Pedagogies: An International Journal

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Drawing bodies and spaces in telecollaboration:

a view of research potential in synaesthesia and
multimodality, from the outside

David Malinowski

To cite this article: David Malinowski (2014) Drawing bodies and spaces in telecollaboration: a
view of research potential in synaesthesia and multimodality, from the outside, Pedagogies: An
International Journal, 9:1, 63-85, DOI: 10.1080/1554480X.2014.877559

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Pedagogies: An International Journal, 2014
Vol. 9, No. 1, 63–85, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1554480X.2014.877559

Drawing bodies and spaces in telecollaboration: a view of research

potential in synaesthesia and multimodality, from the outside
David Malinowski*

Center for Language Study, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06520, USA
(Received 31 October 2013; accepted 8 November 2013)

While much scholarship on the multisensory and transmodal phenomenon of

synaesthesia seeks to uncover its psychophysiological and neurological bases, recent
research in multimodal literacy and language acquisition addresses it largely in terms
of agentive processes of meaning-making and design. This paper takes as its starting
point the latter’s concern with socially situated learning, but examines data from a
university-based, distance French learning project in order to suggest that such
research may need to look further. Content and narrative analyses of students’ reflec-
tive drawings illustrate their awareness of the complexities of learning and expression
in hypermediated environments, where geographic and virtual spaces, mediated and
interpersonal relations and embodied and on-screen actions converge – all seeming
contradictions that may, when viewed together, offer a new vantage point on the nature
of synaesthesia, from the outside.
Keywords: embodiment; foreign language education; multimodality; spatiality;
telecollaboration

I. A concern for synaesthesia, made visible

“Synaesthesia”, in my experience with language and literacy education, has always had as
much to do with socially oriented meaning-making practices as it has with the neurocog-
nitive and psychophysiological processes that accompany them. From the standpoint of
the self-conscious creation and interpretation of visible, audible or otherwise perceptible
signs, he or she who is concerned with pedagogies needs (or so I have thought) first to
attend closely to that which can be discussed, and around which interventions can be
planned and carried out, in the language classroom; the question of what poetic, musical,
authorial or other creative acts linking the senses constitute “genuine synaesthesia” and
what is “merely” “metaphorical talk” (Harrison & Baron-Cohen, 1994, p. 343) takes the
back seat inasmuch as all communication relies, at some level at least, on metaphor
(cf. Lakoff & Johnson, 1980).1 In his seminal work in reimagining literacy beyond
language as multimodal design, Kress (1998, 2003, 2010) has noted that “It is in the
realm of synaesthesia, seen semiotically as transduction and transformation, that much of
what we regard as ‘creativity’ happens” (Kress, 2003, p. 36). Extending this work to better
understand how multimedia authors express ideas across modes and genres of commu-
nication, Nelson (2006, 2008; see also, for instance, Fortune, 2005) assigns central
importance to the phenomenon and processes of synaesthesia; “synaesthetic reimagining”,
he argues, is a reflexively co-constitutive redesign of meaning on the psychological level,
and a repurposing of material resources in the physical world. Certainly, explicating the

*Email: david.malinowski@yale.edu

© 2014 Taylor & Francis

64 D. Malinowski

mechanisms by which language and literacy learners design meaning between written,
pictorial and musical modes (to name but a few), from institutional, popular and personal
genres and purposes of communication, and across virtual and physical domains, is of
paramount concern for language and literacy educators today. The goal of this narrative
essay2 is to take up this issue of synaesthetic reimagining in this very practical, visible
sense, by reimagining synaesthesia, from the outside.

II. Broadening and narrowing the scope: synaesthesia in space?

Understandably, studies in the tradition of new and multiliteracies grounded in the
tradition of Hallidayan social semiotics (e.g. Cope & Kalantzis, 2000; Kress, 2003;
Lankshear & Knobel, 2006; New London Group, 1996; Unsworth, 2001) have taken as
their focal object of study the changing processes and materialities of text-making and
textual interpretation in the digital era. Much scholarship has focused on the changing
ecologies between spoken/written language and all other communicative modes encom-
passing image, action, sound and more (e.g. Cope & Kalantzis, 2000; Jewitt, 2008);
much, as well, has focused upon the relative ascendance of the image over the word in
recent years (e.g. Kress, 2003; Kress & van Leeuwen, 1996; Unsworth, 2001). A
relatively smaller number of studies have shed light on multimodality in textual practices
utilizing other communicative modes (e.g. Gall & Breeze, 2005 on music and musical
composition) or media (such as Davies & Merchant, 2007 on blogs, Hull & Nelson, 2005
on digital stories), or on the very stuff-ness of the stuff of literacy itself, as in Pahl and
Rowsell’s (2010) documentation and theorization of “artefactual literacies”.
A foundational premise of the above studies, of course, is the inherent sociality of
literacy – the creation and interpretation of texts, and the making of meanings across
modes and genres of expression, in contexts that are shot through with social, ideological
and personal relations (Street, 1984, 1995). Yet their reading of these relations through
texts, individuals and their textual practices has left much room for exploration of the
spatial, temporal and material conditions that are, from a postmodern perspective (e.g.
Harvey, 1989; Lyotard, 1984), productive of the text-designing subject – room that, I
suggest in this paper, may be fertile ground for building our understanding of synaesthesia
in language and literacy learning settings. Gee’s (2003, 2005) work on the nature of
learning in video games, Black’s (2005) work on the creation of “affinity spaces” in fan
fiction and Stein’s (2004, 2007) investigations of the productive role of silence
in multimodal pedagogies direct our attention as much to the emerging environments in
which literacy is learned and enacted – that is, to the nature of the conditions that enable
language and literacy learning to take place – as they do to the whos and whats of the
learning.
Indeed, a growing area of research seeks to understand language and literacy learning
practices across virtual and physical environments as spatial phenomena (see, for
instance, Jones, 2010; Kostogriz, 2006; Leander & McKim, 2003; Leander & Sheehy,
2004). These studies, together with other efforts to define the nature of presence, attention
and action in “digitally complexified” contexts of communication, suggest that where
language learners are, and where (and when) they understand themselves to be, may have
everything to do with the meanings they are able to make. In this regard, this essay shares
the concern of Leander, Phillips, and Taylor (2010) to open up the “imagined geogra-
phies” of places of learning – and, specifically, of multimodal interpretation, composition
and re-combination – in the light of physical, sociocultural and virtual mobilities. It is in
questions such as Leander, Phillips and Taylor’s below, that synaesthetic operations
 Pedagogies: An International Journal 65

(the refiguring of semiotic material across modes, contexts and audiences to mean in
different ways, to new audiences, and with new tools) can, I contend, be re-thought
through the larger figure of “learning”. They ask, “How are the dynamically moving
elements of social systems and distributions, including people themselves and all manner
of resources for learning as well, configured and reconfigured across space and time to
create opportunities to learn?” (Leander et al., 2010, p. 331).

III. The places drawings show

Before further pursuing the theoretical question of what a spatialized perspective would
bring to understanding synaesthesia in language and literacy learning, however, it seems
necessary to ground the conversation in the events and objects of actual language class-
rooms. In this section and throughout this essay, I present and discuss artefacts from
student participants in an ongoing multinational research project on French language
teaching and learning online, Le français en (première) ligne, in which I participated
from 2008 to 2012 (Malinowski, 2011; Malinowski & Kramsch, 2014; see also Develotte,
2008; Develotte, Guichon, & Kern, 2008; Mangenot, 2008; Zourou, 2008).3 Drawings,
sketches and collages were produced by students of French as a foreign language at the
University of California, Berkeley (USA), following a half-semester of weekly online
language lessons from tutors at a university in Lyon, France. Directed to visually depict
the content, themes and nature of their desktop videochat lessons for a short homework
assignment, the students used pens, pencils, crayons and magazine cut-outs in order to
create texts such as those that appear below.
Janet’s drawing (Figure 1) depicts a conversation between herself, on the left of the
vertical line in the centre of the page, and her tutor to the right. Their respective speech
bubbles, set against a light blue background, surround the drawing and depict many of the

Figure 1. Janet’s drawing, showing herself (on left) and her tutor (on right) in conversation.
66 D. Malinowski

Figure 2. Vo’s drawing, merging physical, geographic and online elements.

people, places and topics touched upon in their exchanges: political leaders, pop culture
figures and popular stereotypes held by outsiders to the French and US cultures. In his
drawing (Figure 2), the Berkeley student Vo included not only himself (near the top left of
the drawing) and his tutor (near the bottom, with her back facing the drawing’s viewer), but
also his partner and fellow student of French in Berkeley. The three don headsets as they did in
their online lessons with their tutor, sitting in front of computer screens while physically
situated in their respective geographic locales: Vo and his partner in Berkeley, in front of the
campus’ iconic Sather Gate, and his tutor above the map-like territory named “LYON”.
Finally, we see the Berkeley student Iztli’s crayon drawing (Figure 3), upon which she
has superimposed her written narration in a red font. The drawing is of the river Seine in
Paris on a sunny day, with the iconic Eiffel Tower standing in the background, and boats
 Pedagogies: An International Journal 67

Figure 3. Iztli’s drawing, representing her increasing fluency in French.

along the water’s edge in the foreground. There are no people depicted outright in Iztli’s
drawing, but there is a movement from left to right: as she progressed through the semester
and her online lessons with her tutor, she said in a subsequent interview, the French
language came more into focus. The increasing complexity in shape, colour and shadow
of the boats viewed from left to right, she said, shows her own progression from a childlike
command of basic French, to increasing, adult-like facility with the language.
Certainly, these artefacts can be read for the multimodal creative processes that they, as
mixed-medium representations, embody: the visual elements of Iztli’s drawing, for instance,
“say” nothing literally about the French language per se, or even the passage of time;
meanwhile, the verbal narration in the top right portion of the drawing indicates little of the
specific imagistic means through which she realizes her intended meaning. Together,
however, they might not only combine to realize their full intended potential, but could
easily be read as surpassing this, as the viewer is led to consider the ramifications of seeing
a single animate subject (the artist and language learner Iztli), in effect, draw herself
distributed into and as part of an iconic French landscape. As Lemke has remarked,
“Meanings in multimedia are not fixed and additive (the word-meaning plus the picture-
meaning), but multiplicative (word-meaning modified by image-context, image-meaning
modified by textual context), making a whole far greater than the simple sum of its parts”
(Lemke, 1998, p. 312). In light of this view, I would contend that at least some of this
multiplied or amplified meaning can be accounted for by reading the students’ images and
words in the light of spatial and other-modal design elements (Cope & Kalantzis, 2000;
Kalantzis & Cope, 2012; New London Group, 1996) that might inform their designs – the
understanding of walls as barriers that informs Janet’s drawing, the “offering” of landmark
towers that takes place in the palms of students’ hands in Vo’s, and the visual/spatial refrain
of progressions-in-rows (water, boats, trees) that underwrites Iztli’s.
68 D. Malinowski

However, rather than focusing on the relationships between these visual artefacts and
the students’ creative processes in producing them, in this paper, I read these drawings –
and dozens of others like them – for what they might say about the worlds of their
authors, at the time of their online learning. Read individually and taken together,
drawings made by participants in a bi-national telecollaborative partnership (discussed
in more detail in the sections that follow) index aspects of language learners’ classroom
experiences that are seldom told, or for which language may not conventionally be put to
the task of telling. Indeed, I would suggest that, in hybrid learning environments such as
class-to-class telecollaboration, it is only because the classroom itself is being radically
refigured (with walls metaphorically broken down, “brick-and-mortar” re-entering the
language about where learning takes place, etc.) that drawings such as the three repro-
duced above become so instructive. What is it about the nature of cross-cultural dialogue
online that might allow for the exchange of such vivid images of the other’s culture
(Janet’s drawing), yet divide its participants so poignantly? What becomes of the three-
dimensionality, and geographical situation of places (in Berkeley, in Lyon, as in Vo’s
drawing), when they are narrated and shown by learners and teachers on screens? Does
transcultural interaction in a rich, multimedia environment (desktop web conferencing,
text chat, etc.) allow foreign language learners to see themselves “drawn into” the land-
scape of the intercultural other in ways that conventional classroom learning does not
(Iztli’s drawing)?
Language lessons such as those that formed the basis for these and many other student
drawings clearly involved the intertwining of perceptual and communicative events across
multiple modes. They give urgency to the questions of how, to what degree, with what
consequences videochat-mediated language lessons (an example of the rich, multichannel
communicative and compositional environments utilized today for language learning and
teaching) mime other attempts, in other times and places, to achieve multisensory,
immersive, “transcendental form[s] of synaesthesia”; Saletnik’s (2002) treatment of the
Wagnerian opera, an artistic production that “sought to unite the visual, the aural, and
narrative text into a single artistic unity or gesamtkunstwerk”, is but one example.

IV. Preparing the ground for synaesthetic language and literacy learning
experiences on/offline
That one’s physical, sensory and subjective locations may profoundly shape the meaning
potential of any word, visual element, musical note, or other sign in use is a matter of little
debate; Kalantzis and Cope’s (2012) simple example of the possible meanings that can be
assumed by “a tree in a cityscape compared to a tree in the forest” is a ready reminder. Yet
a spatialized view of literacy practices (e.g. Kostogriz, 2004; Leander & Sheehy, 2004) is
also one that does not take this or that context for granted, but highlights the multiplicities,
contingencies, ideologies, and thus, the productive role of context itself. As attested in a
body of postmodern-leaning scholarship that urges space be considered in the plural rather
than singular, and as ever-changing rather than fixed (e.g. Lefebvre, 1991; Massey, 1994;
Soja, 1989), spatiality bespeaks the “liveliness, the complexity and openness of the
configurational itself, the positive multiplicity” (Massey, 2005, p. 13). In this vein, with
respect to literacy practices in transcultural spaces, Kostogriz posits,

literacy is not something that radiates out from an identifiable central place neither it is simply
particular to bounded sociocultural places. Rather, literacy is fluid and relational and, because
of this spatial property, people can bridge the meaning-making gap between “here and now”
 Pedagogies: An International Journal 69

and “there and then” by drawing on diverse mediating texts and, thereby creating a complex
co-presence of different understandings that sit in relations of power. (Kostogriz, 2004, p. 2)

However, in intercultural encounters online, a student’s ability to appreciate this “complex

co-presence of different understandings that sit in relations of power”, and to enact
“semiotic motion across real and imagined boundaries created within and between
cultures, social groups and ethnic communities” (Kostogriz, 2004), would seem to be
challenged by a video medium that, in much popular and commercial discourse, promises
its own im-mediacy, rather than the foregrounding of boundaries or differences. As
O’Dowd writes with respect to real-time audio/visual communication in telecollaborative
language learning projects (e.g. Belz & Thorne, 2006; Guth & Helm, 2010; O’Dowd,
2007), “The contribution of visual images to online communication and the immediacy of
‘live’ face-to-face interaction seem to offer a much more authentic and personal side to
long-distance telecollaboration” (O’Dowd, 2006, pp. 92–93). Such a foregrounding of the
immediate, face-to-face, interpersonal aspects of communication enabled by videochat,
while speaking to one compelling goal of language-learning telecollaborations such as
Le français en (première) ligne (cf. Develotte, 2008), may risk masking other pluralities
and differences, as Schneider and von der Emde (2006) argue. They write, citing Kramsch
and Thorne (2002), p. 85,

In addition to realizing that there is not one right way to communicate (or disagree), students
also need to be aware that cyberspace is not, as Kramsch and Thorne warn, a “utopian middle
landscape, where native speakers and non-native speakers can have access to one another as
linguistic entities on a screen, unfettered by historical, geographical, national, or institutional
identities”. (Schneider & von der Emde, 2006, p. 181)

As I hope is amply demonstrated in the pages ahead, the spatial experiences of language
and literacy learners online appear to be anything but uniform. To observations such as
Leander and McKim’s that “the emerging social spaces of Internet practices are complexly
interpenetrated with social spaces considered to be ‘before’ and ‘outside of’ the Internet”
(Leander & McKim, 2003, p. 218), I apply a typology of attention spaces proposed by
Jones (2005) as a sort of conceptual scaffolding for teasing apart and working with
expressions of such “complexly interpenetrated social spaces”. In analysing the online
(chatroom) use of spatially indexical language (this, that, here, there, etc.) by secondary
school English students (first group) and gay men (second group) in Hong Kong, he finds
a descriptive way into practitioners’ “sites of engagement”, or, “those moments in time
and points and space where mediated actions happen” (p. 141; see also Jones, 2010).
These sites of engagement, he argues, are the result of repeated, sedimented practices of
paying attention, and then directing intention in action; in computer-mediated commu-
nication, he writes, “there are at least five kinds of space towards which users can orient
their attention” (Jones, 2005, p. 144). These are:

(1) Physical spaces: The physical, material surroundings of the computer user. The
location of the computer user’s body.
(2) Virtual spaces: The immersive spaces of the software and online tools with which
computer users communicate.
(3) Relational space: A space that is created by the “state of talk” between
participants.
70 D. Malinowski

(4) Screen space: The computer screen and its (most often windowed)
representations.
(5) Third spaces4: Locales, areas, places referred to in the process of online interac-
tion. (Jones, 2005, p. 144)

In the following sections of this paper, I adopt this typology in order to interpret the
hybrid online/offline worlds indexed in the drawings of Janet, Vo, Iztli and 62 other
language student-drawers, whose learning experiences I have previously reported on
(Malinowski, 2011; Malinowski & Kramsch, 2014).

V. Drawing methods for the spaces of online language learning

The Français en (première) ligne telecollaborative project mentioned in the previous
sections of this paper, and discussed in greater detail here and below, is a multi-year
partnership facilitating online language lessons between graduate student teacher trainees
enrolled in French as a foreign language (Français langue étrangère) courses at the
Université de Lyon 2 and École normale supérieure in Lyon and undergraduate students
of French at UC Berkeley, USA (Develotte, 2008). Every week for approximately
8 weeks in the spring semester, the Berkeley students and their tutors in Lyon were
joined in groups of either one or two on a side, in computer laboratories on their
respective campuses. There they engaged in 1 hour lessons conducted via Skype, then
and still a popular platform for one-to-one or small-group telecollaborations.5 The French
tutors, who were undergoing training in pedagogical and technological competences for
teaching French online, prepared communicative lesson plans to roughly correspond with
the Berkeley curriculum, which was built around the textbook Sur le vif. For approxi-
mately 50 minutes on Tuesday mornings in Berkeley, the tutors led the students in
communicative activities addressing themes such as education, youth culture, modes of
transportation, immigration, national identity and television and cinema.
Data collected at both sites include laboratory and classroom field notes and analytic
memos, transcripts from semi-structured interviews with participants, video and audio
captures of the online tutorials and – the central focus of this paper – the students’
drawings of their personal and affective responses to learning French online. My own
research (Malinowski, 2011; Malinowski & Kramsch, 2014) has generally followed a
qualitative case study approach in the ethnographic tradition (e.g. Dyson & Genishi,
2005), with particular attention being paid to the transformed space, time and representa-
tional technologies, the explication of which is a foundational concern of online and
virtual ethnography (e.g. Boellstorff, 2008; Hine, 2000, 2005; Markham & Baym, 2009;
Miller & Slater, 2000).
The ability to read student drawings for the particular constellations of spaces they
moved between as they learned French (as outlined at the end of the previous section) was
afforded by a fortuitous homework assignment. After their 2 month telecollaboration had
ended (a point in time corresponding to the middle of the Berkeley semester), the
students’ classroom teacher assigned them to create a drawing in which they would
represent their subjective responses to their online learning experience. The homework
prompt read as follows:

Draw “Tuesdays” with your tutors. The drawing should be a depiction of your personal
experience of these interactions. What do you see? Who’s there in the computer lab (your
partner, your tutors)? What’s the lab like? How do you feel? What do you think about? This is
 Pedagogies: An International Journal 71

an assignment that’s personal, subjective, affective. You can include images or words in order
to talk about your associations, your emotions. You’re not obliged to be artists! Have fun
with it!

Three examples of students’ productions have already been shown in Section III. The
content of others’ drawings was no doubt influenced by the presence in the prompt of
directions to remember “seeing” the lab, other students, tutors, etc.; yet questions of
exactly who and what was seen, what was to be shown, and how, were answered
differently by every student. While some primarily depicted key themes and concepts
discussed by the student–tutor partners without visual evidence of the physical environ-
ment or individuals involved, others focused in detail upon the mediational means of the
interactions (computer screens, headsets, networks). The variation in form, content and
style across these drawings – explained in follow-up interviews by the student-designers
themselves – made them valuable sources of insight into the pedagogical realities they
experienced.6 In particular, the social semiotic notion of “transduction” (Kress, 2003,
p. 36; see development of this concept in Nelson, 2006), indicating the shift of semiotic
material across communicative modes (and one of the “engines” of synaesthesia), made
these student drawings a rich source of insight into the productive role of space(s) in
enabling language learning and transcultural understanding, on one hand, while introdu-
cing new barriers and ambiguities, on the other. That is to say, students’ readings of the
sometimes contradictory and always multilayered spaces that defined their learning
experiences may have found shape in visual forms, when they could not easily have
been put into words. In the next section, then, I report on the results of a visual content
analysis of a corpus of 65 student drawings from 5 years of Berkeley–Lyon telecolla-
borative language lessons, with reference to the spatial categories introduced by Jones
(2005) in order to help elucidate this phenomenon.7

VI. Content analysis: the mixed spaces of student drawings

With respect to the mini-corpus of 65 drawings produced by student participants in the
Français en (première) ligne project, visual content analysis proved to be a valuable tool
in demonstrating the plural, heterogeneous pedagogical spaces occupied by the students
during telecollaborations with their overseas tutors. Primary content was divided into four
main categories (People, Language, Technology and Setting), each of which was divided
into two or more sub-categories. In turn, to each of the sub-categories were assigned one
or more variables that described the specific content of each drawing in a more granular
fashion; then, one or more attention spaces, according to the typology introduced in the
last section (cf. Jones, 2005), were assigned to each variable. The presence or absence of
each variable was tabulated in a spreadsheet, allowing for comparison of the relative
frequency of each. The results of the content analysis appear in Table 1.
It should be noted that, while the determination and designation of the four main
categories was made by the research team at the analysis stage, the presence or absence of
each of the variables in any particular drawing was substantiated by the student-drawers
themselves, as part of the recorded and transcribed final project interviews. The Berkeley
students sat with their partners and two members of the research team (including me) as
they described their drawings, their intentions behind how and what they drew and the
significance of any abstract or unclear elements. These narrated significances were also
the basis for the correspondences drawn between the variables generated in the analytic
process, and the pre-defined attention spaces. The transformation of these drawings into
72 D. Malinowski

Table 1. Visual content analysis of student drawings. “Type(s) of space indexed” refers to
typology of attention spaces adapted from Jones (2005).

Type(s) of space Number %

Category Sub-category Variable Indexed (tot = 65) (x/65)

People People (any) 58 89

On-screen Tutor(s) R, V, S 29 45
Self R, V, S 17 26
Partner R, V, S 12 18
Off-screen Others R, P, V 36 55
Self R, P, V 37 57
Parts Parts P, V, R 12 18
Language Language (any) 53 82
Utterances Own R, V 30 46
Others’ R, V 25 38
Labeling Thematic R, V, S 34 52
Technology Hardware Computer(s) P, R 33 51
Head set(s) P, R 25 38
Keyboard/mouse P 17 26
Research apparatus P, R, V 5 8
On-screen Content S, V 32 49
Skype/Visu window S 26 40
Other window(s) S 2 3
Setting Immediate Lab/physical env’t P, O 14 22
Geographic Geographical division / P, O 20 31
delineation
Landmarks 0, V 13 20
Network O, R, P 15 23
Note: P = Physical spaces; V = Virtual spaces; R = Relational spaces; S = Screen spaces; O = Other spaces (see
Section IV).

research data through iterative processes of viewing, verbalization and inquiry by groups
of four (two students and two researchers), taking place after the telecollaboration had
finished, and in a language centre lounge separate from the students’ site of learning, thus
represented a sort of collaborative and “transductive” accomplishment in itself, creating
new meanings that may not have existed before the scene of the interview (see Goodwin,
1994, on “professional vision”).
With respect to the “People” category, for instance, such collaborative readings helped
us to ascertain that figures drawn in chairs with their backs facing the drawing’s viewer,
and seated in front of computer screens, were almost invariably the students’ off-screen
selves, as appears in Figure 4. Indeed, as may be seen in Table 1 above, students depicted
themselves off-screen, in the language laboratory or other physical room in 37 out of 65
cases (57%), more often than they depicted all others, including their fellow classmates,
tutors, classroom teacher, researchers and student assistants combined. On-screen, the
tutors were the most frequent to appear (45% of drawings), but the students also drew
themselves on screen (in 26% of all drawings), most often in the small inset self-
monitoring window that is now near ubiquitous on Skype, Google Hangouts and other
web and videoconferencing platforms.
Considering this paper’s interest in the spatial configurations underlying synaesthesia
and multimodal learning processes more broadly, content from drawings in the “Setting”
and “Technology” categories is of central importance. Again, the students’ own narrations
of their drawings were crucial in reading abstract or metaphorical symbols employed
 Pedagogies: An International Journal 73

Figure 4. Student drawing showing self from behind, facing computer screen.

there: the zigzag lines with arrows in the upper-right portion of Figure 5, for instance,
were said to show the compression of geographic space online. Drawings such as this one,
that explicitly depicted the online network joining the Lyon and Berkeley classrooms with
visual devices such as solid, dotted or zigzag lines, accounted for 15 out of 65, or 23% of
all drawings. Approximately one-third (31%) of drawings, including that shown in
Figure 5, depicted the geographic division between the US and France, or demonstrated
other map-like elements (generally, categorized as “Other spaces”). Still others, as in
Figures 4 and 5, focused more on on-screen content (“Screen spaces”) such as browser
and web conferencing windows (49%), and/or included other hardware such as the
headsets that students and tutors donned at all times (38%), or showed discernible
elements (doors, chalkboards, tables, chairs, etc.) of the “Physical spaces” in Berkeley
and Lyon where the exchanges took place (22%).
Clearly, the attentional and interactive spaces alluded to or depicted more explicitly in
any given student drawing are not singular, and are not mutually exclusive. The on-screen
elements in the drawing in Figure 4 – by a student named Joan, in the Spring of 2010 –
may be said to belong both to the “Screen space” of the web conferencing software
window layout, and to the “Virtual spaces” of the prototypically French and American
cultural content that Joan said typified the interactions. The musical note, the strip of film,
the open book, and the “French” wine, grapes and baguette in the yellow-coloured area
that surrounds the computer screen also belong to these “Virtual” interactive spaces, and
not to the Physical space of the language laboratory. This physical space is not, however,
absent from the drawing; Joan explained in her interview that, outside the yellow light of
the interaction, the “greyed-out” portions of the drawing point towards the other students
74 D. Malinowski

Figure 5. Student drawing depicting complex intersections of physical, geographic and network
spaces.

and their computer monitors, tables, chairs and other “elements” other elements in the
language laboratory.
The overlapping of all five attentional spaces may also be seen in Figure 5, a drawing
by Stacy, a classmate of Joan’s in 2010: Screen space and relationship space intermingle
as Stacy’s emoticon-like tutor smiles back at her from inside the video window. The
outline of the computer screen, the stem of the monitor and Stacy’s own hand grasping the
mouse give a first-person perspective on the physical space she occupied during the
exchanges – a laboratory space that was also, seen at a different scale and moment in time,
a space of relations between fellow Berkeley students as they entered the language
laboratory (labelled “B-3” at the top left of the drawing). The Other, geographic spaces
 Pedagogies: An International Journal 75

of the US and Europe, and their virtualization/reduction to the territories of California and
France (and then again to the points labelled “Berkeley” and “Lyon” in her drawing), and
the virtual/metaphorical networked elements linking Relationship and Other spaces to
Screen and Virtual spaces are realized visually in the overlays of arrows and lines that
reach across the “ocean”, joining the general geographic location of other participants and
physical landmarks to their textual and image representations on Stacy’s screen.
Such a conglomeration of spaces is perhaps to be expected in drawings such as these.
Indeed, the ability to imaginatively join various times, places, people and topics together
with the uses of line and word, shape, shade and colour (and the lack thereof) on a
delimited flat surface can be considered among the definitional characteristics of the
drawing itself. In addition, Jones (2005, 2010) – and the mediated discourse analytic
and spatial theoretical perspectives that underwrite his spatial typology (e.g. Lefebvre,
1991; Scollon & Scollon, 2003, 2004) – is clear that, in lived practice, the relevance
of these spaces ebbs and flows with the moment-to-moment intersections and patternings
of history, discourse, material environment, social interaction and embodied experience of
the youth he studies. Focusing on secondary school students’ “inability to pay attention”
and remain within the teacher’s control in computer lab English classes, Jones (2010)
remarks that “spaces in which competing attention structures overlap are sites of social
struggle in which people reproduce or resist particular social positions” (p. 165). These
spaces are also, viewed from the first-person perspective of those who compose ideas in
new languages and across communicative modes in online language lessons (and in the
view of those who, later, depict their experiences in drawings and other mediums), the
multilayered site of synaesthetic perception and expression. It is to this site, in the first
person, that I turn in the next section of this paper.

VII. A space missing?: student bodies as loci of meaning-making

Viewed from afar, the typology of spaces I employed at the end of Section IV to
understand the “locations” of individuals’ attention and action in mixed off/online envir-
onments seems complete. Employed originally by Jones (2005) in order to understand
“sites of engagement” across the complex physical/digital environments and multiple
timescales of computer-mediated communication,8 this spatial typology subsumes that
which takes place on screen and off-screen: the physical arena of the computer user’s
material surroundings and the computer itself as a material artefact; the computer screen
as a surface of projected representations; the immersive virtual spaces constituted by the
interior (software, web, etc.) worlds of the computer; the interactive relational space
between interactants online and, understanding the computer users’ awareness of or
reference to more removed geographic locales to constitute a space unto itself, the
“third spaces” (or, as I have called them, “other places”) invoked through various
symbolic means. Indeed, landmarks are present in Janet’s, Vo’s, Iztli’s (Section III) and
10 other student drawings; “other places” such as Paris’ Arc de Triomphe and San
Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge formed a frequent backdrop for discussion and activities
in the Français en (première) ligne lessons.
Yet Jones is the first to point out that such a typology of spaces is only as complete
as the particular constellation of purposes, practices and identities brought to bear upon it.
In particular, as a collection of “negotiated social orientations” (Jones, 2005, p. 144)
towards which attention can be focused, a typology such as this leaves out a critical space
of prime importance both to the participants in gay men’s chatrooms of Jones’ analysis,
and to the Berkeley students of French whose visual discourse this paper analyses. Jones
76 D. Malinowski

points to the presence, in his chatroom data, of “a sixth use of deixis not accounted for”
in the above typology, from men who “seek to decrease the separation between virtual
and physical space”. Their use of deixis, he explains, refers “not to any external physical
or virtual space but, rather, to the space of one’s own body, or the ‘self’” (Jones, 2005,
p. 147).
In their quite different online communicative context, the Berkeley students’ frequent
depictions of themselves both on-screen and off-screen (in over 60% of drawings combined),
and the infrequent but still significant appearance of bodily parts (both of oneself and others,
in 12 drawings out of 65), suggest the relevance of bodies and bodily spaces in their online
language lessons as well. While this may not be obvious when perusing drawings such as
Janet’s, Vo’s and Iztli’s (Section III), where conventional cut-out images of heads or drawn
upper torsos/busts and heads stand in for “people”, drawings such as June’s and Christine’s
are reminders that, in desktop web conferencing at least, heads and shoulders are in effect
removed from, and only rarely seen together with, the rest of the participants’ bodies. June’s
drawing (Figure 6), by way of illustration, shows a hybrid classroom/web conferencing
space, an amalgamation of the physical and the virtual: the teacher leads a class of just two
students (June and her partner), in a room with two clocks showing the times in both Lyon
(evening) and Berkeley (morning). Strikingly, the tutor seems to be both standing in a
physical room and appearing on screen, as her head and shoulders are framed by a floating
rectangle, and keyboard and mouse are laid out in front of her. The (online, enframed) frontal
bust motif is the defining trait of the online interactions for June’s classmate Christine, who
draws her partner and two tutors in the square 2 × 2 video array of the Visu web conferencing
system used in the project in 2010 (Figure 7).
Evident in the drawing by June – and strikingly visible in earlier drawings by Stacy
(Figure 5), Joan (Figure 4), Vo (Figure 2) and others – is the bodily involvement of the

Figure 6. June’s drawing, depicting the tutor standing in front of her two students in a hybrid
physical/virtual space.
 Pedagogies: An International Journal 77

Figure 7. Christine’s drawing, depicting the Visu web conferencing video window, partitioned into
four parts to show the two tutors in Lyon and two students in Berkeley.

student in overlapping and (we might surmise from both the students’ depictions and
narrations) contradictory demands of multiple attention spaces. Janet and her tutor
(Figure 1) exchange colourful ideas about cultural and political topics, yet they can
never touch or reach the place of the other beyond the virtual wall that divides them;
Joan appears to enjoy being transported by her online language lessons to a place of
film, music and wine, but this may be at the expense of awareness of others in the room
(see Malinowski, 2011, pp. 204–206 on the phenomenon of “disappearing classmates”
in small-group telecollaborative settings); similarly, perhaps, Stacy’s drawing shows her
hand’s clicking involvement in a form of mediated communication that, she acknowl-
edges, makes surrounding physical territories (Spain to the west of France, “et le reste
des États-Unis” (and the rest of the United States)) irrelevant (“n’importe quoi” (what-
ever), she writes). As they communicate, students feel, at times, metonymically reduced
to the eyes, ears and mouths that strain to understand and produce the audiovisual
signals needed to communicate (Jennifer’s and Tim’s drawings, Figure 8); they are
aware of the eyes of others intently observing and reducing them to the most basic of
existences (Ann’s and Cybil’s drawings, Figure 9); and they do so all the while knowing
that they are being not just observed but recorded (Mandy’s and Hyunjung’s drawings,
Figure 10).
Clearly, then, the French language learners of the Français en (première) ligne project
are not just intellectually involved in their online lessons; their experiences appear to echo
those of the undergraduate student multilingual subjects surveyed a decade earlier by
Kramsch (2009) about their associations and feelings with respect to learning a new
language. Of their metaphor-rich written responses, she writes,

Far from being perceived as primarily a tool for communication and exchange of information,
the foreign language is first and foremost experienced physically, linguistically, emotionally,
78 D. Malinowski

Figure 8. Jennifer’s and Tim’s drawings (left and right, respectively) showing eyes and mouths
removed from their bodies.

Figure 9. Ann’s and Cybil’s drawings (left and right, respectively), demonstrating their awareness
of being observed and exposed under observation by others online.

artistically […] It is an intimate encounter between learners and their bodies, between the
body and its new mode of meaning-making. (Kramsch, 2009, p. 60)

To that, as Kramsch herself makes clear, the project of foreign language learning online
raises a new set of challenges, not least of which is maintaining the integrity of one’s own
subjectivity in a medium where physical and other spaces may be overwritten by the
virtual, where relationship spaces are both entered into and obscured via disembodied
representations in headphones and screens, and where the echoing and mirroring effects of
those same technologies encourage learners’ constant encounters with themselves
(see Malinowski & Kramsch, 2014). As Kramsch writes, now addressing the plight of
the online, “virtual subject”,
 Pedagogies: An International Journal 79

Figure 10. Mandy’s and Hyunjung’s drawings, foregrounding the web conferencing apparatus of
vision and observation (recording dots on the left, and webcam “monster” on the right, respectively).

hyperreality can liberate communication from the social and cultural constraints imposed by
the real world and facilitate the acquisition and use of another language through encounters in
cyberspace. This liberation can potentially foster the growth of a postmodern, reflexive
subject that looks at language as well as through language. But it can also transform it into
what Mitchell (2003) has called a “nodular” subject or “Me++”, that depends for its very
existence on the networks that link it to other nodular subjects. This dependency can in turn
be the source of a wide-spread anxiety. (Kramsch, 2009, p. 180)

In the next and final section, I will take up the case of such a “nodular subject” from
among the Berkeley students whose drawings have been surveyed in this paper. In her
visualization, striking in its disembodied representation, we see something of the angst
and potential of the networked language learner, re(con)figured as a nexus of meaning
potential in a space that is at once virtual, relational and semantic. Crucially, though, I
argue that it is also in the linking of spatial and bodily meanings in representations like
this that we may better approach the phenomena of synaesthesia in multimodal meaning-
making.

VIII. Synaesthesia: putting it all back together

This essay has taken us in a somewhat circuitous route in an effort to better understand a
phenomenon that, from psychophysiological perspectives, has been called “a genuine
sensory/perceptual phenomenon” and “neurological disorder” (Ramachandran &
Hubbard, pp. 4, 6), “a simultaneous cerebral processing of all sensory modalities”
(Ternaux, 2003, p. 321) and “parallel sensation”, “a union of the senses” (Cytowic,
2002). And, from a language and literacy learning vantage point, as we have seen in
Section I, synaesthesia has been described as the site of “creativity” in multimodal
meaning-making, as semiotic material is reworked within modes (transformation) and
refigured across them (transduction) in complex and creative processes of design
80 D. Malinowski

(see Kress, 2003, 2010; Nelson, 2006, 2008). However, whether it is seen as primarily
neurological, sensory, cognitive or aesthetic, discourses of synaesthesia speak frequently
of it in terms of its individual dimensions, its interiority.
In this sense, the approach taken in the preceding pages – to examine the multilayered
spatial experiences of undergraduate student participants in online, intercultural foreign
language lessons and, further, to do so through readings of visual artefacts they produced
well after the fact of their online lessons – may seem counterintuitive. How might the
quickly produced student drawings of their tutors, partners and selves, displayed in dialog
on computer screens, or sketches of French and US maps with imaginary lines connecting
them, or a self-conscious brain-in-a-jar (all from third-semester students tasked with
acquiring French as a foreign language at that), contribute to our understanding of
synaesthetic processes of agentive design, processes that “focus on transformation rather
than on acquisition” (Kress, 2005, p. 20)?
And yet, after reviewing ongoing attempts by investigators of synaesthesia in recent
decades to unravel the mixed neuropsychological and aesthetic properties of this phenom-
enon, Best (2003) concludes concisely, “Synaesthesia forces us to question our assump-
tions about the relationship between perception and reality.” This is precisely the lesson
that I have learned from my own engagement with the mixed-medium sketches, drawings
and collages produced by the Berkeley learners of French online, and a conclusion
reached as well by Jones (2005), whose typology of “attention spaces” I have borrowed
in analysing the student drawings: questions of embodiment and embodied experience are
imminent in, and indeed inseparable from, questions of where one is (residing, acting,
speaking, designing). And this appears to be particularly the case for the ambiguous,
multilayered and still ill-understood places of online learning and expression.
In this regard, one student’s drawing stood out in the analysis, both for what it showed
and for what it did not. Elizabeth, a senior who was majoring in architecture and had had a
short field experience in France, mentioned in her interview that she was attempting to
show in abstract form the difference in expressive potential between the students and the
tutors (see Figure 11).
She and her partner, represented as the two nodes in the bottom section of the
drawing, were restricted in their ability to express themselves in French, a fact that was
indicated in the two-dimensionality and impoverished number of “networked”
connections among the linguistic elements that she spells out with words in the list at
right: les mots (words), la grammaire (grammar), les structures (structures), etc. The
relative simplicity of the bottom half of the network stands in opposition to the seeming
three-dimensionality and rich interconnectedness of the meaning-making networks
available to the tutors, above the horizontal dashed line that Elizabeth identified as the
screen. Crucially, this barrier divided the participants not just in their access to linguistic
resources, but to the very embodied instruments of expression and, indeed, life in another
language: les voix (voices), in the upper-left of the drawing; le son (sound) on top;
les visages (faces) appear in the middle of the network; l’images (images) and
les memoires (memories) are on the right. In the networked space first represented in
this drawing, and in Elizabeth’s subsequent narration, we are confronted with the disturb-
ing possibility that the inability of a language learner to “reach” into the virtual and
relational spaces of online, intercultural language lessons may be felt directly, or under-
stood, as a loss of her own body.
Here I use expressions of low modality – we are confronted with the possibility that
spatial and embodied experience may be organically related in such settings – because even
Elizabeth, during her interview with her partner and another researcher, resisted the idea that
 Pedagogies: An International Journal 81

Figure 11. Elizabeth’s drawing.

the nodes and lines her drawing be interpreted too literally (see Malinowski, 2011, p. 102–
107). Yet when verbal and visual evidence mounts that, online as well as offline, bodies
may be “dilated along an entire space that is both exterior and interior to it” (Foucault, 2006,
p. 233), or that, even online, “having a body is, for a living creature, to be intervolved in a
definite environment” (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. 82), I would suggest that the drawings of
Elizabeth and the other Berkeley students can serve as richly instructive signposts in the
quest for understanding about synaesthesia in language and literacy learning. Perhaps, the
geographical and the interpersonal, the virtual and the physical, and the screen and the body
need each other, in ways we have only begun to understand.

Notes
1. Recent reviews of scholarship on the centuries-old fascination with, and research of, people for
whom “one type of stimulation evokes the sensation of another”, such as when hearing a sound
82 D. Malinowski

produces sensations of colour, include Best (2003), Hochel and Milán (2008), Hubbard and
Ramachandran (2005) and Ternaux (2003).
2. I use this term to describe what I intend, and what has become, a hybrid form of academic
writing that diverges somewhat in its structure and exposition of ideas from the standard
research paper. In doing so, I have in mind Cosgrove’s (2008) description of the essay form
in the British university tradition: the essay does not “set out to demonstrate or demolish a
previously stated theory or hypothesis. Rather it addresses a question, a curiosity, an event or
occurrence, and within a limited space of writing, seems to elaborate this issue, expose its
various facets and explicate its implications, all from the perspective of experience, reflection
and prior study by the essay’s author” (Cosgrove, 2008, p. 9).
3. The project website appears at http://w3.u-grenoble3.fr/fle-1-ligne/index.html.
4. For the remainder of this paper, instead of the term “third spaces”, I prefer to use the “Other
places”, primarily due to the existing uses of the former term in contexts of critical language,
literacy and cultural studies (e.g. Bhabha, 1994; Kostogriz, 2006; Kramsch, 1993).
5. Throughout this paper, I employ the term “telecollaboration”, defined by Guth and Helm
(2010, p. 4) for language-learning contexts as “Internet- based intercultural exchange between
people of different cultural/national backgrounds, set up in an institutional context with the
aim of developing both language skills and intercultural communicative competence through
structured tasks”. Researched examples of such telecollaborations utilizing Skype include Levy
(2009), O’Dowd (2007) and Sykes, Oskoz, and Thorne (2008).
6. On the analysis of visual artefacts in qualitative research, see, for instance, Berger (1973),
Collier and Collier (1986) and Pink (2007).
7. Content analysis is by now a long-established method in the social sciences for working with
collections of advertisements, paintings, magazine covers and other collections of visual
documents; it has had particular utility in the analysis of trends and changes in representation
in the popular media (Bell, 2000; Rose, 2007; Sturken & Cartwright, 2009). As Bell notes, this
method is “a systematic, observational method used for testing hypotheses” in collections of
images, one that functions by “quantification of samples of observable content classified into
distinct categories.” He continues to point out that “It does not analyse individual images or
individual “visual texts”. Instead, it allows description of fields of visual representation by
describing the constituents of one or more defined areas of representation, periods or types of
images” (Bell, 2000, p. 14).
8. For the purposes of this discussion, I am including mobile phones, tablets and other mobile
devices as “computers”.

Notes on contributor
David Malinowski is a Language and Technology Research Specialist at Yale University, where he
conducts research on new media and technology in foreign and second language education. His
projects have included an investigation into the changing nature of “foreignness” in Internet-
mediated language learning projects, and the development of new tools and teaching resources
using the multilingual city as text.

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