spatial configurations that constitute filmmaking have been enabled by combining multimodal social semiotics with socio-spatial theory (Mills, 2010). Most recently, Ranker and Mills (2014) have theorised relations between spatiality, embodiment, and creativity in the filmmaking of children and youth in classrooms.

This study demonstrates the application of a useful approach to represent and interpret emotions and appraisals of place in children's films. Specifically, the language of evaluation or appraisal in English developed by Martin and White (2005) is applied to the analysis of children's multimodal texts--videos created at school, and produced while walking with the camera in the local area. This appraisal framework was chosen because it is currently one of the foremost systematic approaches to mapping feelings or attitude in applied linguistics. It attends to three axes along which the interlocutors' 'inter-subjective stance' can vary--affect, judgement, and appreciation (Martin & White, 2005). Traditionally in rhetorical studies and linguistics, these three regions are often referred to as 'emotion', 'ethics' and 'aesthetics' respectively.

The axis of the framework that deals with emotions in language is termed 'affect'--language resources to convey positive and negative feelings. These may be descriptions of emotional states, such as 'I feel scared', or behaviours that indicate emotional states (e.g. child jumping with delight) (Unsworth, 2006). Martin and White's (2005) approach extends beyond some existing accounts of affect because it addresses not only the funds of language through which interlocutors overtly encode what they present as their personal attitudes, but also how they indirectly or directly influence other's feelings.

Affect can be represented through a diverse range of grammatical structures in language, and can be expressed as 'affect as quality' (e.g. This is a sad place), 'affect as process' (e.g. Playing here excited me), or 'affect as comment' (e.g. Relaxed, we wanted to stay here all day). Feeling can also be expressed grammatically through gradable meanings using different lexical items. For example, graduations of cheer from low to high could be expressed as 'cheerful' (low), 'buoyant' (median), or 'jubilant' (high) (Martin & White, 2005).

Literacy educators who are familiar with Systemic Functional Linguistics of M.A.K Halliday will be aware of the three modes of meanings that operate concurrently in all language--the interpersonal (i.e. construction of relationships), the ideational (i.e. construction of the nature of events), and the textual (i.e. relative information value among textual elements). The appraisal framework in English develops the Hallidayan account of the interpersonal metafunction of language, with a secondary focus on the ideational and textual meanings (See Halliday, 1994; Martin, 1992; Matthiessen, 1995). The interpersonal is focal because appraisal in English analyses the linguistic resources used by interlocutors to represent feelings and attitudes within the nature of relationships between themselves and the listener, reader or viewer, and what is viewed (Mavers, 2009).

It was necessary to extend Martin and White's linguistic appraisal framework to address the representation of affect through images. This is because the children's movies about place and emotions are multimodal --combining images, voice-overs, sound effects, and subtitles. In this analysis of children's appraisal of place and emotions, theories of multimodal social semiotics are also applied (See Kress & van Leeuwen, 1996; Jewitt, 2011; van Leeuwen & Jewitt, 2001; Lemke, 1998; Unsworth, 2001). Lemke (1998) and others (Unsworth, 2006) argue that multimodal texts have a meaning-making capacity that is multiplicative in nature, being more than the sum of each mode. A key feature of any multimodal analysis of texts is that it draws attention to the interrelationships between modes in texts, as opposed to attending to linguistic or word meanings alone (Kress, 2000).

Digital filmmaking and emotions in local places

Emotions are situated self-feelings (Denzin, 1984; Goldie, 2000), which locate children in a network of human and non-human relations that help them to make sense of the world. Place is understood as constitutive, rather than a mere backdrop for human action and literacy practices. Places are seen as relational and dynamic, not as fixed and unchanging. This is because places are essentially 'socially produced, and hence, can be contested, re-imagined, and changed' (Mills & Comber, 2013).

Few studies have given attention to understanding children's emotions in the materiality of lived, embodied, and situated experience of places, and how children can represent those experiences multimodally through film. Such understandings are beneficial because emotional knowledge is essential for social and academic success (IzardFine, Schultz, Mostow, Ackerman & Youngstrom, 2001). Improved understandings of the connection between emotion and places could inform practitioners who wish to assist their students in identifying and communicating their emotions at school. Research has examined how children and youth who create digital films experience and develop knowledge of place through their senses in four important ways--embodiment, sensoriality, co-presence with others, and through movement or locomotion (Mills, Comber & Kelly, 2013). Filmmaking in everyday places can enable children to become more conscious of how the materiality of places is related to how they feel at a given moment. As Gruenewald and Smith (2008) have argued, we need to draw ... 'on local phenomena as the sources of at least a share of children's learning experiences' (p. xvi).

Multimodality and emotions: the Australian literacy policy context

Emotional experiences and relationships have for too long been marginalised in educational research (Pekrun & Schutz, 2007). This is increasingly important in the Australian context where the National Assessment Program in Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) testing and other political agendas are preoccupied with achievement of a narrowly defined set of literacy skills, often at the expense of the affective dimension of learning (Mills, 2008; Unsworth, 2014). It is also important because the Australian National Curriculum: English (Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA), 2014) specifically addresses an important strand of outcomes called 'Language for Interaction'. For example, children as young as 4 V across Australia are required to, 'recognise some of the ways emotions and feelings can be conveyed and influenced by visual representations, for example in advertising and animations' (ACELA 1428). Children need to be able to position themselves as text producers who can successfully align the intended reader to empathise with their stance when they speak, write, and communicate in different forms of digital media.

The emotional turn in a range of disciplines has stimulated new ways of thinking about the affective content of social life, and of the affective content in semiotic choices. How children experience places emotionally contributes to their sense of well being, forming an integral part of how young lives are lived and how their histories are experienced. Here, we apply appraisal in English to explore the emotions of children in different places, and expressed in their multimodal semiotic choices through video production.

Research design

In view of students' need to communicate their emotions multimodally, and of the connections between places and emotions, the research question asked: 'How can children represent their emotions and appraisal of local places multimodally?' We wanted to explore the affordances of multimodal expression through filmic media, to indicate children's view of the world.

We applied sensory ethnography, following Pink (2009), to answer our research question because this sensory ethnography explicitly acknowledges that sensory data plays an important role in the generation of knowledge. Sensory ethnography typically incorporates widely used visual methods, such as video, visual artifacts, and hypermedia, to represent the materiality of culture and experience in ways that do not privilege one form of knowing over another. Our research used children's documentary films, and video recordings of what children said about their films, to document feelings, sense of wellbeing, and emotions in places. Sensory ethnography can be combined in complementary ways with multimodal analysis, as Pink (2009) suggests: 'While understanding communication as multimodal can itself yield useful research findings, the [multimodal] approach could be usefully supplemented by ... sensory ethnography' (p. 103).

Sensory ethnography explicitly draws on geographical theories of place, place--making, and space in combination with philosophical and anthropological work on place and perception (Casey, 1996; Ingold, 2007). It is distinguished from typical ethnographic research by its capacity to bring together the phenomenology of place and the politics of space (Pink, 2007). The ultimate purpose of data collection was to take us into the children's worlds and the world of their community, gathering their subjective, multimodal accounts of what it is like for children to experience real places in their local area.

Participant selection

The research was conducted with children from a primary school in Southeast Queensland, which has a student population of 600 drawn primarily from suburbs in an economically and socially disadvantaged region of Southeast Queensland, Australia. The fourteen Year 5 students (ages 9.5-11) were selected using purposive sampling from three classes by their teachers. The group reflected the typical composition of students in many state schools, including male and female students from varied cultural and language backgrounds. There were eight boys and six girls. The students provided ethical consent (voluntary, informed, written, and understood) by parents and students to participate in the filming workshops and research.

Data collection

Self-authored video record by students

The sensory ethnography primarily drew on the children's personal accounts of places represented in their self-authored videos. Research has suggested that methods such as video recording the experiences that trigger emotional states are necessary for fine-grained understanding of emotions in educational contexts (Zembylas, 2011). In our study, children took video cameras with them to record, moment-by-moment, their sensory experiences of what they perceived to be happy and healthy places, or unhappy and unhealthy places. The use of video self-production is an established research technique proven to enable the study of self-expression and emotions (See for example Niesyto, Buckingham & Fisherkeller, 2003).

The fourteen children worked in pairs to produce seven videos of places--each of approximately 3 -4 minutes duration. We prepared the students for filmmaking through filmmaking workshops, and conducted sensitising activities with the children to heighten their sensory awareness of places--sights, sounds, smells,

and touch. We took the students on 'sensory walks' through the local suburbs, shopping centre, and a local recreational area. The students were also permitted to take one video camera home. The students video-recorded their experiences of places, and recorded interviews with community members.

Think-aloud video recordings about the self-authored videos

We used video-recorded think-aloud recordings with the children while they edited their movies. A semi-structured, think-aloud format was used to guide conversations between the researcher and children as they digitally edited their movies in class. Questions included items such as, 'Why did you decide to include that scene?' or 'What did you want viewers to feel?' The aim was to clarify, through verbalising their meta-cognitive reflections, the children's decision-making about selecting and juxtaposing certain images of place. Similar think-aloud questions have been used as an important research method to obtain knowledge of mental processes when participants are reading, solving problems, or creating (van Someren, Barnard & Sand berg, 1994).

Data analysis

The two data sets--the seven self-authored videos and transcripts of the complete think-aloud recordings about the videos--were analysed using the framework outlined in 'The Language of Evaluation: Appraisal in English', developed by Martin and White (2005), as introduced in our literature review. When analysing the children's spoken words, we attended to three semantic regions or axes of analysis within appraisal theory affect, appreciation, and judgement.

In our analysis of the two data sets, we systematically coded the scenes using Martin and White's (2005) categories throughout the seven final videos. The transcriptions of the children's reflections on the videos, that indicated their emotional response to place, were also coded. We first attended to the axis of the framework that deals with emotions in language, traditionally termed 'affect'--language resources to convey either positive or negative evaluations of entities, happenings, and states-of-affairs. These may be descriptions of emotional states, such as 'I feel scared', or behaviours that indicate emotional states (e.g. a child jumping with delight) (Unsworth, 2006).

Our analysis of data sets similarly attended to 'appreciation', which reworks feelings as propositions about the value of things. Relating closely to the branch of philosophy called axiology--beliefs about the nature of beauty and value--language of appreciation can be divided into statements that concern reactions to things (e.g. Does it appeal to me?), the value of things (e.g. How important is it?), or to composition (e.g. Does it have complexity and balance?). Appreciation is an evaluative stance that differs from affect because appreciation does not require an assessment of one's feelings or emotions about something (Martin & White, 2005).

We also coded for the children's statements of judgement. In the appraisal framework, judgement deals with moral 'attitudes towards behaviour, which we admire or criticise, praise or condemn' (Martin & White, 2005, p. 42). Judgements pertain to social norms what is institutionally right or wrong in a particular social context, or judgement of social esteem--capacity, normality, and tenacity. Applying each of the categories of appraisal, we coded for both positive and negative evaluations. The examples used in this report are illustrative of the most consistently recurring categories of affect, appraisal, or judgement in the seven movies, and in the think-aloud discussions with the students.

Results and discussion: Places and emotions of happiness, satisfaction, and security

The results presented in this section demonstrate some of these connections via children's documentaries of their placed experiences. It highlights the specific ways in which place influences the emotions and aesthetic evaluations of the students who inhabit these everyday social spaces.

In terms of the three axes of the interpersonal mode in the appraisal framework--affect, appreciation, and judgment--the children's meanings expressed in their films, and their related talk about the films, were largely occupied with constructing an evaluation of places, which concerns appreciation, and their emotional response--affect. In the following excerpt of transcript, the two children were seated at a computer, editing their movie together during a whole group workshop in the library.

Girl 3: I think that the lagoon is a healthy and happy place because there's a lot of things to play with and ...

Boy 2: Birds flying past.

Girl 3: Yeah, and there's a lot of animals and a lot of trees. Oh, and there's a lot of oxygen in the air ... and it smells fresh and you can breathe fresh air.

In this transcript, the girl evaluates the lagoon as a 'healthy and happy place', indirectly realised, as opposed to directly (e.g. 'I feel happy and healthy in this place'). The two children provide a list of specific evidence and assessment to support this position (e.g. birds flying past, a lot of animals and trees, oxygen in the air, things to play with, and fresh air). These ideational meanings invoke positive appreciation. The children are the conscious participants experiencing the backgrounded emotion--an Emoter--and the phenomenon responsible for that emotion can be designated the Trigger (Martin & White, 2005). We can determine grammatically the extent to which the children consider it a place that triggers positive emotions by placing their lexicalisation to represent emotions on a continuous scale extending from 'low' to 'high', with various intermediate points possible between these extremes (Martin & White, 2005). Feelings of 'contentment', 'happiness', and 'elation', for example, can be analysed as representing a positive cline from low intensity to high. The choice of the term 'happy' expresses higher positive emotion than contentment, but less emotional intensity than say, excitement or elation.

The girl in the example above draws on a first person, present tense mental process--'I think that .' to establish the degree of certainty. In terms of grading the intensity of opinions, grammatically, prefacing her judgment with 'I think' communicates median modality. It is not as certain as other possible high modality choices--'I know' or 'certainly', but also more certain than other low modality choices, such as 'I suspect' or 'possibly'. This use of a scaled system of value shifts from a typology of evaluative language to a topology, highlighting regions of meaning and the proximity of one meaning to another possible meaning along a cline (Martin & White, 2005).

The girl's use of the personal pronoun 'I' expresses a statement of subjective modality, rather than objective modality. For example, 'The Lagoon is a happy and healthy place' foregrounds objectivity, as opposed to the child's personal reflection, 'I think the Lagoon is a happy and healthy place' (Martin & White, 2005). The use of the term 'is' also indicates higher modality than other possible choices, such as 'maybe' or 'perhaps', which demonstrates low modality. It is also important to note the word 'lot' which appears four times in the children's list of evidence--'a lot of things to play with . a lot of animals, and a lot of trees . a lot of oxygen'. The ideational meanings of 'things to play with' and other descriptions invoke positive appreciation. Lot is graduating or intensifying by quantification. The accompanying image is also chosen to show positive affect--attribution.

The girl's evaluative stance involves a reaction to a place-based stimulus, which grammatically is called realis, rather than irrealis. In appraisal theory, a grammatical distinction is constructed between desiderative future or intended versus experienced emotive mental processes. For example, the clause 'I'd like to be in a happy place' indicates emotions about intended or future events (irrealis), whereas the clause, 'I liked the park' indicates an emotional response to an experience or trigger (realis) that has occurred (Martin & White, 2005). All of the children's reflections on their movies were about experienced places, and so their representations of emotions are grammatically coded as 'realis'. Correspondingly, at the very start of any text construction process, 'there is always a perception of the external and internal, which is the basis of our experience' (Vygotsky, 2004, p. 25). What the children sensed provided the meaning-making support for multimodal design.

The students selected the material of their experiences to construct and reflect on their filmic images and emotions. In their movies, they associated this recreational space--a lagoon, established trees, stretches of green grass, walkways, playground, and covered eating areas--with positive reactions to place as appreciation, though also invoking positive emotions. For example, consider the following evaluative stance toward one of the boy's selection of images of the Lagoon. He is speaking on behalf of a peer, who is sitting with him making decisions about the movie editing at the computer.

Boy 4: We're putting some shots into a movie. We're like putting the manmade stuff in first to see what things can be fun. Then we're putting nature things that can be relaxing.

In response to the researcher's open-ended question to both boys, 'What are you doing?' this boy moves immediately into explaining his evaluative stance on the text. His response is one that combines appreciation of place--a reaction to place that has created impact. There are also elements of backgrounded affect or emotion (invoked satisfaction). Appreciation involves evaluations of semiotic and natural phenomena according to the ways in which they are valued or not (Martin & White, 2005). He chose the term 'fun' to describe the man-made playground and other fixtures, and the term 'relaxing' to describe the natural green space. 'Having Fun' is a marker of happiness combined with positive emotions associated with the pursuit of goals--dis/satisfaction. Having fun implies that one is 'absorbed' and 'involved', or 'engrossed' in an activity and 'satisfied' (See Martin & White, 2005, p. 51). It expresses less satisfaction than high intensity emotions, such as 'thrilled', but higher modality than low intensity emotions, such as being 'occupied'. It is positive, as opposed to negative affect, such as finding something as 'boring' or 'dull' on the dis/satisfaction cline.

The term 'relaxing' combines a low intensity of 'happiness' with a median intensity of 'security'. To relax is a state of being comfortable and secure, as opposed to feeling anxious. Without boredom, it indicates a state of contentment (Martin & White, 2005). 'Relaxation' was a repeated theme in the students' movies, reflected in both the moving images and the children's verbal reflections about the corresponding images.

Researcher: [addressing 2 children at a shared computer]: What are you thinking when you join those clips together? Why did you put that one located there--the feet?

Boy 5: That's ... to show that it is 'relaxing'. And also, it's at the end.

This boy's response 'to show that it's relaxing' uses a special type of reporting verb 'show'. Martin and White (2005) explain that reporting verbs like 'show' and 'demonstrate' adopt a particular stance toward the attributed proposition, in this case, to show that the place is relaxing, holding it to be true. This 'endorsing formulation' is used to convey a strong authorial voice, which is combined here with the existential verb 'is'. Existential verbs are frequently used in information texts to convey an objective stance that indicating the existence of a phenomenon. We can analyse the relationship between the meaning of Boy 5's words above, and the image upon which he is reflecting (Figure 1).

Here, the photographer [Boy 5] convinces the viewer that the Lagoon 'is relaxing' by shooting video footage from a horizontal posture, which reveals only the author's limbs and feet in the foreground. The limbs function as vectors that lead the eye to view the landscape in the background, which was produced by filming while reclining on the grass. Because the boy's upper body cannot be seen, the viewer is positioned to adopt his evaluative stance--to imagine relaxing on the green grass at this place on a warm, sunny day. In multimodal analysis, images such as this are categorised as subjective rather than objective--when appendages of the imaginary viewer are foregrounded so that the viewer must see the world from this subjective stance (Kress & van Leeuwen, 1996). This image, even in the absence of the accompanying narration, is able to communicate a positive evaluative stance of the Lagoon as place, evoking through viewpoint, the viewers' awareness of an emotional state of relaxation and appreciation.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

Evaluative meaning in systemic functional linguistics is realised by polarity (yes or no) and by the system of modality, which realises possibilities between positive and negative polarity, such as degrees of certainty and probability in truth statements (perhaps versus certainly), and degrees of typicality or frequency (sometimes versus always) (Unsworth, 2006). In the grammar of visual design, evaluation also focuses on the truth or credibility of images, also referred to as modality (Kress & van Leeuwen, 1996). However, within a naturalistic coding orientation, high modality is a reflection of the fidelity of the representation with the natural world. The use of video photography realises a naturalistic clarity that expresses high modality. Consider the following excerpt of a conversation between a researcher and another pair of students engaged in digitally editing their movies:

Girl 4: I'm doing my [movie] clips on happy and healthy [places] and I chose the footage of me playing ... on the playground, and taking footage where people can actually have a run and play with their friends and have a good time ... and so it shows me going down the slide.

Boy 8: I think it's healthy because lots of people like to go there and ...

Girl 4: It feels peaceful and there's lots of nature around. Like, makes us feel good inside that we're living in this sort of place.

[FIGURES 2 OMITTED]

[FIGURES 3 OMITTED]

Here, both of these students draw on a language of positive appreciation for construing the value of place (e.g. happy and healthy place), including natural phenomena (e.g. 'there's lots of nature around'). They also use a multimodal language of appreciation to draw attention to the built features of the recreational space, indicated by the images of the playground and their statements. In appraisal theory, this language of appreciation encompasses feelings (e.g. 'It feels peaceful'), while moving beyond linguistic or visual depiction of emotions into the deployment of attitude to manage taste (Martin & White, 2005). The images move from an objective, medium-long shot of the playground to an image that personalises the girl's embodied and sensory experience and feelings of happiness as she moved quickly down the slide.

In general terms, appreciations can be classified into three types: reaction (e.g. Did it grab me?), composition (e.g. Was it well-constructed?), or evaluation (e.g. Was it worthwhile?). As appraisers of the local recreation reserve, the students' evaluation can be classified as both appreciation as 'reaction' to place (e.g. 'I think it's healthy'), and 'valuation' of place (e.g. It is worthwhile because 'People can actually have a run and play with their friends and have a good time .'). The boy's statement of valuation is phrased objectively as propositions (e.g. ' it is healthy'), while ascribing attributes to a place.

Affect is indicated in the above dialogue when the girl shares her feelings of security or ecosocial wellbeing: 'It feels peaceful'. She similarly uses the dis/satisfaction variable, which indicates emotions concerned with telos or 'the pursuit of goals', which includes emotions such as pleasure, displeasure, ennui, curiosity, and respect (Martin & White, 2005, p. 49). This is indicated in her statement that it 'makes us feel good inside that we're living in this sort of place'.

The complete list of terms of affect and appraisal to describe the recreational reserve in the children's evaluative statements, which were typically preceded by the mental process 'feel', are indicated and classified in Table 1.0. Sometimes, these occurred in the context of classroom discussions in which the teacher or researchers supplied the mental process in questioning sequences, e.g. 'How did you feel at the recreation reserve?' Children responded with: 'I felt happy' or just replied with a single term of affect 'happy'. Some of these terms occurred in the context of class discussions, where the frequency of individual student contributions was random.

In Table 1 only two terms of appraisal indicate negative valuations of the recreation reserve (crowded and smelly), with positive appreciation of place, classified as 'reaction', being the most consistent response from the group. Their emotional responses to a recreational place span the three affect groups (i.e. happiness, satisfaction, and security). These are invariably positive, and of medium intensity, as opposed to amplified or intense emotions, such as very happy, exuberant, ecstatic, euphoric or rapturous. Note that the children's inscribed appreciation in their reactions to places (e.g. The park was exciting) often simultaneously invoked affect, rather than ascribing feelings more directly, as would occur in a statement such as 'I felt excited'.

This analysis is significant in terms of understanding how places influence children's sense of happiness and eco-social wellbeing. From a methodological standpoint, it highlights the utility of using filmmaking by children to document their emotional reaction to, and appreciation of, emplaced experiences that contributed to a positive sense of wellbeing. Linguistically, it demonstrates the utility of the appraisal framework for understanding emotions and aesthetics in language. Visual scenes in the films and verbal descriptions by the students indicated the students' underlying emotions and appraisal in response to local places.

Positive emotions and visual metaphor

An interesting point, given the need for children to have the necessary meaning-making resources to communicate their emotions, is that the children drew on visual metaphors in their camera work to convey their positive emotions and appreciation. In contrast to the verbal mode, in which abstract concepts are assigned verbal labels, the depiction of an abstract entity, like happiness, is impossible in the visual mode without the mediation of metaphors, except for facial affect. The context-dependence of visual metaphors renders their meaning implicit and subject to multiple interpretations of viewers.

Consider this example in which a pair of students juxtaposed two images in sequence to evoke a sense of happiness and wellbeing experienced at the local recreation reserve. The first constitutes cloudscape photography, which one of the children composed by lying on the ground and filming extreme long shots directly into the sunny and slightly cloudy sky. The image appears at the beginning of the movie, setting the scene or orientation (Figure 4).

[FIGURE 4 OMITTED]

This image positions the viewers to adopt a positive evaluative stance toward the natural world. Whereas the actual referent of this metaphor is an abstract feeling, an upward gaze at the moving clouds on a sunny day is in the domain of everyday human perception for many people (El Refaie, 2003). In the context of the whole group digital editing workshop, as the children worked in pairs at the computers, a researcher asked the boy who took the shot to elaborate the meaning of this image:

Researcher: What about the scenes at the beginning going from the sky shots and then going into the close up of the child ...

Boy 6: The sky is happy. And the next one's showing the park.

The boy's spontaneous use of personification 'The sky is happy' is an explicit nominal metaphor: the tangible sky is a metaphor for the abstract emotion, happiness. The visual and verbal correspond: both the 'figurative term' (sky) and its 'referent' (happiness) are present (El Refaie, 2003).

Metaphors tend to represent abstract phenomena in terms of something concretely perceived, or simply, seeing one kind of thing in terms of another (Forceville, 2008). There is no specification here of what mode or sign-system a metaphor can employ, such as visual or linguistic. Forceville (2008, p. 462) explains that: 'a metaphor requires active uptake by its audience and in the sense that metaphors potentially influence people's perspectives on the world'. This boy's coupling of blue sky and happiness invites us to appreciate similarly and perceive blue skies with light clouds in this way. He continued to elaborate this metaphor:

Researcher 1: The sky is happy?

Boy 6: I was taking [filming] the sky to show that it's a really nice place, and it's really, if you have nothing to do, you can come to this place and . sometimes the sky is nice, and you can make shapes and stuff with the clouds.

This boy associates happiness with taking the time to come to this open place, and of lifting the gaze upwards to see shapes and forms in the clouds when the 'sky is nice' (presumably sunny, with light clouds). Having his detailed verbal elaboration of the image highlights the complexity of the relationship between a visual metaphor and a linguistic metaphor.

The next image juxtaposed with the clouds in this pair's video shifts the focus to the human action in the park--a medium close-up shot of a toddler feeding the ducks.

[FIGURE 5 OMITTED]

This ideational image involves positive affect, such as 'Happiness is feeding the ducks'. It evokes emotions of happiness and appreciation of place in response to the filmmaker's sensorial and emplaced experiences of the reserve. A consistent feature in the children's movies included a predominance of positive images taken from the recreation reserve. This corresponded to the students' inclination to photograph and select places that evoked feelings of happiness, security and satisfaction, rather than unhappiness, fear, and dissatisfaction (e.g. litter, noisy cars, dull scenes) in the final editing of their films. This occurred despite the breadth of the workshops, which gave equal attention to the semiotic resources for representing both positive and negative emotions, such as subject choice, camera techniques, shot types, lighting, and new vocabulary.

Limitations

This research has demonstrated how sensory ethnography was usefully applied to the study of emotions and place, because video can be used to represent what participants feel when they inhabit particular places. It shows that sensory ethnography can be used to build understandings of how the lived sensory experience of place (i.e. touch, sight, sound) shapes people's actions in different environments (Pink, 2009).

It is self-evident that other groups of children in different places may express different sets of emotions. Therefore, conclusions about the subjective content of the children's videos in this small-scale ethnography cannot be generalised to other groups of children. Places that the researchers could safely walk school children were limited to parks and public spaces, due to health and safety implications. The children were given cameras to film their homes, but ethics constraints limited the inclusion of domestic scenes involving family members or identifying information about the participants. However, the significance of the study rests in the findings about the multimodal semiotic resources of the filmic medium, particularly of images and words that children can use to represent emplaced emotions. It also helps to demonstrate that there are explicit connections between children's experiences of place and their emotions. In addition, the research demonstrates the affordances of Martin and White's (2005) language of evaluation and appraisal in English for analysing emotions and aesthetics extended to multimodal texts.

Conclusion

While there is much academic work in the social and cultural geography that theorises an important relationship between place and children's emotions, there is little work that enables us to understand how children experience everyday lived places. This study demonstrates that a range of emotions and evaluations of place can be associated with children's experiences of different places, which tended toward median level intensity, positive emotions in response to the particular safe places visited in this study. The findings counter any assumption that emotions are important in 'I-thou' relations to people, but 'I-it experiences of places and things should be passionless' (Rolston, 1979).

Given the significance of emotional knowledge for social and academic success (Izard et al., 2001), it is important for practitioners to provide experiences that permit students to identify and communicate their emotions at school. This study has investigated the potential of engaging students in the design of short video productions to reflect and communicate multimodal expressions of positive or negative emotions experienced in different local places. Primary school children were able to represent their placed emotions through filmmaking, and verbally through their reflections to a researcher while digitally editing the movies in pairs. The use of multiple modes (i.e. images and words) through a filmic medium made provision for these children to represent their emotions and appraisals in response to place. This ability to communicate affect and appraisal is important because sign-makers not only make new meanings, but also remake themselves to some degree through their communicative engagement with others in their representations (Kress, 2000).

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Kathy Mills

Queensland University of Technology

Len Unsworth

Australian Catholic University

Alberto Bellocchi and Ji Yong Park

Queensland University of Technology

Stephen Ritchie

Murdoch University

Kathy Mills is a Senior Research Fellow (Australian Research Council) and Senior Lecturer of language and literacy at the Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia. Mills has published educational research widely in digital media production, multimodality, reading comprehension, new pedagogies, and literacy in contexts of social disadvantage. She has also contributed to theorising socio-cultural, socio-critical and socio-spatial approaches to literacy research. Mills is the author of four books, most recently, The Multiliteracies Classroom. Mills serves internationally on the executive committee of AERA Writing and Literacies and review boards of literacy journals. Mills taught as a primary teacher full time for seven years, and served as a Head of Curriculum (P-7) prior to lecturing in higher education.

Len Unsworth is Professor in Education (English and Literacies) at the Australian Catholic University in Sydney, Australia. Len's research is in primary and secondary school English and multiliteracies education. His book publications include [with Angela Thomas, Alyson Simpson and Jenny Asha] Teaching children's literature with Information and Communication Technologies (McGraw-Hill/Open University Press 2005), e-literature for children and classroom literacy learning (Routledge, 2006), New Literacies and the English Curriculum (Continuum, 2008), Multimodal Semiotics (Continuum, 2008) and, with Clare Painter and Jim Martin, Reading Visual Narratives (Equinox, 2013).

Alberto Bellocchi is Senior Lecturer at the Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia. His research program focuses on investigating emotions in science learning and teaching contexts at the high school and university level. He lectures in Science Curriculum Studies and Science Technology and Society. Prior to working as an academic, Dr Bellocchi was a high school science teacher for eight years.

Ji Yong Park is a Senior Lecturer at Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia. He has been engaged in four distinct schools: Art & Design, Education, IT, and Philosophy because of his unique cross-disciplinary expertise in research and teaching. His research specialties include user-experience design, online learning and teaching, and intercultural education. His longterm research project is to investigate cross-cultural and religious metaphysics in order to articulate the structures of value interactions and emergent inter-culturality.

Stephen Ritchie is a Professor and Dean of Education at Murdoch University, Perth, Australia. He has been interested in the complexities of classroom teaching and learning throughout his research career. He has led several recent nationally funded projects that have focused on the emotional engagement of students in science classes and the emotional experiences of beginning science teachers. He was the Editor-in-Chief of the internationally ranked research journal: Research in Science Education from 2008 to 2012. Before becoming a teacher educator he was a science teacher for 12 years. Table 1. Words of affect and appraisal attributed by students to the recreation reserve. Affect Group Words of Affect Appreciation Group Happiness happy Positive bright reaction to exciting place loving fun Satisfaction peaceful relaxing Security comfortable calm welcoming safe Words of Appraisal Appreciation Group natural Positive airy reaction to clean place cool shady fresh healthy crowded Negative smelly reaction to place