An interdisciplinary engagement with Kress’s social semiotic concept of agency: Future directions in multimodal research in museums and schools

This talk discusses instantiations of agency as key in the design of semiotic work we produce, arguing that multimodal texts bear traces of a dialogue between us and the institutions that regulate our semiotic action. This multimodal social semiotic theorization of agency is exemplified through multimodal texts: picture books in the English classroom, student’s movement in the math classroom, drawings from an archaeological site and visitors’ movement in museums. The discussion of agency is set against the backdrop of a retrospective to Gunther Kress’s work and the archaeology of multimodality, while mapping current debates and future directions in the field. Bibliography Cimasko, T. & Shin, D. (2017). Multimodal Resemiotization and Authorial Agency in an L2 Writing Classroom. Written Communication 34(4), 387 –413. Cope B, Kalantzis M (2020) Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge University Press. Diamantopoulou, S. (forthcoming) Children’s engagement with the pedagogic discourse as a political and social achievement: Semiotic practices in children’s visual representations. In Starc, S. and Komninos, N. (eds) Diamantopoulou, S. (2021). The multimodality of English as a school subject: Mapping meanings about literacy discourses on students' work in the case of a museum and a school project. In A. Baldry, N. Vasta (Eds.), Multiliteracy Advances and Challenges in Hypermedia Envrironments. Udine, Italy: Udine University. Diamantopoulou, S., & Ørevik, S. (2021). Multimodality in English language learning: The case of EAL. In Diamantopoulou, S. & Ørevik, S. (Eds.). (2022). Multimodality in English Language Learning. Routledge. Jewitt, C., Bezemer, J., & O'Halloran, K. (2016). Introducing Multimodality (1st ed.). Routledge. Kress, G. (2010). Multimodality: A social semiotic approach to contemporary communication. Abingdon: Routledge. Klemencic, M. (2015). What is student agency: An ontological exploration in the context of research on student engagement. In KLEMENČIČ, M., BERGAN, S., PRIMOŽIČ, R. (eds.) Student engagement in Europe: society, higher education and student governance (pp. 11-29). Council of Europe Higher Education Series No. 20. Strasbourg: Council of Europe Publishing. Lim, F. V. & Nguyen, T. T. H. (2022). ‘If you have the freedom, you don’t need to even think hard’ – considerations in designing for student agency through digital multimodal composing in the language classroom. Language and Education https://doi.org/10.1080/09500782.2022.210787

The multimodality of English language learning: A social semiotic approach

The talk offers an introduction to Gunther Kress's multimodal social semiotic theory for communication and explores its implications for the school subject of English. Some key questions that will be addressed are: What is multimodal about the subject of English? What questions does multimodality ask of English as a school subject? How can multimodality inform the methods and practices we employ for English Language Teaching? Multimodal theorizations of teaching and learning, as well as their implementation in research, teaching practice and curriculum development in various parts of the world have marked a relatively recent paradigm shift. In this talk, using examples from research, we attend to various aspects of teaching and learning, ranging from textbook design, classroom interaction and layout to assessment issues. This is in order to discuss how multimodality theory can inform the way we design for and recognize learning within institutional contexts as well as beyond them and in the meaning makers’ own text worlds. Recent and forthcoming publications relevant to this talk Kress, G., Bezemer, J., Diamantopoulou, S., Jewitt, C., Mavers, D. (2021). A social semiotic perspective on learning: Transformative engagement in a changing world. In Kress, G., Selander, S., Säljö, R., Wulf, C. (Eds.), Learning as Social Practice: Beyond Education as an Individual Enterprise. (pp. 70-102). Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Diamantopoulou, S. (2021). The multimodality of English as a school subject: Mapping meanings about literacy discourses on students' work in the case of a museum and a school project. In Baldry, A., Vasta, N. (Eds.), Multiliteracy Advances and Challenges in Hypermedia Envrironments. Udine, Italy: Udine University. Diamantopoulou, S., Ørevik, S. (Eds.). (2021). Multimodality in English Language Learning. Routledge. Diamantopoulou, S. (forthcoming). Student agency in the creation of multimodal texts: A political project. In Starc, S. and Komninos, N. (eds) Case Studies in Multimodal Texts in Schools. Peter Lang Diamantopoulou, S. & Ørevik, S. (forthcoming) Multimodality in English Language Learning. In Chapelle, C. (ed.) Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics 2nd edition. Wiley. Ørevik, S., Skulstad, A., & Diamantopoulou, S. (forthcoming). Multimodal Literacy in EAL education. In Querol-Julián, M. and Fortanet-Gómez, I.(eds). Designing Learning with Digital Technologies: Perspectives from Multimodality in Education

Engaging with children's graphic ensembles of an archaeological site: A multi-modal social semiotic approach to learning

Children’s drawings have been widely used in the field of museum education as indicators for learning, as well as means for evaluating the teaching that takes place in a museum or a heritage site. This paper employs social semiotics and multimodality as tools for introducing a different perspective when it comes to building a descriptive and an interpretative framework for analysing children’s production, as representative of their learning. The insight into their work is based on the assumptions that learning can be multi-modally mediated through a particular pedagogy and further be made accessible to us through the material realisation of children’s production across multiple modes. The paper aims to explore the implications of this position for generating knowledge about children’s learning. The main argument discussed here is that engaging with a child’s graphic ensemble through a multimodal and social semiotic perspective can enable us, hypothetically, to recover children’s meanings about the archaeological site as well as the aspects of their overall learning experience. Viewing their graphic ensembles as constructions that are interest driven and multi-modally realized could open up more possibilities for accessing the agendas and interests that guide their learning. The paper further uses this visual material as an opportunity to argue that when engaging with children’s learning, multimodality can work not as a theory on its own means, but as the framework that conditions a theory (e.g. social semiotics and discourse) into a direction of encompassing more possibilities for reading their understanding of the world

National Gallery ‘Picture in Focus’ : evaluation of the national roll-out

This report builds on The National Gallery ‘Picture in Focus’ Project: A Research Evaluation by Dr Dominic Wyse and Laura McGarty (who were at the time from the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge) completed as part of their work for the National Gallery. Their work included two other research evaluations: 1) The National Gallery Initial Teacher Education Cultural Placement Partnership: A Research Evaluation, and 2) Evaluation Report: Out of Art into Storytelling. The current report is contextualised in the literature covered in these previous reports so doesn’t repeat this material. A key element across all these evaluations is the ways that art can be used as a stimulus for teaching and learning across a wide range of curriculum subjects and thematic areas

The Choreography of the Museum Experience: Visitors’ Designs for Learning

This paper acknowledges the multimodal and social nature of the museum experience. In this paper, we advocate the view that, within this multimodal frame, visitors are agents of their own design for learning as they engage with the exhibition and each other, redesigning the stories told by the curators. Audio-visual data from two individual projects in the UK illustrate the multimodal, embodied and social nature of the museum experience, which is often assumed to be ocularcentric and logocentric, and suggest that visitors learn by constantly making selections and transformations of the exhibition design, based on their own interests and responses to the various prompts emerging in and through social interaction. As such, the data analysis foregrounds the modes of movement, gaze, deixis and posture, which, alongside speech, are integral elements of the learning experience. Shifting our research focus on visitors’ redesigns of the exhibition poses a challenge to the curatorial design and has implications for exhibition-makers as it calls into question the assumptions of what should be learned and why, as well as how the resources in the exhibition space should be organised

Characterization of vertically aligned carbon nanotube forests grown on stainless steel surfaces

Vertically aligned carbon nanotube (CNT) forests are a particularly interesting class of nanomaterials, because they combine multifunctional properties, such as high energy absorption, compressive strength, recoverability and super-hydrophobicity with light weight. These characteristics make them suitable for application as coating, protective layers and antifouling substrates for metallic pipelines and blades. Direct growth of CNT forests on metals offers the possibility to transfer the tunable CNT functionalities directly onto the desired substrates. Here, we focus on characterizing the structure and mechanical properties, as well as wettability and adhesion of CNT forests grown on different types of stainless steel. We investigate the correlations between composition and morphology of the steel substrates with the micro-structure of the CNTs, and reveal how the latter ultimately controls the mechanical and wetting properties of the CNT forest. Additionally, we study the influence of substrate morphology on the adhesion of CNTs to their substrate. We highlight that the same structure-property relationships govern the mechanical performance of CNT forests grown on steels and on Si