Multimodal ethnography

In this video, Rosie Flewitt (UCL Institute of Education, Helen Hamlyn Centre for Pedagogy) presents the advantages and challenges of using multimodal ethnography in researching digital literacy practices of young children and how she uses it in her research.

Flewitt contends in the video that ethnography enables us to do a detailed study of individual children, and by bringing a multimodal lens to it, we can unpick children’s sign making. However, a challenge is that ethnography and multimodality comes from different epistemologies. And yet, from Flewitt’s point of view it leads researchers to think critically of each framing and that critical thinking allows us to have a different lens.