Multimodal Literacy in School Science

Transdisciplinary Perspectives on Theory, Research and Pedagogy

Len Unsworth, Russell Tytler, Lisl Fenwick, Sally Humphrey, Paul Chandler, Michele Herrington, Lam Pham

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000531435
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Didattica
• Categoría: Istruzione secondaria

This book establishes a new theoretical and practical framework for multimodal disciplinary literacy (MDL) fused with the subject-specific science pedagogies of senior high school biology, chemistry and physics. It builds a compatible alignment of multiple representation and representation construction approaches to science pedagogy with the social semiotic, systemic functional linguistic-based approaches to explicit teaching of disciplinary literacy.

The early part of the book explicates the transdisciplinary negotiated theoretical underpinning of the MDL framework, followed by the research-informed repertoire of learning experiences that are then articulated into a comprehensive framework of options for the planning of classroom work. Practical adoption and adaptation of the framework in biology, chemistry and physics classrooms are detailed in separate chapters. The latter chapters indicate the impact of the collaborative research on teachers' professional learning and students' multimodal disciplinary literacy engagement, concluding with proposals for accommodating emerging developments in MDL in an ever-changing digital communication world.

The MDL framework is designed to enable teachers to develop all students' disciplinary literacy competencies. This book will be of interest to researchers, teacher educators and postgraduate students in the field of science education. It will also have appeal to those in literacy education and social semiotics.

The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

1 Researching multimodal literacy as core to senior high school biology, chemistry and physics pedagogy

DOI: 10.4324/9781003150718-1

1.1 Introduction

Multimodal literacy is increasingly integral to the disciplinary practices of science, with new and evolving semiotic resources enabling the development, validation and enactment of conceptual knowledge (Bezemer & Kress, 2008; Doran, 2017, 2019; Lemke, 2004; Tang, Won, Mocerino, Treagust & Tasker, 2020; Tytler & Hubber, 2010; Tytler, Ferguson & White, 2020a). The role of representational work in practice and thought within and beyond the laboratory has been established by scholars from a wide range of disciplinary and theoretical perspectives (Gooding, 2006; Latour, 1999; Wise, 2006), and representational tools have been described in terms of the ‘inscriptions’ that are developed and negotiated in the generation of scientific knowledge by professional scientists (Latour, 1999). While school science education differs significantly from the professional practice of science (Park & Song, 2019), understandings of the complex processes involved in inscription and the constitutive role of semiosis offer a wide range of possibilities for supporting and assessing the increasingly specialized curriculum learning of senior school subjects such as biology, chemistry and physics (Jones, Turney, Georgiou & Nielsen, 2020; Patron, Wikman, Edfors, Johansson-Cederblad & Linder, 2017; Tytler & Hubber, 2010).

Multimodal disciplinary literacy (MDL) refers to the discipline-specific competences and practices that are recontextualized in school subjects, while multimodal literacy infused science pedagogy (MLISP) refers to the strategies used to develop and use these competences in the classroom. Foundational and ongoing research related to both MDL and MLISP are expanded in subsequent chapters of the book; however, in this chapter, we outline some of the potential areas of ongoing conversation within the literacy and science education community that have been essential in developing transdisciplinary research in both fields. We firstly provide an orientation to research which has advanced understandings of verbal, visual, symbolic and mathematical representations in science and science learning (Doran, 2017, 2019; Ge, Chung, Wang, Chang & Unsworth, 2014; Hao, 2020; Hao & Humphrey, 2019; Lemke, 1990, 2004; Doran & Martin, 2021; Martin, Unsworth & Rose, in press; O’Halloran & Lim, 2014). In part 2 of the chapter, we review motivations for long-standing research interest in infusing literacy and multimodal literacy within senior high school science pedagogy and discuss research perspectives that have contributed to designing pedagogic practices (Rose & Martin, 2012; Tang et al., 2020 Tytler & Hubber, 2010; Tytler et al., 2020b; Unsworth, 2001). We argue that effective pedagogic design requires explication of learning theories which inform intersecting fields of science education and multimodal semiotics and a metalanguage which can mediate the interpretations of recontextualized practice (Tang, 2019).

1.2 Foundations of MDL

While appreciating ongoing debates around the nature and role of literacy in science, perspectives of MDL begin with understandings of ‘fundamental literacy’ in science education (Norris & Phillips, 2003) and of ‘disciplinary literacy’ in broader literacy research (Fang & Schleppegrell, 2010; Moje, 2015; Shanahan & Shanahan, 2008). Fundamental literacy was used originally to refer to the reading and writing that is a necessary basis for science literacy, with the latter concept referring to the ‘knowledgeability, learning, and education’ of science (Norris & Phillips, 2003, p. 224). However, greater emphasis on authentic scientific practice has emphasized the interactive and dynamic relationship between these aspects (Yore, 2018). Disciplinary literacy has emerged as a research tradition through recognition of the increasingly specialized ways in which representations are deployed as students’ progress through the secondary science years. The competencies involved in disciplinary literacy are seen as distinct from everyday oral language and also from basic and generic literacies that are shared across curriculum areas (Shanahan & Shanahan, 2008). Foundational studies of verbal language in relation to fundamental and disciplinary literacy have provided important foundations for articulating the role of various modes and the possibilities inherent in these (Ainsworth, 1999), as well as for developing a metalanguage to talk about meaning making (Lemke, 1990; Veel, 1997).

1.2.1 Verbal language in science

Applied linguistic studies of written scientific research provide a range of perspectives on the construction of meaning and social context, with varying emphasis given to the weight of meaning carried by the context and discourse patterns of text. Rhetorical theorists (Bazerman, 1988; Latour & Woolgar, 2013) identified links between the language used in published research articles and the processes and practices of laboratory investigation, including the integration of persuasive and informative functions in writing. Bazerman (1988) argued that this integration was in response to contextual pressures on research scientists to both ‘create pictures of the immediate laboratory world’ and ‘say something new and persuasive’ (59). Perspectives from historical and socio-political contexts have allowed rhetorical scholars to theorize across many texts, including accounting for how Newton communicated empirical research in ways that ‘lent generality and universibility to his claims’ (Bazerman, 1988, p. 90). However, in grappling with issues of ‘context, agency, and the relationship between style and argument’ (Johnstone & Eisenhart, 2008, p. 5), limited attention has been given to the analysis of language to provide empirical evidence for how discourse constitutes and enacts context.

The social semiotic theory of systemic functional linguistics (hereafter, SFL) is widely used to interpret discourse patterns of texts in scientific research and classrooms (Halliday, 2004; Halliday & Martin, 1993; Lemke, 1990, 1998). In contrast to rhetorical theories, SFL researchers model context as semiotic systems that are realized through language. Language resources are understood to be distributed across different systems of meanings, which can by and large be mapped onto particular dimensions of context, thus providing the model with significant explanatory power. The level of context relating most closely with language is called register. Dimensions of register include the field, which relates to the topics and activities under investigation; the tenor, which relates to the relationship between composers of texts and their audiences; and the mode, which in written language refers to the ways a text is constructed to constitute the message. Foundational SFL research (Halliday & Martin, 1993; Lemke, 1990; Veel, 1997) identified a number of characteristic language structures which realize scientific English, including grammatical forms that are distinct from spoken language. The grammatical form, nominalization, for example, which is typically defined as a word ‘that has been transcategorized from, for instance, verb to noun class’ (Heyvaert, 2003, p. 67), has been recognized as critical resource for creating a technical field and for carrying forward the momentum of the argument’ in the written mode (Halliday, 1998, p. 202). Halliday (1998, 2004) also studied the variation of scientific writing over time and found that condensed noun groups became a significant feature of 20th-century scientific communication. This feature, which he described as ‘a general drift towards thinginess’ (Halliday, 1998, p. 211), has also been identified in science communication research as ‘convenient and even necessary devices for communicating technical information concisely’ (Gross, Harman & Reidy, 2002, p. 169).

Discourse patterns which have been identified in ‘adult science’ have been found to play a constitutive role in learning science, notwithstanding the influence of different processes involved in its recontextualization (Veel, 1997). Descriptions of genres which accomplish different social purposes have been particularly useful in examining recontextualized science practice in international educational policy (Fang, 2010; Schleppegrell, 2004; Tang & Putra, 2018). Genre has been understood as a more abstract level of context, which accounts for how choices for tenor, field and mode are mapped onto each other in unfolding discourse (Dreyfus, Humphrey, Martin & Mahboob, 2016). Martin further defines genre as ‘a staged, goal-oriented, purposeful activity in which speakers engage as members of our culture’ (Martin, 1985, p. 25). Genres for organizing and explaining events in school science have received significant attention in recognition of their contribution to ‘the creation of new knowledge to account for new phenomena’ (Tang & Putra, 2018, p. 570). In terms of literacy development, Unsworth (2001) has found that particular linguistic resources of written explanations in pedagogic materials can provide a systematic ‘textual bridge’ from common sense to scientific reasoning (p. 607). For example, grammatical shifts involving reformulations from verb structures which are more common in spoken language (e.g. compress) to noun structures (e.g. from ‘compress’ to ‘compression’) are important to build abstract concepts across explanations. By including structural phases to unpack and then repack the noun forms, a written explanation can progressively scaffold the development of knowledge. Much of the genre-based research in school contexts instigated to address challenges faced by diverse learners in writing and reading for the curriculum learning perspectives from sociology (Bernstein, 1990, 2000; Maton, 2013) have increasingly allowed SFL researchers to formulate principles for understanding the semiosis of discipline knowledge and how it develops and accumulates in terms of language and broader semiotic resources (Christie & Derewianka, 2008; Martin & Rose, 2008; Unsworth, 2000, 2001; Veel, 1997).

Descriptions of written genres and dimensions of register realized in verbal language provide an important base for exploring the contribution of verbal meanings to multimodal texts and in mapping the expansion of resources across the transition to senior school. Recent SFL studies have focussed on the construal of technical fields in a range of educational contexts (Maton, Martin & Doran, 2020) and have extended linguistic models to explain ‘syndromes of meaning’ involved in disciplinary knowledge building, particularly in physics (Doran, 2017, 2019) and biology (Hao, 2020; Hao & Humphrey, 2019). As we shall explore in the following sections, methods and conceptual frameworks developed through discourse-oriented research have also provided researchers with critical tools for investigating MDL in senior biology, chemistry and physics.

1.2.2 Multimodality in science

Extending research from written language to multimodality in school science has emerged from two related strands of research. Firstly, studies of talk in science classrooms by Lemke revealed how the specialized discourse of science develops through oral interactions amongst teachers and students, reflecting complex cultural and historical traditions of problem-solving (Lemke, 1990, 1998). Lemke’s (1998) further observation that ‘we never make meaning with language alone’ (p. 87) has inspired significant investigation of how classroom interactions integrate multiple semiotic modalities in construing scientific reasoning and knowledge building, including artefacts and embodied representation, symbols and maths modes and a range of visual forms (Doran, 2017; Hao & Hood, 2017; Kress & Ogborn, 1998; Lemke, 2004).

A related strand of multimodal research has emerged from studies of images in relation to language in research articles, textbooks or student writing. Social semiotic approaches to this research, which apply Kress and van Leeuwen’s (2006) descriptions of the grammar of visual design, foreground the context of communication and the ideology found within signs and attend to meanings made by individual modes, drawing on the concept of ‘affordance’ (Gibson, 1977) to investigate the ‘semiotic...

Índice

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Researching multimodal literacy as core to senior high school biology, chemistry and physics pedagogy
• 2 Language, image and multimodal mediation in scientific research and science learning
• 3 Distinguishing multimodal disciplinary literacy in school science
• 4 Contextualizing the conditions for multimodal literacy practices in senior high school science
• 5 Teaching and learning practices for multimodal literacy in science education
• 6 A framework for infused multimodal disciplinary literacy in school science
• 7 Multimodal disciplinary literacy in the senior biology classroom
• 8 Multimodal disciplinary literacy in the senior physics classroom
• 9 Multimodal disciplinary literacy in the senior chemistry classroom
• 10 Design-based research and teacher professional learning about multimodal literacy
• 11 Student engagement in science learning through multimodal disciplinary literacy
• 12 Advancing multimodal literacy transdisciplinary research and teaching
• Index