Semiotic work in the science classroom

Abstract

Abstract 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 classroom. We propose to treat meaning as the outcome of social action and interaction: clearly, environments and practices of learning and teaching come within that frame. We comment on the categories and implicit distinctions of verbal vs nonverbal, and the relative visibility and invisibility of meaning makers (teacher and learner) and their use of semiotic resources in accounts of learning. We highlight the agency of learners and propose a transformation of the role of “teacher” into that of “designer (of learning environments)”. We conclude by briefly speculating on the possibility of bringing the two distinct paradigms into dialogue and conjunction.