Multimodal texts and pedagogies in Higher Education

Student assignments require increasingly complex multimodal competencies and Higher Education needs to be equipped to help students with the construction of these texts. This research project - 'Multimodal texts and pedagogies in Higher Education'- theorizes changing texts and pedagogies in Higher Educational contexts in Sweden and South Africa from a multimodal perspective. The project will analyze changing multimodal texts across disciplines, modes and media in Higher Education and other fields in society, including discourses and assessment practices. Further, it focuses on how to better enable student access to the discourses and practices of academia through the use of multimodal pedagogies. The research is performed within a multimodal social semiotic framework. From such perspective, texts are seen as sites of struggle over discourse, meaning, subjectivities and power. They are therefore crucial in investigating access to academic practices. The combination of interests and abilities of the two key researchers, Arlene Archer, University of Cape Town, South Africa and Anders Björkvall, Örebro University, Sweden, and included graduate students and postdocs will make it possible to approach the research from different methodological angles and theoretical perspectives and from different cultural and societal points of view. Long term collaboration – also after the end of this project – is the main goal of the project.