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In this article I describe the transition of a group of university students in Australia into an online learning environment during COVID-19 pandemic disruptions. I reflect upon my intersubjective experiences as the lecturer in an unexpected situation of urgency and physical distancing. Research has acknowledged synchronous virtual learning contexts as less psychologically distancing than previously thought. I argue that these contexts can foster profound intimacy between participants through linguistic and multimodal means. I use an auto-ethnographic narrative inquiry approach to share observations gained retrospectively through multimodal, critically reflexive, social semiotic discourse analysis of audio-visual recordings of synchronous workshops conducted in 2020. I attempt to fill the gap in research on intimacy in online educational settings by suggesting that intimacy can be created by "linguaplay, personal testimonies," and "contrived chaotic material ecologies." I advocate moving away from an obsession with standardising and generating student knowledge in formal online learning to a stance that values intimacy, connection, and spontaneity.

Social semiotic discussions about the role played by representations in effective teaching and learning in areas such as physics have led to theoretical proposals that have a strong common thread: in order to acquire an appropriate understanding of a particular object of learning, access to the disciplinary relevance aspects in the representations used calls for the attainment of representational competence across a particular "critical constellation of systematically used semiotic resources (which are referred to as" modes, "see more on this later)." However, an affirming empirical investigation into the relationship between a particular object of learning and different representational formulations, particularly with large numbers of students, is missing in the literature, especially in the context of university-level physics education. To start to address, this research shortfall the positioning for this article is that such studies need to embrace the complexities of student thinking and application of knowledge. To achieve this, both factor and network analyses were used. Even though both approaches are grounded in different frameworks, for the task at hand, both approaches are useful for analyzing clustering dynamics within the responses of a large number of participants. Both also facilitate an exploration of how such clusters may relate to the semiotic resource formulation of a representation. The data were obtained from a questionnaire given to 1,368 students drawn from 12 universities across 7 countries. The questionnaire deals with the refraction of light in introductory-level physics and involves asking students to give their best prediction of the relative visual positioning of images and objects in different semiotically constituted situations. The results of both approaches revealed no one-to-one relationship between a particular representational formulation and a particular cluster of student responses. The factor analysis used correct answer responses to reveal clusters that brought to the fore three different complexity levels in relation to representation formulation. The network analysis used all responses (correct and incorrect) to reveal three structural patterns. What is evident from the results of both analyses is that they confirm two broad conclusions that have emerged from social semiotic explorations dealing with representations in relation to attempting to optimize teaching and learning. The first, which is linked to a facilitating-awareness perspective, is that any given disciplinary visual representation can be expected to evoke a dispersed set of knowledge structures, which is referred to as their "relevance structure." Thus, the network analysis results can be seen as presenting a unique starting point for studies aiming to identify such "relevance structure." The second broad conclusion is that disciplinary visual representation can and often does contain more "disciplinary-relevant aspects" than what may be directly visible in a given representation. These are referred to as the "appresent" aspects that need to become part of the total awareness needed by someone to constitute an intended meaning. The results of the factor analysis can then also be seen to be a way of capturing "all" the disciplinary-relevant aspects (both present and appresent). Educational implications are discussed.

Background: In learning astronomy, students need to shift between 3D and 2D representations involving complex interactions between the body and material environment. Little attention has been paid to the iconic nature of this astronomical diagramming. Purpose: This research explored the value for students of diagramming to reveal the structural relationships of astronomical phenomena. The study aimed to (1) operationalise Charles Peirce's pragmatist semiotics to analyse students' bodily and material reasoning (2) identify the iconic nature of students' diagramming through Stjernfelt's activating of Peirce's iconicity. Sample: Two students (a pair) from a class of 30 Year 7 students (12 years old) and their teacher (1) from a government secondary school in Melbourne, Australia. Design and Methods: A micro-ethnographic approach to the analysis of video/audio records and student artefacts was utilised in the context of three moments from a 1 hr lesson on astronomy. This data was analysed using Peirce's sign types of icon, index and symbol to construct a triadic account of the bodily and material nature of students' reasoning as diagramming. Results: The two students determined, by revealing structural relationships with their bodies as well as a mini-whiteboard and a torch and globe, that the Sun is higher in the sky in Summer than Winter due to the Earth's rotational axis with a tilt (of 23.5 degrees) and its elliptical orbit around the Sun. Conclusion: For students to transduct between 3D and 2D astronomical representations, they need to coordinate space-based and Earth-based perspectives through bodily and material diagramming that makes apparent key structural relationships (i.e. iconicity).

Purpose: Government primary schools in Australia increasingly take up the International Baccalaureate's Primary Years Programme (IB-PYP) to supplement government-mandated curriculum and governance expectations. The purpose of this paper is to explore how teachers navigate and contest dual policy-practice expectations in the Victorian Government IB-PYP context. Design/methodology/approach: This study used a narrative inquiry approach. The narratives of two teachers were generated through a narrative interview and then re-storied with participants through a set of conceptual lenses drawn out of the policy assemblage and affect studies theoretical spaces. Findings: The stories participants told show that competing mandatory local policy expressions are experienced and contested both to stabilize a technocratic rationality and produce alternative critical-political educational futures. Originality/value: There a few accounts of teachers' policy experience in government school settings implementing the IB-PYP. In addressing this gap, this paper directly responds to prior claims of the IB's failure to promote an emancipatory pedagogy, showing instead that when teachers who bring a more critical understanding of educational purpose to their work take up the IB-PYP policy to support the enactment of that purpose.

Creative pedagogies contribute significantly to children's cognitive, social and linguistic development. This article discusses the drama-based creative literacy practice of an early primary teacher in a high diversity school in Sydney, Australia. Literacy pedagogy blended with drama and role play was shown to aid oracy whilst also adding valuable semiotic support for language learners. Video recordings of this teacher's lessons formed the basis of a hermeneutic phenomenological study into the affordances of drama in additional language contexts. Findings revealed positive contributions to learner comprehension and engagement. They also indicated that the pressure of an over-crowded curriculum necessitates personal commitment to creative arts pedagogy on the part of the teacher. Despite policy rhetoric promoting creativity as a key capability, creativity itself is seen to be stymied in an educational context heavily prioritising standardisation and assessment. Without systemic support, it is left to motivated, individual teachers to prioritise creative learning experiences in schools.

This paper outlines the general influence of Halliday's (1994, 2014) systemic functional linguistics on TESOL curriculum. Halliday's explanation of language as a social semiotic and language learning as learning to mean has been applied internationally in genre and textbased teaching. The concept of register in systemic functional linguistics describes linguistic variation of texts for the expression of different meanings. SFL studies document teachers' explicit instruction in the lexicogrammatical construction of text types linked to function and social context. The explicitness informs students' decision-making for formulation of meanings in different text types. Reference is made to SFL applied in teacher education. There is mention of the relevance of SFL to Australia's concern with literacy standards in education.

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 status and power. This article explores how 23 primary-aged English as an Additional Language (EAL) students (Years 3-6) engaged in digital multimodal composing, in the context of an after-school multiliteracies programme in one Australian school. Conceptualising critical literacies as a bridge to access and transform codes of power, the article explores how the participating students selected and used different semiotic resources for their digital texts while challenging and redefining dominant discourses based on their lived experiences and interests. The study found that both students and pre-service teachers found value in students having access to digital technologies and experimenting with a range of multimodal and multilingual resources to create digital texts, which reflected cultural and linguistic identities. The findings illustrate how the creation of digital multimodal and multilingual texts allows for opportunities for students to reposition themselves as knowledgeable and active meaning-makers with strategic support from teachers and peers.

There is currently a lack of systematic study examining the integration of verbal-visual elements in science textbooks. In particular, few research has investigated how different types of visual representations (e.g. photograph, diagram, table) vary across the major written genres of science (e.g. information report, explanation). Based on the perspective of social semiotics, this paper aims to understand the co-dependency between visual representations and written genres by analysing a corpus of multimodal texts from a major Australian textbook series. Quantitative and qualitative analyses reveal a number of interesting patterns in terms of how several types of representations tend to appear with certain genres, as well as possible reasons for this co-dependency. In particular, the analysis accounts for why and how: (a) photographs and tables are used to support information report, (b) diagrams and photographs for explanation, and (c) diagrams and tables for experimental account. This study provides empirical evidence to support the importance of analysing multimodal genre for science teaching and learning as well as science education research.

Since 2018, school students around the world have gone on strike from school to call on leaders to take decisive action on climate change. Prominent in the resultant rallies are placards created by participants -- from small children to their adult allies. This paper explores how students in the movement enact and activate visual approaches to communicating their concerns regarding climate change. By analysing the signage created by protestors at the largest yet rally held in Sydney, in September 2019, we situate the protests as a unique space for students' political voice. Our analysis of the signs and placards held by children finds that students use creative, mixed-media construction methods and draw on culturally significant objects and images to produce and visually communicate perspectives on climate change. This study shows how placards leverage emotional responses of anger, amusement and empathy to reflect the political, social and environmental dimensions of climate change, and collective demands for urgent policy action. In doing this, we highlight the role of visual communication in public protests and civic discourse, and the potential benefits to education on climate change. The visual language of the protest reinforces the critical or immediate nature of climate change to students as they draw on temporal symbols to communicate how they relate to climate change. We argue that these findings highlight the importance of creative, participatory and visual methods for student learning -- and co-creating climate change education.

While previous studies have outlined the advantages of semiotic resources for meaning making and relationship building, not all semiotic resources are equal in their ability to enhance these features. Using linguistic ethnographic interviews and focus group discussions, this article examines whether mobile phones provide sufficient semiotic resources for English as a Foreign Language (EFL) migrants to effectively communicate, particularly for service situations regarding finances where they often have to speak in English with unknown interlocutors. Two important elements are uncovered regarding EFL migrants' difficulty in using phones as a semiotic resource -- (1) linguistic superiority, where they are judged by their English-speaking interlocutor as engaging in inferior English practices, and (2) paralinguistic insufficiency, where the lack of gestures and facial expressions takes away their ability to make meaning. These elements combined make telephone conversations difficult for many EFL migrants, affecting their expressiveness and ability to effectively communicate, leading to negative outcomes such as avoidance behaviors, and feelings of anxiety and disempowerment. Such difficulties lead to the finding that EFL migrants must be better accommodated when engaging in service transactions, with other, semiotically richer resources required to better aid their understanding and ease feelings of anxiety.

This paper argues that meaning-making with multimodal representations in science learning is always contextualized within a genre and, conversely, what constitutes an ongoing genre also depends on a multimodal coordination of speech, gesture, diagrams, symbols, and material objects. In social semiotics, a genre is a culturally evolved way of doing things with language (including non-verbal representations). Genre provides a useful lens to understand how a community's cultural norms and practices shape the use of language in various human activities. Despite this understanding, researchers have seldom considered the role of scientific genres (e.g., experimental account, information report, explanation) to understand how students in science classrooms make meanings as they use and construct multimodal representations. This study is based on an enactment of a drawing-to-learn approach in a primary school classroom in Australia, with data generated from classroom videos and students' artifacts. Using multimodal discourse analysis informed by social semiotics, we analyze how the semantic variations in students' representations correspond to the recurring genres they were enacting. We found a general pattern in the use and creation of representations across different scientific genres that support the theory of a mutual contextualization between genre and representation construction.

Representations constitute an important part of chemistry knowledge. This paper revisits the notion of the term, symbolic, in the chemistry triangle proposed by Johnstone using the theoretical lens of social semiotics. In doing so, this paper proposes a framework of chemistry learning that highlights representational re-description and coordination as key mechanisms for facilitating connections among the three domains of knowledge: chemical phenomenon (perceptual-experiential level), macroscopic (theoretical-descriptive level) and submicroscopic (theoretical-explanatory level). This paper illustrates how this framework can be used to explore student meaning making of changes of state by examining students' interactions with the phenomena of melting and boiling and with the multiple representations of the phases of matter introduced in the classroom. The findings revealed the opportunities and challenges which emerged from student meaning making with multiple representations in the process of developing an understanding of the submicroscopic view of phase change. It also highlighted the support needed to facilitate such meaning making through representational re-description and coordination in order for students to develop a deep understanding of the logical connections between the particular model and the macroscopic patterns of the observed phenomena.

Television, like other media, can work as a platform for promoting learning. This article illustrates the value of multimodal discourse analysis for evaluating the potential of a children's television show as a vehicle for fostering knowledge and skills in a specific subject area. Drawing on social semiotic principles and systemic functional genre theory, we examine the use of language and other modes in "Teacup Travels" -- a show designed to introduce young viewers to historical artefacts. The analysis demonstrates that both story structure and particular semiotic resources contribute to how these objects are represented, and thus shape the TV programme's potential to engage children in learning about the past. Our findings suggest that multimodal storytelling strategies used in "Teacup Travels" encourage some aspects of children's historical consciousness and thinking, while backgrounding others.

The present study is aimed at unpacking Latino migrants' metaphorical conceptualizations of their language learning trajectories as sites for construction and negotiation of their complex identities throughout the process of transnational migration. In particular, our work intends to describe and interrogate three adult Latino migrants' personal, linguistic and cross-cultural journeys as they experienced their English language learning in Australia. Informed by a qualitative approach, three data sets were gathered: (i) written narratives of personal, linguistic and cross-cultural challenges experienced throughout their trajectories in Australia; (ii) visual metaphors produced by the participants depicting metaphorically their language learning experiences; (iii) face-to-face interviews. The findings revealed the complex personal, cultural and linguistic processes, which have all contributed to re-shaping and negotiating their personal, social and professional identities over time. The metaphorical analysis of the respondents' spoken narratives and of their metaphorical visual images evidenced the presence of pervasive metaphors of 'disability" and "impairment" in their discourse.

This paper examines the affordances of physical objects (e.g. apparatus, models, manipulatives) as they were used by teachers and students to make meaning in coordination with their speech and gestures. Despite the pervasive use of physical objects as material and tactile resources in hands-on investigations or demonstrations, there have been few attempts to analyze their role and function in meaning-making, in the same way, that researchers have previously done for other modes of representation such as speech, written text, diagram and gesture. Using social semiotics as a theoretical framework, we conceptualise physical objects as a semiotic mode with a particular affordance for making meaning that involves embodied actions and manipulation of tools. Based on a multimodal discourse analysis of numerous classroom situations, we illustrate how physical objects as a mode have four unique affordances for meaning-making in science classrooms. These affordances are: (a) enacting material interaction, (b) providing evidential meaning, (c) orientating three-dimensional spatial meaning and (d) sensitising experiential meaning. The implication of why we should use physical objects to support or value-add science meaning-making is then discussed.

In this article, we provide an overview of the last twenty years of research on Indigenous sign languages, deaf community sign languages, co-speech gesture, and multimodal communication in the Australian context. From a global perspective, research on sign languages and on the gestures that normally accompany speech has been used as the basis for exploring different aspects of linguistic theory. Such research informs debates about the nature of the human language capacity and questions as to whether the diverse range of languages we see in the world share some universal patterns of organisation. We outline some of the theoretical and methodological achievements of scholars working in these interconnected disciplines in Australia, highlight the value of corpus-based approaches to linguistic research, draw attention to research on multimodality in the verbal arts, and discuss community-oriented research outputs guided by collaborative research practices. The article is accompanied by an on-line and editable bibliography of well over 300 publications that is accessible to researchers and others working in these related fields.

In this article, the authors argue that the notion of a teacher and the coexisting teacher education processes are being progressively emptied out, and replaced by the model of a corporate worker, serving the needs of a post-industrial financial capitalist society. They assert that teachers have had their identities stripped of their previous roles as guardians and proponents of civil society, or as the keepers of an essential knowledge to live a good life. Instead their roles have become merged with the over-riding concerns of financial capitalism, which primarily works from the perspective of the profit motive, and that reduces all activity under its aegis to calculable economic values representable as numerical, parallel to the multitude of companies on the stock exchange. The authors look for concrete routes out of the current situation, which escape the ways in which subjectivity is captured and turned into something else, ready to be demarcated as a flow in the financial capitalist setup. They draw upon concepts invented by Deleuze and Guattari (1983) that emphasize movement and interconnection, flows and blockages, in complex, unpredictable and contradictory contexts such as capitalism. They suggest that schizoanalysis, an approach from Deleuze and Guattari (1983) that focuses on mapping the contradictory productions and flows of desire across multiple scales, allows the analyst to move between the micro and macro, and to consider fragments, moments and events, and is a potent methodology to resist the capture of subjectivity by capital, and to reconceive the processes of teacher education.

The main goal of this paper is to depict the struggle for cultural existence in "Rabbit Proof Fence." It also reflects the cultural conflict represented in the three aboriginal girls' characters which is due to their rejection and resistance for the colonialists' culture. Besides, the paper presents the cognitive analysis of the cultural struggle and resistance in Molly's character, and it tackles the cultural resistance in "Rabbit Proof Fence" from a postcolonial point of view. Additionally, the semiotic dimension, which is based on a socio-cultural basis, is introduced in this paper.

Courses: Visual Rhetoric, Visual Communication, Multiplatform Journalism, Advertising, Journalism, Public Relations. Objective: This unit activity requires that students analyze and produce imagery with the help of semiotic theory. Students will: (1) learn to connect theory with practice holistically by simultaneously practicing visual analysis and synthesis; (2) practice visual rhetoric, a key skill for professionals from media and related sectors; and (3) understand the basics of visual storytelling.

To acknowledge the lasting and increasing influence of Halliday's theory of systemic functional linguistics (SFL) on teacher education, this article outlines Critical SFL Praxis (CSFLP) in teacher education as an activist effort in research and practice. Informed by systemic functional linguistics, the critical approach seeks to push back against minoritization of multilingual youth in schools and communities. Profiling the socio-historical background of SFL-based pedagogy in teacher education in Australia, the authors of this article conducted interviews with four SFL scholars and teacher educators from Australia who were greatly influenced by Michael Halliday and his theory of social semiotics. After a brief definition of CSFLP, we present the findings of our qualitative analysis of the interview with the four Australian SFL scholars. These findings illustrate the historical tensions, challenges, and opportunities in enacting CSFLP and point toward key affordances of the theory for teachers and teacher education.

Slowmation is a twenty-first century digital literacy educational tool. This teaching and learning tool has been incorporated as an assessment strategy in the curriculum area of science and mathematics with pre-service teachers (PSTs). This paper explores two themes: developing twenty-first century digital literacy skills and modelling best practice assessment tools. In the growing debate about the impact of multi-model representations, researchers such as Hoban and Nielsen, and Brown, Murcia and Hackling emphasise the development of conceptual understandings and semiotics. This paper focuses on PSTs' experiences of and reflections on Slowmation as an educational tool. Data was collected from a cohort of final year PSTs who created, presented and reflected on their Slowmation process.

Increased attention to urban diversity as a site of study has fostered the recent development of linguistic landscape studies. To date, however, much of the research in this area has concerned the use and spread of English to the exclusion of other global languages. In a case study situated in Box Hill, a large suburb of Melbourne, we adopted a layered approach to investigate the role of Chinese language in Australia. Our data set consisted of hundreds of photographs of street signage in one square block area of the shopping district. Results of our analyses show that signage portrays a variety of code preferences and semiotic choices that in turn reveal insights into the identities, ideologies, and strategies that help to structure the urban environment. As demonstrated in our study, such complexity requires a renewed and situated understanding of key principles of linguistic landscape research (Ben-Rafael & Ben-Rafael, 2015).

This paper arises from research undertaken by educational semioticians and science educators investigating the use of student generated digital artefacts as assessment tasks in pre-service science teacher education. Part of a broader shift toward student-generated media in tertiary science, the use of such tasks is driven by the need to deepen pre-service primary teachers' understandings of content and to foster enthusiasm for teaching science. However, the tasks are challenging as students must demonstrate both content and meta-semiotic knowledge in these brief digital standalone presentations. In the paper, we draw on artefacts, interviews and assessment practices to demonstrate these challenges. We identify what have emerged as key semiotic understandings necessary to complete a successful response to the task, arguing that these include multimodal understandings as well as knowledge of disciplinary specific representational practices. We describe an intervention informed by functional social semiotics and scaffolded literacy approaches with key features including use of an exemplar text for deconstruction and an explicit instructional sequence with a tailored assessment rubric. The paper reports both theoretical and practical insights and seeks to contribute to emerging analytical frameworks as well as multimodal literacy assessment.

While recent literacy research shows an increasing uptake in multimodal literacies, there remains a disjunction between multimodal literacy teaching and assessment. This paper offers a critical review of assessment in the context of teaching multimodal literacies and begins by reviewing the notion of literacy and reframing assessment in educational contexts. In our review, assessing multimodal literacies is often located in studies of multimedia compositions as extensions of writing. Assessing multimodal literacies tends to take the form of rubrics and teachers' lack of knowledge in this domain of professional practice leads them to assessment criteria for writing as their point of reference. Research in higher education shows an emerging interest in engaging students in establishing criteria for assessing multimodal literacies. Elsewhere in English as an additional language/dialect and second language education, an embrace of multimodal tasks offers non-linguistic modes that can influence, engage and in some cases enhance students' multimodal communicative competence. Yet, researchers suggest multimodal literacies tasks are generally less valued for assessing literacies in these contexts. This article highlights the opportunities and challenges of assessing multimodal literacies and extends the ongoing debates for further research in closing the gap between teaching and assessing multimodal literacies.

A "digital explanation" is a science learning task where learners explain science content to non-expert others, in this case, the learners are primary preservice teachers [PST] in a science methods class. In the task, PST are assigned a prompt based on science content from the New South Wales K-6 syllabus and generate or source multiple representations to design and produce this stand-alone digital artefact. In this study, PST were interviewed about their decision making in producing the digital explanation, which offers insight into the design process and what makes for a successful product. Data include the digital explanations, interviews with nine PST, marking rubrics and rationale statements generated as part of the task. Thematic coding shows PST make design decisions for four principal reasons: content, engagement, clarity and unconscious selection. Decisions around content and engagement prevail and their decisions reveal keys to success in creating a digital explanation. We also note a tension between emphasis on engagement over content, which may reflect that the intended audience is young children and PST have a strong desire to gain and keep children's interest.

The use of cohesive devices in academic discourse not only improves the quality of writing but also enhances our learning experiences. This study aims to explain how the multimodal accounting discourse is constructed by postgraduate business students through the cohesive ties. Halliday and Hasan's and Halliday's cohesion analysis schemes were employed in the systemic functional multimodal discourse analysis (SF-MDA) of the cohesive devices in the multimodal accounting texts. The schemes are based on systemic functional linguistics (SFL) which suits the context of this study as it considers language as a social semiotic resource for making meaning. Its linguistic tools are capable of explaining the way we construct and make meanings. The SF-MDA findings showed the first and most frequently occurring cohesive device type in the orthographic texts was lexical cohesion, in particular repetition of the same lexical items, followed by reference and conjunctions. Lexical cohesive devices were higher in the tables than in the orthographic texts. Conjunctions were only employed in the orthographic texts to signal extension and enhancement relationships. One of the key features that characterize financial statements is the abundance of implicit hierarchically networked lexical ties that bind the separate lexical strings, thereby organizing the discourse of financial statements. The results contribute to our understanding of the complex multimodal meaning-making processes in accounting discourse.

This paper reports on research which has explored essential requirements for pedagogies of hope, including the expansion of teachers' semiotic knowledge. The study, a professional learning intervention with teachers of young multilingual learners engaged in science inquiry, was informed by Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) descriptions of verbal language and image in scientific representations. SFL's metalanguage provided resources for teachers to support their learners' academic and reflexive literacies in a number of ways. With academic mentors, the teachers used SFL's analytical tools to reveal learners' existing literacy repertoires in relation to the demands of curriculum tasks and to design lesson sequences to infuse support for multiliteracies within science content learning. Analysis of the multimodal texts composed by students provides evidence of the positive impact of culturally sustaining SFL on bi/multilingual learners' writing, including learners who had previously been challenged to demonstrate their science learning in writing and those who had achieved curriculum expectations. Significantly, teachers' developing semiotic knowledge allowed them to engage all students in substantive and reflexive conversations of scientific communication.

In a global and volatile world, teachers are being constantly challenged to support students' literacy development and assist them to develop knowledge and skills to expand into new ways of knowing. This two-year school-university partnership is dedicated to enhancing teachers' learning about language with the goal of building teachers' repertoires in ways that promote effective literacy teaching within their subject specific teaching areas in an Australian high school. The project is grounded in theories of knowledge structures of discipline learning within the sociology of education and associated social semiotic theories of language as a resource for meaning making. The project utilizes formative experimental methodology to understand how teachers enact text-based approaches to school-based literacy. Initial findings reveal how a partnership based on trust, mutuality, and reciprocity motivated teachers to make small but measurable changes to their classroom practice in one area of literacy development.

Literate practice in the arts encompasses both aesthetics and creativity. It is also multimodal in nature and often collaborative. This article presents data collected from a small multi-age school, with children from Prep to Year 7, during their preparation for an end-of-year show. The children had studied the topics of conservation and sustainability through the work of author Graeme Base and in particular his children's book "The Sign of the Seahorse" (1992). Using a mentoring and collaborative approach the children worked together to present the story through drama, dance and song. This research highlights the importance of expressing knowledge and meaning through multiple modes--not just using language. It demonstrates that creative and collaborative expression can be a powerful tool for learning and understanding story.

Despite the growing numbers of migrant students enrolling in Australian secondary schools, and an official acknowledgment of their complex support and learning needs, there has been little policy focus on the pedagogical changes that need to be made by teachers to accommodate these needs. There is also little understanding of the depth and diversity of linguistic resources and cultural funds of knowledge that migrant students bring to Australian classrooms, and the ways in which these might enrich classroom learning experiences for all students. This paper draws upon data from a qualitative, ethnographically oriented case study research project in which teachers and researchers collaborated to enact bottom up language policy that involved the use of translanguaging (Garcia, 2009) to enhance communication and classroom learning amongst multilingual students from migrant backgrounds. The aim was to draw upon students' observable languaging practices from their full repertoire of languages, and to tap into their existing cultural and linguistic funds of knowledge to support their academic language development and foster their linguistic and personal identities in the classroom.

Several studies have been undertaken to develop instruments to measure English teachers' TPACK, but few studies have measured English teachers' TPACK to develop meaningful relationships among technology, content, and pedagogy in the context whereby literacy should be associated with a range of semiotic modes beyond the written language. The interactions with a wider range of texts across modes, media and contexts point to the need for an instrument that can measure English teachers' TPACK in the context of teaching multimodal literacies. In this study, we investigated what factors and items were necessary for examining pre-service teachers' TPACK in multimodal literacy teaching. The proposed TPACK instrument was validated with 220 pre-service teachers across three institutions in Indonesia, China, and Australia. The study shows that the proposed eight-factor instrument generally expressed acceptable validity and reliability and was appropriate for assessing pre-service teachers' TPACK for multimodal literacies. Implications and further research are discussed with the aim of equipping pre-service teachers with the capabilities to integrate content, pedagogy, technology and understand the complex interdependence of contextually bound factors that influence their classroom readiness in teaching multimodal literacies.

This article presents the development, description, application, and discussion of an analytical framework to examine students' drawings of scientific concepts and processes. Student-generated representation, particularly drawing, is increasingly emphasised as an important learning strategy to help students reason, explain, and demonstrate their scientific thinking and understanding. Although this strategy would require a greater need to understand what students are drawing, there are currently few frameworks that can support researchers and educators in analysing student-generated drawings. Based on the theory of social semiotics and an empirical data corpus of students' drawings from two research projects, we developed an analytical framework to describe and categorise a broad range of ideas and relationships that students are representing through their drawings in physics and chemistry. The application of this framework will be illustrated by two analytical examples of students' drawings in the topics of rotational moment and chemical bonding. The first example analysed students' drawings in relation to their accompanying written explanations, while the second example analysed the students' drawings in conjunction with the occurring classroom discourse. Through the illustration, the research and pedagogical applications and usefulness of this analytical framework will be discussed.

Visual arts and other modes and media of communication are vital to Indigenous People, yet multimodal forms of representation, such as those prioritised in the arts, are often poorly understood and excluded from Indigenous education. This article describes cross-cultural, participatory community research enacted with an Indigenous school in Australia. Indigenous elementary students were taught by Indigenous community leaders to engage in visual arts through paintings and other forms of artistic representation (e.g. dances, rap video). These artistic expressions were coherent with Indigenous ways of learning and communicating. The multidimensionality of Indigenous students' paintings was analysed, and the significance explained in relation to the language of transgenerational Indigenous Lore. The results demonstrate how Indigenous visual arts enabled powerful representations of transgenerational knowledge and understandings. The findings also provide generative illustrations of a culturally informed and responsive multimodal literacy pedagogy, highlighting the need to respect the multimodal dimensions of representation that have cultural meanings for Indigenous identity and education practices. The article challenges Western, privileged forms of literacy, while highlighting the need to respect visual arts as language in the English curriculum for equitable and culturally responsive education for Indigenous students.

From a social semiotic perspective, image designs in science textbooks are inevitably influenced by the sociocultural context in which the books are produced. The learning environments of Australia and Taiwan vary greatly. Drawing on social semiotics and cognitive science, this study compares classificational images in Australian and Taiwanese junior high school science textbooks. Classificational images are important kinds of images, which can represent taxonomic relations among objects as reported by Kress and van Leeuwen ("Reading images: the grammar of visual design," 2006). An analysis of the images from sample chapters in Australian and Taiwanese high school science textbooks showed that the majority of the Taiwanese images are covert taxonomies, which represent hierarchical relations implicitly. In contrast, Australian classificational images included diversified designs, but particularly types with a tree structure which depicted overt taxonomies, explicitly representing hierarchical super-ordinate and subordinate relations. Many of the Taiwanese images are reminiscent of the specimen images in eighteenth century science texts representing "what truly is", while more Australian images emphasize structural objectivity. Moreover, Australian images support cognitive functions which facilitate reading comprehension. The relationships between image designs and learning environments are discussed and implications for textbook research and design are addressed.

An essential requirement for supporting the activist literacies of adolescents is a critical understanding of the purposes, practices and roles of engaged citizens and of the linguistic and broader semiotic resources they deploy in response to their multi-layered contexts. Drawing on theories from social semiotic and rhetorical traditions as well as socio-culturally informed genre-based pedagogies, I discuss how teachers and adolescent learners have developed their knowledge of rhetoric and grammar from a close study of the texts of adolescent activists to inform their own activist literacies. (Contains 3 figures.)

The "Early Years Generalizing Project" ("EYGP") involves Australian years 1 to 4 (age 5 to 9) students and investigates how they grasp and express generalizations. This paper focuses on data collected from 6 Year 1 students in an exploratory study within a clinical interview setting that required students to identify function rules. Preliminary findings suggest that the use of gestures (both by students and interviewers), self-talk (by students), and concrete acting out, assisted students to reach generalizations and to begin to express these generalities. It also appears that as students became aware of the structure, their use of gestures and self-talk tended to decrease. [This document was originally published as Warren, E., Miller, J., & Cooper, T. J. (2012). Exploring young students' functional thinking. In B. Ubuz (Ed.), "Proceedings of the 35th Conference of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education" (Vol. 4, p. 329-336). Ankara, Turkey: PME.]

In this thematic case study in a rural primary school, young children of diverse socio-cultural origins use transformative and transmodal redesign in music as they explore new conceptual meanings through self-reflexive interaction in classroom music events. A focus on music dialogue created by interaction between modes is seen to promote inclusiveness and transformation of learning. This praxial approach to music learning in the classroom context uncovers hidden dogma used to justify existing structures in the curriculum. In music education in Australia there is still a common failure to acknowledge that embodied and situated music making found in "everyday life" (De Nora, 2011) is linked to conceptual knowledge of music. In this study, investigating young children's selections of semiotic resources when redesigning meaning in a dialogue of modes enables educators to determine how conceptual knowledge of music is established, extended and expanded through children's developing understanding of the elements of music during redesign. The complexity of young children's use of music imagery and genre and their grasp of music concepts is evident in their interactions in classroom music events. Awareness of the space of music dialogue allows for a deeper insight in children's capacity for music invention. (Contains 2 figures and 3 transcripts.)

This paper takes up the sea-faring metaphor at the centre of this special edition and asks what kinds of navigational tools (metalanguages) are necessary to steer English through the digital seas of contemporary communication. Much of this territory is yet to be mapped and the disciplinary "boat" is buffeted by contrary winds such as pressures for improved outcomes on the basics and development of 21st-century digital skills. The role of grammar as a navigational aid is complicated by these competing pressures. Alongside developing metalanguages to explore digital literacy practices in Web2, in multimodal texts like picture books, websites and social networking sites, teachers are being asked simultaneously to prepare students for national testing regimes which assess children's abilities to identify the correct verb, to underline the pronouns and to punctuate sentences in language convention tests. What kinds of grammar will enable us to manage such seemingly incongruous purposes? How do we make use of tools to improve students' writing without succumbing to reductionist models of language? What kinds of "stretch" do available grammars need if they are to prove useful as tools in this environment? In this paper, I draw on a range of students' verbal, visual and multimodal texts to investigate the issues facing adaptations of grammatically informed metalanguages in English. I attempt to show how such metalanguages will need to accommodate and account for verbal texts produced by students for assessment and multimodal texts produced by young learners in less formal, even play, situations. Basing my account on Halliday's notion of "grammatics", I argue that any navigational toolkit needs to make space for both convention and innovation, but that this process requires careful thinking, dialogue across different grammars and substantive research into semiosis in school English. (Contains 4 figures.)

Purpose: This study aims to seek to demonstrate how explicit teaching of SFL metalinguistic and multimodal "grammars" enhanced 8-9-year-old children's deeper understanding and production of multimodal texts through critique of the construction of mini-documentaries about animals: the information, language of narration, composition of scenes and resources to engage the viewer. It also seeks to demonstrate how a knowledge of metalinguistic and multimodal "grammars" contributes to students achieving both content knowledge and understanding of the resources of semiotic modes. Design/methodology/approach: A design-based approach was used with the teacher and author working closely together to implement a unit of work on mini-documentaries, including explicit teaching of the metalanguage of information reports, mini-documentary narration (aka script) and multimodal resources deployed to scaffold students' creating their own mini-documentaries. Findings: The students' mini-documentaries demonstrate how knowledge of SFL written and multimodal SFL-informed "grammars" assisted students to learn how meaning was created through selection of resources from the written, visual, sound and gestural modes and apply this knowledge to creating multimodal texts demonstrating their understandings of the topic and how to make meaning in a multimodal mini-documentary. Research limitations/implications: The research is limited to the outcomes from one group of students in one class. Generalisation to other contexts is not possible. Further studies are required to support the results from this research. Practical implications: The linguistic and multimodal SFL-informed grammars can be applied by educators to critique multimodal texts in a range of mediums and scaffold students' production of multimodal texts. They can also inform assessment criteria and expand students' conception of what is literate practice. Originality/value: Knowledge of a linguistic and multimodal metalanguage can provide students with the tools to enhance their critical language awareness and critical multimodal awareness.

A variety of practices and specialised representational systems are required to understand, communicate and construct molecular genetics knowledge. This study describes teachers' use of multimodal representations of molecular genetics concepts and how their strategies and choice of resources were interpreted, understood and used by students to demonstrate their conceptual understanding. Recordings of teachers' and students' discourse around representations, teacher interviews and student pre- and post-tests were used as data sources. Vignettes of students' dialogue with teachers around the form and function of representations and teacher interview responses highlight higher order conceptual understanding. Coding for cognitive domains within lesson phases where different modes of representation were utilised showed classrooms operated at higher domains compared to lessons where modalities were absent. This study shows how pedagogy that focuses on representational form and function as well as students' engagement in critical discussion around affordances and constraints of representations results in a higher cognitive engagement with molecular genetics knowledge.

This article interrogates the construction of a visual and sound installation that juxtaposes contemporary material with historical artefacts regarding academic work to offer an aesthetic mode of interruption in explorations of academic voice in university histories and in the contemporary university. Drawing upon Foucauldian histories of the present (particularly genealogy), this installation combines text, images and sound to take audiences on an emotive journey of the university. As historical research increasingly takes on an aesthetic and sensual turn, moving beyond content and context to consider other forms of representation, the article draws on theories concerning the functions of art and the semiotics involved when we engage with art to explore the emotional dimensions of academic work. Art in story and story in art methodologies are used to situate attempts at engaging in aural and visual ways of knowing time and place to (re)consider academics' silenced historical and contemporary narratives.

Supported by ever-evolving digital tools and online spaces, we argue that multiliteracies can be used to close the gap between teacher-directed, individual, and assessment-driven learning, and authentic, shared, and purpose-driven learning. This is particularly evident through multimodal composition and collaboration in primary classrooms. Over two decades ago, the New London Group argued that all meaning-making is multimodal. By representing their knowledge through multiple modes and for local and global audiences, students can express their identity, exercise agency, and foster a sense of authoring through multimodal production.

This paper explores some of the ways in which our insights into the pedagogy of postgraduate supervision may benefit from understanding some of the attributes of psychotherapy. It proposes that psychotherapy involves teaching and learning processes that can be fruitfully compared with the idealised pedagogical model of the dialectic. It develops insights into postgraduate supervision as pedagogy by interrogating the intersection of teaching and learning with some aspects of psychotherapy. In doing so, it shows how those pedagogical aspects of psychotherapy can enable a deeper understanding and richer practising of postgraduate supervision. This paper works within a model postulated by Gregory Ulmer. In his development of an idea that there is in academic writing the self and the researched, the conscious intellectual semiotic and that arising from storytelling, Gregory Ulmer surveys the idea of "mystories." This word encompasses the self, the story and the mystery of this. I propose my own version of this as the "subjective academic narrative." (A bibliography is included.)