Snapshots of learning: exploring the meaning making potential of everyday visual literacy practices

Abstract

This article explores the meaning making potential of everyday multimodal text production from a group of students’ communication in Snapchat. By in-depth analysis of three examples, the characteristics of the snaps are explored, and the students are interviewed to find out what they thought about the texts’ function, content, and use. We find this vernacular communication being strongly shaped by the applications’ scripts and affordances, by usage patterns and by the context in which they are created. We also find that the students’ vernacular multimodal communication is time-effective, easy and intuitive, and mainly based on visuals. The vernacular communication thus differs clearly from the typical, verbal-based communication in school, but the article still argues there is some learning value in everyday digital communication. Being able to communicate adequately in visuals is found to be an important digital skill, developed informally, which can be significant for meaning making in school.