Multimodal Teaching and Learning - The Rhetorics of the Science Classroom (Hardcover)

This book takes a radically new look at communication, and in doing so presents a series of challenges to accepted views on language, on communication, on teaching and, above all, on learning. Drawing on extensive research in science classrooms, it presents a view of communication in which language is not necessarily communication - image, gesture, speech, writing, models, spatial and bodily codes. The action of students in learning is radically rethought: all participants in communication are seen as active transformers of the meaning resources around them, and this approach opens a new window on the process of learning. In demonstrating that communication always draws on a multiplicity of modes of representation, and of communication, the book constitutes a profound challenge to accepted views of language as the dominant, or perhaps only significant and rational means of representation. Instead, the book suggests that communication proceeds by many modes, of which language is one and not necessarily the dominant one, and it opens a whole new set of questions: if language is not the sole, or even the dominant mode, what are the roles of other modes and how are the