Chapter 2: Sensory Literacies, the Body and Digital Media The human senses have always been vital... more Chapter 2: Sensory Literacies, the Body and Digital Media The human senses have always been vital to literacy practices, but are seldom acknowledged within literacy studies in education. Historically, the senses have been central to the aesthetics of representation across cultures . The senses are essential to everyday communication practices, necessitated by an expanding range of new technologies that interact with a greater range of the sensorium. Devos (2014, p.68) contends: "Sensory perception constitutes the primordial channel through which a person acquires knowledge about the material world". So too, the senses are primordial to channels of communication with the world and with others. What is needed in current understandings of literacy practices is systematic attention to the role of the full sensorium evoked in the process of meaning making. In this chapter, we build up examples of the sensorial dimensions of reading, extending Mills' (2016) theory of sensory literacies to focus on the role of haptics and interpretive meaning making possibilities with interactive tablet eBooks. The theory of sensory literacies concerns the multisensorial nature of literacy and communication practices that varies across cultures, practices and technologies. This theory extends ongoing work located in sensory studies more broadly, and draws on an anthropology of the senses. Some of the key principles include: a) the prioritization of the role of the human body in communication practices; b) a recognition that the mind is not separate from the body, nor the role of the body taken for granted, but mind and body are seen an integral to literacy practices; and c) a critique of Western hierarchies of knowledge which privilege the visual over other forms of perception and expression, at the expense of researching the whole body in communication practices. Chapter 2: Sensory Literacies, the Body and Digital Media 2 Of particular interest is the neglected realm of the non-visual senses, including haptic communication (involving touch), olfaction (smell), taste, and locomotion . This has been demonstrated through sensory ethnographic research in which kinesis -movement of the body, limbs, hands and feet -was central to the digital filmmaking of Indigenous and non-Indigenous children . The children filmed themselves as they glided down slides and balanced on walls, or used breath to blow dandelions. Walking feet and climbing bodies were salient in the children's films, essential to both the process and product of text making. It is timely for literacy educators to attend more consciously to the senses in the study of communication practices in everyday life and in education sites. There has been an upsurge of agreement among philosophers, sociologists, ecologists, ethnographers and sensory anthropologists that the role of the body must be taken into account seriously in theories of knowing, perceiving, and practising . The burgeoning sensorial turn in literacy studies has been foregrounded by a paradigm shift across the social sciences. This shift is a critique of ocularcentrism, which privileges what is seen with the eyes over other modes of perception. As Howes (1991, p.3) argues, a central tenet of sensory studies is to recognize the "visual and textual biases of the Western episteme". It is only by beginning here that "we can hope to make sense of how life is lived in other cultural settings" (p.3). Likewise, from the perspective of "sensory literacies", it is only by understanding the hegemony of sight that we can hope to make sense of how the full sensorium is intimately involved in communication . Here, we focus on the role the affordances of the touch screen and interactive e-book design in the process of navigating the text to make meaning. We also highlight examples of the sensorial dimensions of primary classroom literacy practices, including handwriting lessons and HANDBOOK OF WRITING, LITERACIES AND EDUCATION IN DIGITAL CULTURES Chapter 2: Sensory Literacies, the Body and Digital Media
Innovations in science education and technology, 2020
animations are included in online editions of major science journals such as Nature (e.g. Sasihit... more animations are included in online editions of major science journals such as Nature (e.g. Sasihithlu, 2019) and Developmental Cell (e.g. Isabella & Horne-Badovinac, 2016) with more widespread and increased use anticipated as online journals become the norm and reader access to animated content improves (Grossman, Chevalier, & Kazi, 2016); and animation is also increasingly being deployed as a dimension of science research methodology (e.g.
view and the impact of this variation on interpretive possibilities of literary narratives. For e... more view and the impact of this variation on interpretive possibilities of literary narratives. For example, in Year 3 it is expected that students will: Identify the point of view in a text and suggest alternative points of view … recognising that there is more than one way of looking at the same event and that stories seen through the eyes of one character privileges some aspects of the story over others (ACELY1675).
This sensory ethnography explores the affordances and constraints of multimodal design to represe... more This sensory ethnography explores the affordances and constraints of multimodal design to represent emotions and appraisal associated with experiencing local places. Digital video production, walking with the camera, and the use of a think-aloud protocol to reflect on the videos, provided an opportunity for the primary school children to represent their emotions and appraisal of places multimodally. Applying a typology from Martin and White's (2005) framework for the Language of Evaluation, children's multimodal emotional responses to
In a complex communicational environment and at the dawn of an Australian curriculum, teachers ne... more In a complex communicational environment and at the dawn of an Australian curriculum, teachers need new kinds of knowledge about language (KAL). Our paper investigates the character of a 'good enough' KAL through 'grammatics' -a metalanguage based on careful study of grammar -a way of thinking with grammar in mind. It identifies four challenges facing any grammatics that is going to be adequate to the discipline: (1) Building a coherent account of KAL for contemporary English; (2) Fashioning a rhetorical grammatics for improving students' compositions; (3) Improving continuity and cumulative learning through the years of schooling; and (4) Developing a grammatics adequate to multimodal communication. Our paper draws on the resources of systemic functional grammatics to explore these challenges and considers the implications for teachers and students.
Well-known stories in established and contemporary literature for children are increasingly becom... more Well-known stories in established and contemporary literature for children are increasingly becoming available in various moving image media versions as well as in traditional book formats. Classroom exploration of the same story in different narrative formats has addressed the impact on meaning-making of similarities and differences in language and image across versions. What has received very little attention however, is the role of music in conjunction with image and language in the construction of the potentially different interpretive possibilities of the multiple versions of ostensibly the same story. This paper discusses the nature and role of music, images and language in the book and movie versions of Shaun Tan's story of The Lost Thing, drawing attention to the role of music in highlighting key interpretive differences deriving from subtle variation in the use of image and language in the two story versions. Implications for students' multimodal text creation and interpretation in the context of the new Australian Curriculum: English are briefly noted.
This research is part of an Australian Research Council linkage project that is developing a mode... more This research is part of an Australian Research Council linkage project that is developing a model of image-language relations in multimodal texts (Unsworth, Barnes & O'Donnell, 2006. The materials used in the investigation were the 2007 NSW Basic Skills Tests (BST). Data from the tests enabled an analysis of variance to compare the mean difficulty of BST items assessing the comprehension of different types of image-language relations which have been outlined by . As there was a range of difficulty for the items assessing each type of image-language relation, it was decided to investigate other aspects of the texts that might be causing difficulty. Accordingly, complexity within the targeted written language segments and complexity within the images were analysed separately using selected features of Functional Grammar (Halliday, 2004/ 1994) and Visual Grammar (Kress & van Leeuwen, 1996) to see whether these factors also affected item difficulty. In conclusion, the findings about multi-semiotic text complexities and item difficulties are considered in order to identify factors that might be relevant to the comprehension of multimodal texts and to suggest implications for future research about language and literacy learning in primary schools.
Global Developments in Literacy Research for Science Education, 2018
Drawing on cognitive theories of graphic comprehension and on systemic functional semiotics, the ... more Drawing on cognitive theories of graphic comprehension and on systemic functional semiotics, the intention of this study is twofold: first, to examine the effects of image design on reading comprehension of science texts; second, to investigate the process of meaning-making when reading image and verbal text. An experiment was conducted to test the hypothesis that image designs with salient tree structure can cue better reading comprehension about the concept of the biological classification system. A 5-phase interview was developed to investigate the reading comprehension in different textual conditions. 12 Taiwanese students from year 7 were assigned as the participants either in a control group to read the text with the textbook images or in a treatment group to read the same texts but with a salient tree structure image designed to be more coherent with the textual information. The participants are further identified in terms of low, medium, and high level of prior knowledge on the topic according to a pretest. The results support the hypothesis which shows the textbook image did not efficiently activate as many theme-related meanings as the tree-structure one. Moreover, there are many misunderstandings embedded in the design of the textbook image which might also be potential risks for the other readers. The influence of prior knowledge on the reading comprehension was negligible. Implications are drawn for the importance of image design in textbooks and biology pedagogy, and value of extended large-scale research in this area.
Popular culture for children is increasingly characterized by a digital multimedia dimension. One... more Popular culture for children is increasingly characterized by a digital multimedia dimension. One highly visible example is the adoption, adaptation, and re-versioning of stories from literary picture books to movies, animations, and videogames (Unsworth, 2006; Unsworth, Thomas, Simpson, & Asha, 2005). The experience of literary narrative by today’s children involves taking the “multiplicity of media and versions for granted” (Mackey, 1994, p. 19). Classic picture books such as Where the Wild Things Are (Sendak, 1962) as a popular mainstream animated movie (Jonze et al., 2009) have been highly celebrated within broad popular culture. Australian picture book author Shaun Tan’s winning of an Oscar in 2011 for the best animated short fi lm of his book The Lost Thing (2000) initiated a fl urry of online responses from children and adults. These phenomena indicate how digital multimedia is merging literary picture book culture with popular culture animated movies. Although discussing chi...
The new Australian Curriculum in English to be adopted or adapted by all Australian states, in it... more The new Australian Curriculum in English to be adopted or adapted by all Australian states, in its statements of expectations for students from the very early years of schooling, makes prolific reference to learning about variation in narrative point of view and the impact of this variation on interpretive possibilities of literary narratives.
Learning from Animations in Science Education, 2020
This introductory chapter briefly outlines the factors that motivate this book to provide a catal... more This introductory chapter briefly outlines the factors that motivate this book to provide a catalyst for advancing transdisciplinary research in the use of animation in science education. Fundamental among these is the ongoing development of animation as a resource for scientific investigation and for the representation and communication of knowledge about complex processes in new areas of scientific discovery, which means that science teaching as inducting students into the disciplinary discourse of science necessarily entails developing their competence in the interpretation and creation of science animation. Related to this is the growing recognition by science education researchers of the efficacy of interfacing different disciplinary perspectives, especially those of social semiotics, digital technology and science pedagogy, to investigate the development of innovative approaches to enhancing student engagement and learning. With this orientation, an overview is then provided o...
Pensamiento Educativo: Revista de Investigación Educacional Latinoamericana, 2021
The complexity of science discourse has long been recognized as challenging for many students. Sy... more The complexity of science discourse has long been recognized as challenging for many students. Systemic functional linguistic accounts of technicality and meaning aggregation, differentiating scientific and everyday discourse, have explicated the linguistic complexity confronting students. The complexity of images and image-language ensembles in science discourse has not been similarly delineated. Two aspects of multimodal meaning-making have not been sufficiently theorized to support pedagogies of visualization interpretation and creation in science: (1) the role of the verbiage within scientific visualizations has been largely ignored; (2) image analysis has emphasized single-structure images, e.g. narrative or classificational or analytical, whereas multiple structures in a single image is a frequent and significant resource in science. This paper outlines a framework describing the co-deployment of image and verbiage to construct multi-structure image-language ensembles in high ...
Students’ difficulties interpreting diagrams remain a concern in science education. Research abou... more Students’ difficulties interpreting diagrams remain a concern in science education. Research about improving diagram comprehension has included few studies of teachers’ orchestration of language and gesture in explaining diagrams—and very few in senior high schools. Research with younger students and studies of research scientists’ practice indicate the significance of the interaction of teachers’ gesture and language in explaining visualisations. The strategic deployment of such teacher-focussed authoritative explanations has been observed in facilitating progression to more complex and symbolic representations in classroom work. However, the paucity of such research in senior high school leaves open the question of how these teachers use gesture and language in managing the challenges of explaining the intricate sub-microscopic and abstract visualisations senior high school students need to negotiate. In this paper, we outline existing studies of teachers’ use of gesture and langu...
In an age of mobile technologies, digital animation creation can be an important tool for teachin... more In an age of mobile technologies, digital animation creation can be an important tool for teaching adolescents how to communicate emotions multimodally. This article draws on appraisal theory and original research to illustrate the power of digital animation for multimodal literacy learning. Students from a culturally diverse cohort were taught how to interpret emotions in animated films and produced 2‐D cartoon animations using drawings with an iPad application and stylus. The findings show that impassioned multimodal communication is enhanced by knowledge of how feelings produce different facial expressions, gestures, body movements, and physiological changes in characters that are often exaggerated to powerful effect in animations. This includes an ability to invoke different intensities of emotions. The research has significant implications for engaging adolescents in the multimodal communication of emotions and feelings through vocabulary, images, and body language.
This international collection discusses how the individualised, reflexive, late modern era has ch... more This international collection discusses how the individualised, reflexive, late modern era has changed the way we experience and act on our emotions. Divided into four sections that include studies ranging across multiple continents and centuries, Emotions in Late Modernity does the following: 1 Demonstrates an increased awareness and experience of emotional complexity in late modernity by challenging the legal emotional/rational divide; positive/negative concepts of emotional valence; sociological/philosophical/psychological divisions around emotion, morality and gender; and traditional understandings of love and loneliness. 2 Reveals tension between collectivised and individualised-privatised emotions in investigating 'emotional sharing' and individualised responsibility for anger crimes in courtrooms, and the generation of emotional energy and achievement emotions in classrooms. 3 Debates the increasing mediation of emotions by contrasting their historical mediation (through texts and bodies) with contemporary digital mediation of emotions in classroom teaching, collective mobilisations (e.g. riots) and film and documentary representations. 4 Demonstrates reflexive micro and macro management of emotions, with examinations of the 'politics of fear' around asylum seeking and religious subjects, and collective commitment to climate change mitigation. The first collection to investigate the changing nature of emotional experience in contemporary times, Emotions in Late Modernity will appeal to students and researchers interested in fields such as the sociology of emotions, cultural studies, political science and psychology.
This paper outlines a framework designed to explore the linguistic knowledge of primary and secon... more This paper outlines a framework designed to explore the linguistic knowledge of primary and secondary English teachers as they used grammar 'to think with ' (Halliday, 2002). Utilizing Halliday's distinction between usage (grammar) and theory ('grammatics'), we draw on findings from a three-year study investigating the impact of systemic functional grammatics on teachers' linguistic subject knowledge (LSK). The paper begins by reviewing limitations of current studies of grammar and shows how we translated Hallidayan concepts like metafunctions and stratification into a grammatics for narrative. It then explains a framework developed to analyze shifts in teachers' LSK along three dimensions: approach to narrative, levels of language awareness and assessment stance. Drawing on interviews with 23 teachers before and after implementation of grammatics, we use the framework to describe shifts in LSK of two teachers. The paper concludes by discussing the potential of grammatics for exploring the multidimensional character of English teachers' LSK.
Onomázein Revista de lingüística filología y traducción, 2014
Australian primary school teachers face two major challenges in their implementation of the natio... more Australian primary school teachers face two major challenges in their implementation of the national curriculum for English: literary study and multimodality. Whilst teachers and students frequently engage with texts like literary picture books, the requirement that teachers build children’s understandings of texts as patterned, aesthetic constructs is new. And it is especially demanding for teachers without specialized training in either literature or multimodality. They must learn to manage the expanded ‘reservoir’ of meaning in school English and develop ‘repertoires’ of semiotic understanding in the course of fulltime teaching (Bernstein, 2000). This paper emerges from a larger study that aimed to meet the challenge of literary study in English by introducing practicing teachers to a semiotic toolkit inspired by systemic functional grammatics. Grammatics, as Halliday (2002) interprets it, distinguishes the theory from the practice of grammar, the metalanguage from language in us...
The Appraisal framework within Systemic Functional Linguistics as a robust tool in language teach... more The Appraisal framework within Systemic Functional Linguistics as a robust tool in language teaching and research has attracted a great deal of interest in recent years. Since its establishment as the most complete account, the framework has been used in a variety of contexts, resulting in a number of refinements, tuning its applicability for specific research purposes such as studies of the evaluative language in research article abstracts, biology experiment reports, wine appreciation and student narrative writing. This article proposes additional refinements, particularly to the system of Attitude, informed by research into the deployment of evaluative resources in spoken discourse by postgraduate students in small group discussions in English and in Vietnamese. The refinements were required to account for the range of evaluative language used in discussions of topics including personal experiences of living and studying in Australia, academic experiences at Australian universiti...
Writing to learn has become an important practice in science education. How is scientific knowled... more Writing to learn has become an important practice in science education. How is scientific knowledge constructed during writing? To investigate this question, we examined the process through which four university students constructed written explanations of either projectile motion or buoyancy. The analysis, informed by systemic functional linguistics, focused on the mapping of semantic elements to grammatical choices, and the way in which this mapping unfolded throughout the course of each text. The texts began largely congruently; grammar mapped closely to experience. Gradually, each text shifted towards greater use of grammatical metaphor. Nominalization allowed propositions and sequences of events to serve as participants in complex causal and epistemic relationships. Students' texts showed several properties of professional scientific texts: transcategorization, compaction, and logicality; however, professional science texts instantiate these properties synoptically and systemically, whereas student texts exemplify them dynamically and instantially.
Chapter 2: Sensory Literacies, the Body and Digital Media The human senses have always been vital... more Chapter 2: Sensory Literacies, the Body and Digital Media The human senses have always been vital to literacy practices, but are seldom acknowledged within literacy studies in education. Historically, the senses have been central to the aesthetics of representation across cultures . The senses are essential to everyday communication practices, necessitated by an expanding range of new technologies that interact with a greater range of the sensorium. Devos (2014, p.68) contends: "Sensory perception constitutes the primordial channel through which a person acquires knowledge about the material world". So too, the senses are primordial to channels of communication with the world and with others. What is needed in current understandings of literacy practices is systematic attention to the role of the full sensorium evoked in the process of meaning making. In this chapter, we build up examples of the sensorial dimensions of reading, extending Mills' (2016) theory of sensory literacies to focus on the role of haptics and interpretive meaning making possibilities with interactive tablet eBooks. The theory of sensory literacies concerns the multisensorial nature of literacy and communication practices that varies across cultures, practices and technologies. This theory extends ongoing work located in sensory studies more broadly, and draws on an anthropology of the senses. Some of the key principles include: a) the prioritization of the role of the human body in communication practices; b) a recognition that the mind is not separate from the body, nor the role of the body taken for granted, but mind and body are seen an integral to literacy practices; and c) a critique of Western hierarchies of knowledge which privilege the visual over other forms of perception and expression, at the expense of researching the whole body in communication practices. Chapter 2: Sensory Literacies, the Body and Digital Media 2 Of particular interest is the neglected realm of the non-visual senses, including haptic communication (involving touch), olfaction (smell), taste, and locomotion . This has been demonstrated through sensory ethnographic research in which kinesis -movement of the body, limbs, hands and feet -was central to the digital filmmaking of Indigenous and non-Indigenous children . The children filmed themselves as they glided down slides and balanced on walls, or used breath to blow dandelions. Walking feet and climbing bodies were salient in the children's films, essential to both the process and product of text making. It is timely for literacy educators to attend more consciously to the senses in the study of communication practices in everyday life and in education sites. There has been an upsurge of agreement among philosophers, sociologists, ecologists, ethnographers and sensory anthropologists that the role of the body must be taken into account seriously in theories of knowing, perceiving, and practising . The burgeoning sensorial turn in literacy studies has been foregrounded by a paradigm shift across the social sciences. This shift is a critique of ocularcentrism, which privileges what is seen with the eyes over other modes of perception. As Howes (1991, p.3) argues, a central tenet of sensory studies is to recognize the "visual and textual biases of the Western episteme". It is only by beginning here that "we can hope to make sense of how life is lived in other cultural settings" (p.3). Likewise, from the perspective of "sensory literacies", it is only by understanding the hegemony of sight that we can hope to make sense of how the full sensorium is intimately involved in communication . Here, we focus on the role the affordances of the touch screen and interactive e-book design in the process of navigating the text to make meaning. We also highlight examples of the sensorial dimensions of primary classroom literacy practices, including handwriting lessons and HANDBOOK OF WRITING, LITERACIES AND EDUCATION IN DIGITAL CULTURES Chapter 2: Sensory Literacies, the Body and Digital Media
Innovations in science education and technology, 2020
animations are included in online editions of major science journals such as Nature (e.g. Sasihit... more animations are included in online editions of major science journals such as Nature (e.g. Sasihithlu, 2019) and Developmental Cell (e.g. Isabella & Horne-Badovinac, 2016) with more widespread and increased use anticipated as online journals become the norm and reader access to animated content improves (Grossman, Chevalier, & Kazi, 2016); and animation is also increasingly being deployed as a dimension of science research methodology (e.g.
view and the impact of this variation on interpretive possibilities of literary narratives. For e... more view and the impact of this variation on interpretive possibilities of literary narratives. For example, in Year 3 it is expected that students will: Identify the point of view in a text and suggest alternative points of view … recognising that there is more than one way of looking at the same event and that stories seen through the eyes of one character privileges some aspects of the story over others (ACELY1675).
This sensory ethnography explores the affordances and constraints of multimodal design to represe... more This sensory ethnography explores the affordances and constraints of multimodal design to represent emotions and appraisal associated with experiencing local places. Digital video production, walking with the camera, and the use of a think-aloud protocol to reflect on the videos, provided an opportunity for the primary school children to represent their emotions and appraisal of places multimodally. Applying a typology from Martin and White's (2005) framework for the Language of Evaluation, children's multimodal emotional responses to
In a complex communicational environment and at the dawn of an Australian curriculum, teachers ne... more In a complex communicational environment and at the dawn of an Australian curriculum, teachers need new kinds of knowledge about language (KAL). Our paper investigates the character of a 'good enough' KAL through 'grammatics' -a metalanguage based on careful study of grammar -a way of thinking with grammar in mind. It identifies four challenges facing any grammatics that is going to be adequate to the discipline: (1) Building a coherent account of KAL for contemporary English; (2) Fashioning a rhetorical grammatics for improving students' compositions; (3) Improving continuity and cumulative learning through the years of schooling; and (4) Developing a grammatics adequate to multimodal communication. Our paper draws on the resources of systemic functional grammatics to explore these challenges and considers the implications for teachers and students.
Well-known stories in established and contemporary literature for children are increasingly becom... more Well-known stories in established and contemporary literature for children are increasingly becoming available in various moving image media versions as well as in traditional book formats. Classroom exploration of the same story in different narrative formats has addressed the impact on meaning-making of similarities and differences in language and image across versions. What has received very little attention however, is the role of music in conjunction with image and language in the construction of the potentially different interpretive possibilities of the multiple versions of ostensibly the same story. This paper discusses the nature and role of music, images and language in the book and movie versions of Shaun Tan's story of The Lost Thing, drawing attention to the role of music in highlighting key interpretive differences deriving from subtle variation in the use of image and language in the two story versions. Implications for students' multimodal text creation and interpretation in the context of the new Australian Curriculum: English are briefly noted.
This research is part of an Australian Research Council linkage project that is developing a mode... more This research is part of an Australian Research Council linkage project that is developing a model of image-language relations in multimodal texts (Unsworth, Barnes & O'Donnell, 2006. The materials used in the investigation were the 2007 NSW Basic Skills Tests (BST). Data from the tests enabled an analysis of variance to compare the mean difficulty of BST items assessing the comprehension of different types of image-language relations which have been outlined by . As there was a range of difficulty for the items assessing each type of image-language relation, it was decided to investigate other aspects of the texts that might be causing difficulty. Accordingly, complexity within the targeted written language segments and complexity within the images were analysed separately using selected features of Functional Grammar (Halliday, 2004/ 1994) and Visual Grammar (Kress & van Leeuwen, 1996) to see whether these factors also affected item difficulty. In conclusion, the findings about multi-semiotic text complexities and item difficulties are considered in order to identify factors that might be relevant to the comprehension of multimodal texts and to suggest implications for future research about language and literacy learning in primary schools.
Global Developments in Literacy Research for Science Education, 2018
Drawing on cognitive theories of graphic comprehension and on systemic functional semiotics, the ... more Drawing on cognitive theories of graphic comprehension and on systemic functional semiotics, the intention of this study is twofold: first, to examine the effects of image design on reading comprehension of science texts; second, to investigate the process of meaning-making when reading image and verbal text. An experiment was conducted to test the hypothesis that image designs with salient tree structure can cue better reading comprehension about the concept of the biological classification system. A 5-phase interview was developed to investigate the reading comprehension in different textual conditions. 12 Taiwanese students from year 7 were assigned as the participants either in a control group to read the text with the textbook images or in a treatment group to read the same texts but with a salient tree structure image designed to be more coherent with the textual information. The participants are further identified in terms of low, medium, and high level of prior knowledge on the topic according to a pretest. The results support the hypothesis which shows the textbook image did not efficiently activate as many theme-related meanings as the tree-structure one. Moreover, there are many misunderstandings embedded in the design of the textbook image which might also be potential risks for the other readers. The influence of prior knowledge on the reading comprehension was negligible. Implications are drawn for the importance of image design in textbooks and biology pedagogy, and value of extended large-scale research in this area.
Popular culture for children is increasingly characterized by a digital multimedia dimension. One... more Popular culture for children is increasingly characterized by a digital multimedia dimension. One highly visible example is the adoption, adaptation, and re-versioning of stories from literary picture books to movies, animations, and videogames (Unsworth, 2006; Unsworth, Thomas, Simpson, & Asha, 2005). The experience of literary narrative by today’s children involves taking the “multiplicity of media and versions for granted” (Mackey, 1994, p. 19). Classic picture books such as Where the Wild Things Are (Sendak, 1962) as a popular mainstream animated movie (Jonze et al., 2009) have been highly celebrated within broad popular culture. Australian picture book author Shaun Tan’s winning of an Oscar in 2011 for the best animated short fi lm of his book The Lost Thing (2000) initiated a fl urry of online responses from children and adults. These phenomena indicate how digital multimedia is merging literary picture book culture with popular culture animated movies. Although discussing chi...
The new Australian Curriculum in English to be adopted or adapted by all Australian states, in it... more The new Australian Curriculum in English to be adopted or adapted by all Australian states, in its statements of expectations for students from the very early years of schooling, makes prolific reference to learning about variation in narrative point of view and the impact of this variation on interpretive possibilities of literary narratives.
Learning from Animations in Science Education, 2020
This introductory chapter briefly outlines the factors that motivate this book to provide a catal... more This introductory chapter briefly outlines the factors that motivate this book to provide a catalyst for advancing transdisciplinary research in the use of animation in science education. Fundamental among these is the ongoing development of animation as a resource for scientific investigation and for the representation and communication of knowledge about complex processes in new areas of scientific discovery, which means that science teaching as inducting students into the disciplinary discourse of science necessarily entails developing their competence in the interpretation and creation of science animation. Related to this is the growing recognition by science education researchers of the efficacy of interfacing different disciplinary perspectives, especially those of social semiotics, digital technology and science pedagogy, to investigate the development of innovative approaches to enhancing student engagement and learning. With this orientation, an overview is then provided o...
Pensamiento Educativo: Revista de Investigación Educacional Latinoamericana, 2021
The complexity of science discourse has long been recognized as challenging for many students. Sy... more The complexity of science discourse has long been recognized as challenging for many students. Systemic functional linguistic accounts of technicality and meaning aggregation, differentiating scientific and everyday discourse, have explicated the linguistic complexity confronting students. The complexity of images and image-language ensembles in science discourse has not been similarly delineated. Two aspects of multimodal meaning-making have not been sufficiently theorized to support pedagogies of visualization interpretation and creation in science: (1) the role of the verbiage within scientific visualizations has been largely ignored; (2) image analysis has emphasized single-structure images, e.g. narrative or classificational or analytical, whereas multiple structures in a single image is a frequent and significant resource in science. This paper outlines a framework describing the co-deployment of image and verbiage to construct multi-structure image-language ensembles in high ...
Students’ difficulties interpreting diagrams remain a concern in science education. Research abou... more Students’ difficulties interpreting diagrams remain a concern in science education. Research about improving diagram comprehension has included few studies of teachers’ orchestration of language and gesture in explaining diagrams—and very few in senior high schools. Research with younger students and studies of research scientists’ practice indicate the significance of the interaction of teachers’ gesture and language in explaining visualisations. The strategic deployment of such teacher-focussed authoritative explanations has been observed in facilitating progression to more complex and symbolic representations in classroom work. However, the paucity of such research in senior high school leaves open the question of how these teachers use gesture and language in managing the challenges of explaining the intricate sub-microscopic and abstract visualisations senior high school students need to negotiate. In this paper, we outline existing studies of teachers’ use of gesture and langu...
In an age of mobile technologies, digital animation creation can be an important tool for teachin... more In an age of mobile technologies, digital animation creation can be an important tool for teaching adolescents how to communicate emotions multimodally. This article draws on appraisal theory and original research to illustrate the power of digital animation for multimodal literacy learning. Students from a culturally diverse cohort were taught how to interpret emotions in animated films and produced 2‐D cartoon animations using drawings with an iPad application and stylus. The findings show that impassioned multimodal communication is enhanced by knowledge of how feelings produce different facial expressions, gestures, body movements, and physiological changes in characters that are often exaggerated to powerful effect in animations. This includes an ability to invoke different intensities of emotions. The research has significant implications for engaging adolescents in the multimodal communication of emotions and feelings through vocabulary, images, and body language.
This international collection discusses how the individualised, reflexive, late modern era has ch... more This international collection discusses how the individualised, reflexive, late modern era has changed the way we experience and act on our emotions. Divided into four sections that include studies ranging across multiple continents and centuries, Emotions in Late Modernity does the following: 1 Demonstrates an increased awareness and experience of emotional complexity in late modernity by challenging the legal emotional/rational divide; positive/negative concepts of emotional valence; sociological/philosophical/psychological divisions around emotion, morality and gender; and traditional understandings of love and loneliness. 2 Reveals tension between collectivised and individualised-privatised emotions in investigating 'emotional sharing' and individualised responsibility for anger crimes in courtrooms, and the generation of emotional energy and achievement emotions in classrooms. 3 Debates the increasing mediation of emotions by contrasting their historical mediation (through texts and bodies) with contemporary digital mediation of emotions in classroom teaching, collective mobilisations (e.g. riots) and film and documentary representations. 4 Demonstrates reflexive micro and macro management of emotions, with examinations of the 'politics of fear' around asylum seeking and religious subjects, and collective commitment to climate change mitigation. The first collection to investigate the changing nature of emotional experience in contemporary times, Emotions in Late Modernity will appeal to students and researchers interested in fields such as the sociology of emotions, cultural studies, political science and psychology.
This paper outlines a framework designed to explore the linguistic knowledge of primary and secon... more This paper outlines a framework designed to explore the linguistic knowledge of primary and secondary English teachers as they used grammar 'to think with ' (Halliday, 2002). Utilizing Halliday's distinction between usage (grammar) and theory ('grammatics'), we draw on findings from a three-year study investigating the impact of systemic functional grammatics on teachers' linguistic subject knowledge (LSK). The paper begins by reviewing limitations of current studies of grammar and shows how we translated Hallidayan concepts like metafunctions and stratification into a grammatics for narrative. It then explains a framework developed to analyze shifts in teachers' LSK along three dimensions: approach to narrative, levels of language awareness and assessment stance. Drawing on interviews with 23 teachers before and after implementation of grammatics, we use the framework to describe shifts in LSK of two teachers. The paper concludes by discussing the potential of grammatics for exploring the multidimensional character of English teachers' LSK.
Onomázein Revista de lingüística filología y traducción, 2014
Australian primary school teachers face two major challenges in their implementation of the natio... more Australian primary school teachers face two major challenges in their implementation of the national curriculum for English: literary study and multimodality. Whilst teachers and students frequently engage with texts like literary picture books, the requirement that teachers build children’s understandings of texts as patterned, aesthetic constructs is new. And it is especially demanding for teachers without specialized training in either literature or multimodality. They must learn to manage the expanded ‘reservoir’ of meaning in school English and develop ‘repertoires’ of semiotic understanding in the course of fulltime teaching (Bernstein, 2000). This paper emerges from a larger study that aimed to meet the challenge of literary study in English by introducing practicing teachers to a semiotic toolkit inspired by systemic functional grammatics. Grammatics, as Halliday (2002) interprets it, distinguishes the theory from the practice of grammar, the metalanguage from language in us...
The Appraisal framework within Systemic Functional Linguistics as a robust tool in language teach... more The Appraisal framework within Systemic Functional Linguistics as a robust tool in language teaching and research has attracted a great deal of interest in recent years. Since its establishment as the most complete account, the framework has been used in a variety of contexts, resulting in a number of refinements, tuning its applicability for specific research purposes such as studies of the evaluative language in research article abstracts, biology experiment reports, wine appreciation and student narrative writing. This article proposes additional refinements, particularly to the system of Attitude, informed by research into the deployment of evaluative resources in spoken discourse by postgraduate students in small group discussions in English and in Vietnamese. The refinements were required to account for the range of evaluative language used in discussions of topics including personal experiences of living and studying in Australia, academic experiences at Australian universiti...
Writing to learn has become an important practice in science education. How is scientific knowled... more Writing to learn has become an important practice in science education. How is scientific knowledge constructed during writing? To investigate this question, we examined the process through which four university students constructed written explanations of either projectile motion or buoyancy. The analysis, informed by systemic functional linguistics, focused on the mapping of semantic elements to grammatical choices, and the way in which this mapping unfolded throughout the course of each text. The texts began largely congruently; grammar mapped closely to experience. Gradually, each text shifted towards greater use of grammatical metaphor. Nominalization allowed propositions and sequences of events to serve as participants in complex causal and epistemic relationships. Students' texts showed several properties of professional scientific texts: transcategorization, compaction, and logicality; however, professional science texts instantiate these properties synoptically and systemically, whereas student texts exemplify them dynamically and instantially.
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Papers by Len Unsworth