Multimodal Teaching and Learning: The Rhetorics of the Science Classroom

Description

This book takes a radically new look at communication, and in doing so presents a series of challenges to accepted views on language, on communication, on teaching and, above all, on learning. Drawing on extensive research in science classrooms, it presents a view of communication in which language is not necessarily communication - image, gesture, speech, writing, models, spatial and bodily codes. The action of students in learning is radically rethought: all participants in communication are seen as active transformers of the meaning resources around them, and this approach opens a new window on the process of learning. In demonstrating that communication always draws on a multiplicity of modes of representation, and of communication, the book constitutes a profound challenge to accepted views of language as the dominant, or perhaps only significant and rational means of representation. Instead, the book suggests that communication proceeds by many modes, of which language is one and not necessarily the dominant one, and it opens a whole new set of questions: if language is not the sole, or even the dominant mode, what are the roles of other modes and how are the functions of language altered by the fact that it may be occupying a co-equal or even a minor role in relation to the mode of image, for instance? While the book comes from the environment of school education, its arguments should have repercussions well beyond that: especially on views of language in all areas of application, and on issues of communication in the broadest sense.

Gunther Rolf Kress MBE is Professor of Semiotics and Education in the Department of Culture, Communication and Media at IOE, UCL's Faculty of Education and Society, University College London, UK. Carey Jewitt is a Senior Researcher, Culture Communication and Societies, Institute of Education, University of London. Jon Ogborn is Professor of Science Education, University of Sussex. Charalampos Tsatsarelis is Director of Research and Developments Centre, The Ziridis Schools, Athens.

'Multimodal Teaching and Learning: The Rhetorics of the Science Classroom achieves the rare goal of explicating multimodality as both theory and practice. This is an importantly concrete analysis, derived from extended, careful, and interdisciplinary observation, which challenges our thinking about how meaning and knowledge are shaped by our modes of communication. The book appeals to a wide range of scholars and practitioners far beyond the science classroom.' Professor Ron Scollon, Department of Linguistics, Georgetown University. * Blurb from reviewer *