Abstract
Multimodal Literacy in School Science is an innovative and creative exploration on science education and multimodal semiotics that focuses on multimodal disciplinary literacy (MDL) in senior high school science and intends to develop an enlightening framework of multimodal literacy-infused science pedagogy (MLISP) by adopting an integrated perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and social semiotics. By MDL, it refers to ‘the discipline-specific competences and practices that are recontextualized in school subjects’ (p. 1), while MLISP refers to ‘the strategies used to develop and use these competences in the classroom’ (p. 1).
Structurally, this volume consists of 12 chapters. Chapter 1 mainly provides an overview of this volume; Chapters 2 to 5 delineate the theoretical foundations and sociocultural contexts for integrating MDL in senior school science subjects and make a prelude to the MLISP framework proposed in Chapter 6; Chapters 7 through 9 explore the practical adoption and adaptation of the present MLISP framework and relevant literacy strategies in the senior biology, physics and chemistry classrooms; Chapters 10 to 12, respectively, discuss ‘the impact on teacher professional learning of their engagement in the design-based research, the nature of the engagement of the students in science learning’ (p. 14), and the transdisciplinary development of the MLISP framework. To sum up, the core orientations of this volume are to: (1) develop the pedagogical framework of MLISP; (2) examine its universal applicability in different senior science classrooms; and (3) illustrate the pedagogical strategies or models within the framework, with a focus on the teachers’ scaffolding and engagement with students.
As an integral component of science education, MDL plays an important role in science teaching and learning. The training of MDL could support students to construct scientific knowledge and enhance their science achievement. Therefore, the framework of MLISP, which is urgently required, draws upon the studies of multimodal literacy and pedagogical practices with the consideration of contextual factors. This framework takes multimodal representations as mediating tools, and involves teacher and students’ engagement through a series of stages, which are structured as ‘Orientation^ Challenge-Investigation^ Negotiation^ Consensus/Confirmation’. These structured stages could enable students to develop their scientific knowledge through engagements. In addition, several interrelated factors contribute to contextual challenges to the integration of multimodal literacy and science education, such as assessment regimes (e.g. Cambridge A level, PISA) and complexities in learning disciplinary knowledge. However, it seems that all the contents being considered require students to be equipped with the abilities of both dealing with complexities in learning science through multimodal representations and adapting to the crowded curricula once they are instructed in the pedagogical framework.
Scaffolding and engagement are emphasized in the various pedagogical options, i.e. the options for the planning of classroom procedures and the specific pedagogical strategies within the MLISP framework. The scaffolding in this volume highlights teachers’ procedural support for developing students’ understanding of the science knowledge, but the degrees of scaffolding may rely on students’ performance and feedback. The engagement of students could work with various pedagogical strategies through the teaching stages, e.g. the students’ joint or independent construction of knowledge is provided with different degrees of guidance from teachers. All the teaching strategies engage students not only in dialogue with teachers, but also in ‘both representational work and dialogue about this work’ (p. 239). Through the dialogues, the disciplinary concepts and skills are represented to students through multimodal texts along with teachers’ interpretation. Both scaffolding and engagement reinforce the interaction between teachers and students, which reflects the dialogism and practicality of the framework.
There are three major contributions made by this volume. First, part of the research purposes of the present volume (e.g. Hand et al., 2016), such as using multimodal representations to develop students’ literacy and methodological approaches (e.g. Maton et al., 2021) – for instance, using discourse analysis to develop students’ understanding of multimodal texts – could be seen in the previous studies. However, this volume makes a unique integration and development. It synthesizes a series of pedagogical ideas or approaches, such as pedagogical metalanguage and genre-based pedagogy within SFL, scaffolded and multiliteracy pedagogy, into an integrated framework that emphasizes the pedagogy consisting of both the disciplinary knowledge construction and the cultivation of MDL, and also ensures the practical operability of itself. In addition, it employs a model of ‘longitudinal’ design-based research (p. xii) by which teachers and researchers could collaborate with each other to produce iterative cycles of planning and implementation within actual classroom contexts. This kind of methodology weaves science teaching and research into an organic whole so as to facilitate sustainable development of science education. Second, the MLISP framework could not only systematize the multimodal representations of knowledge by the co-construction and complementarity among diverse modalities in the disciplinary teaching and learning, but also inspire students’ agency and encourage their active contribution to the multimodal interpretation, production and communication of knowledge with the guidance of effective engagement. Third, we are situated in an ever-changing digital world in which the various forms of visual and verbal communication are ubiquitous. This volume would guarantee that students could benefit more in the transmission from schooling to future academic development with sound multimodal literacy education.
However, there are still some limitations regarding the application of the MLISP framework. First, although the authors have done an excellent job of providing tangible classroom strategies, too much emphasis on students’ engagement relatively leads to the neglect of indirect experience learning. In addition, the differences in knowledge structure across disciplines should be taken into account, which is also supposed to be applied to pedagogy of humanities and social sciences. Second, the sociocultural approach is an innovative development informed by Bernstein’s (1990) research in the sociology of education, but the sociocultural factors are multifaceted and variable. How to appropriately situate and evaluate this approach to the MLISP framework needs more consideration and application. Moreover, it is significant to make sure that MDL should be taught and learned explicitly in classroom contexts, but science education is still necessary to prioritize the transmission of disciplinary knowledge. On the whole, we highly recommend this book, especially to those interested in studies of literacy research and science education, or relevant research on visual communication in an academic context.
