ABSTRACT
This book takes a multimodal perspective on teaching and learning. It explores the potential of teaching and learning environments to become more democratic, inclusive spaces through investigating the meaning potential in the cultural and material sources to which children have access, to use and transform to make their meanings. Through examining real classrooms, where, every day, children and their teachers are engaged in ‘the work of representation and discourse-making, of culture and development, of capital, communication and exchange’ (Luke 2005), I argue that the forms of representation through which students make their meanings are signs which inflect what their makers ‘wanted to say’ at that particular moment. These signs are not neutral: they are traces of social practice, constantly moving and changing, as they move within ever-expanding ‘webs of significance’ (Pahl and Rowsell 2006: 8). As such, these signs can be viewed as complex inflections of the micro-sites in which they are embedded and broader, macro contexts of history and culture.
