Negotiating Memory and Creativity: Choices of Image-text Representations in the Creative Writing Classroom

This paper discusses the incorporation of images beside text in contemporary pedagogy at higher education. This is due to the visual turn which prioritizes the visual, and the changes in technology which innovate information distribution. The interest on images and text is evident in the e-poetry created by three learners of a creative writing classroom. This paper aims to study the choices of selected representations from the context of their social memory as they interpret the past events of Malaysian Independence through their revisioning and techniques of production. The theoretical construct to support the discussion is multimodality social semiotics analysis (Kress & van Leeuwen 1996, 2006; Kress, 2010; Machin & Mayr 2013) which shows the relationship among ‘images-text, contexts and social practice’ of the multimodal resources through the interests of the learners as the sign-makers. An iconography analysis to examine the images and texts chosen is adopted and adapted to discover their multilayered meanings. Finding from the research reveals that on interpreting the idea on patriotis m based on Malaysia's historical past, the learners’ preferences over selective images and text disclose their individual identities over collective social, as the citizen of Malaysia's post-Independence.