This study aims to explore the meanings communicated by young children with visual cultural semiotic resources available in the science classroom. It is a case study in an Early Childhood Education classroom of 23 children (3-4 years old) and their teacher, all engaged in a long-term science project about snails. We focus on the analysis of two…

Students' understanding of nature of science (NOS) has been largely examined primarily in written or verbal modes. The visual, verbal, and written modes are essential for students' meaning-making of NOS. However, research has sidelined the interaction among these three modes in understanding students' collaborative discourse of NOS. Informed by…

Language and literacy are inextricably linked with identity, yet most children experience children's literature in schooling contexts in only one language. For many students, this language is not their home or preferred language, so they rarely, if ever, see their home language represented in school and children's literature. While the number of…

This paper contributes to the contemporary focus on literacy and digital stories in early childhood education and care (ECEC) institutions. When a group of young children create an animated story together, they might collaborate, both with their peers and with their teacher. By drawing on social semiotic multimodal perspectives as the theoretical…

This review is on Lilian Pozzer and Wolff-Michael Roth's "A cultural-historical perspective on the multimodal development of concepts in science lectures." We offer some brief observations from within the paradigm of social semiotics, more specifically from our own attempts to produce multimodal accounts of learning in and beyond the…

A central goal of lesson-centered professional development programs (PD) for mathematics teachers is to learn by constructing an artifact, for example, by designing and improving a lesson plan together. That leads to the questions, what does it mean, for mathematics teachers, to improve a lesson? And how can improvements be accounted for in the…

As literacy curricula around the world expand to include multimodal meaning-making, the challenge that remains is how teachers can design engaging and effective learning experiences in this context and the nature of their guidance to students in developing their multimodal literacy. Our paper focuses on the topic of multimodal composing, where…

The growing popularity of multimodal resources in technology-mediated learning and teaching practices has brought to the fore the issue of learners' competencies in interpreting, employing and interacting with various semiotic resources, of which language is just one (Kress, van Leeuwen, Multimodal discourse: the modes and media of contemporary…

This qualitative case study delved into students' understanding and positioning while they participated in solving an authentic, conceptually-based problem in a high-school chemistry class. Verbal and nonverbal cues, particularly gestures, offered broader awareness of students' engagement in sensemaking during the learning experience. The…

As literacy researchers continue to investigate how young students make sense of texts, specifically picture books, attention has expanded beyond the role that written language plays in reading comprehension to the various ways that visual images, typography, design elements, and digital devices support and challenge young readers during the act…

General education physical education (GPE) teachers currently face difficulties in providing for the special needs of students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in inclusion GPE classes. In addition, there is currently no best practice in how to present information on adapted physical education (APE ) strategies to GPE teachers effectively. This…

This study examined 94 bilingual and emergent bilingual 10th grade students' perspectives on multimodal composing for academic purposes in their English Language Arts class. A social semiotics theoretical framework was employed to understand students' views of the affordances and constraints when composing three digital multimodal projects--a…

There is increasing recognition of the multimodal representational nature of science discovery practices and the roles of multiple and multimodal representations in students' meaning making in science (Lemke, 1998; Tytler, Prain, Hubber, & Waldrip, 2013; Tang, "International Journal of Science Education," 38(13), 2069-2095, 2016).…

Recent research indicates that using multimodal learning experiences can be effective in teaching mathematics. Using a social semiotic lens within a participationist framework, this paper reports on a professional learning collaboration with a primary school teacher designed to explore the use of metaphors and modalities in mathematics…

While digital multimodal composing, underpinned by a critical literacies approach, provides opportunities for students to make informed semiotic choices and voice concerns about social issues, there is limited research exploring how digital multimodal composing is employed to interrogate and challenge the entanglements of language, immigration…