ABSTRACT
The world of meaning has always been multimodal. Now, for a variety of reasons, that realization is once again moving centre-stage. A range of questions arises from this re-recognition. In education, for instance, the question of what theories are needed to deal with learning and assessment in a multimodally constituted world of meaning is becoming newly and insistently urgent. That question also poses, in a more general form, the issues of identity and knowledge: identity seen as the outcome of constant transformative engagement by someone with ‘the world’, with a resultant enhancement of their capacities for acting in the world. In that frame, knowledge is seen not as the outcome of processes regulated by power and authority but of everyday, entirely banal processes of meaning-making by individuals in their engagement with the world. The augmentation – in the processes of learning – of the individual’s capacity is at the same time a change in identity of the person.
