Defining learning

The social semiotic account of learning has been described in Jeff Bezemer and Gunther Kress’s foundational text, Multimodality, Learning, and Communication: A Social Semiotic Frame. Bezemer and Kress (2016) argue that learning is essentially meaning-making and that learning happens whenever there is engagement. The term ‘transformative engagement’ is introduced ‘in recognition of the fact that sign-makers do not “simply” — so to speak - copy, acquire, somehow straightforwardly internalize or absorb signs made by others... Learning... rests on interpretation as the outcome of principled, transformative engagement’ (Bezemer & Kress, 2016: 38). Applying the semiotic lens of learning, we shall examine three other aspects of learning in relation to meaning-making through the students’ transformative engagement with the knowledge. They are the understandings that learning is social, semiotic, and embodied.

Learning is a social practice where the students engage and negotiate with the knowledge representations through a pedagogical relationship with the teacher and, at times, collectively, with other students. Kress et al. (2005: 14) explain that ‘the interpersonal and ideational transactions of education are shaped by social relationships... and that the classroom is, in important ways, a site of conflicts, to which the teacher’s rhetorical activity is a response’.The process of collective negotiation of meaning is fundamental to learning as learning is about communication (Bezemer & Kress, 2016). Cope and Kalantzis (2015: 39) argue that‘learning is also very social, as we rely on the artefacts of collective memory, and work with others in the essentially collaborative task of knowledge making’. As such, learning is not just an individual achievement, but an engagement in communication with the teacher, and often in collaboration, with other learners.

Learning is semiotic in that it is about meaning-making. Kress (2007: 37) explains that the signs of learning ‘can be seen as the individual’s agentive selection from engagement with and transformation of the world according to their principles’. The meaning-making in learning is also multimodal in nature. Lemke (2002: 23) explains that semiotically, we never in fact make meaning with only the resources of one semiotic system: words conjure images, images are verbally mediated, writing is a visual form, algebra shares much of the syntax and semantics of natural language, geometric diagrams are interpreted verbally and pictorially, even radio voices speak to us of individuality, accent, emotional states and physical health through vocal signs not organized by the linguistic code.

In this light, learning is semiosis, both in the reception of meaning made, and in the production of meaning.

Learning is also embodied and involves material ways of knowledge representations. Students experience the teacher’s multimodal classroom orchestration and construe the meanings made through the teachers’ embodied semiotic modes, and use of semiotic technologies. This challenges the dominant paradigm as to what the teacher says is the main source of knowledge representation in the classroom. The social semiotic lens on learning posits that meaning is made, and knowledge is represented multimodally, through the teacher’s use of embodied semiotic modes and semiotic technologies. Kress (2000) argues that multimodality is biological and intrinsic to all human beings. Kress (2000: 159) draws attention to the process of synaesthesia, which he describes as ‘the transduction of meaning from one semiotic mode to another semiotic mode, an activity constantly performed by the brain’. In other words, the translation and interpretation of meanings through transformative engagement occurs as part of the cognitive functioning of the brain. Notwithstanding, Cope and Kalantzis (2015: 39) point out that‘knowledge is not (just) the stuff that ends up in our minds. It is what we do and make. Learning is a consequence of a series of knowledge actions, using multimodal media to externalize our thinking.’ In this regard, the view of a teacher as a sage on a stage, dispensing words of wisdom, to students is increasingly irrelevant to the changing learners’ profile and needs in today’s digital age. Central to the pedagogic shift required today is the recognition that a teacher would need to orchestrate the use of embodied semiotic modes and semiotic technologies to design lesson experiences that both engage and educate the students. In this regard, learning is embodied and experienced through the verbal, visual, aural, and somatic sensor)' modes of the students. As such, learning is not just a cognitive achievement, but involves various embodied sensory resources, both through the teacher’s multimodal classroom orchestration and the learner’s transformative engagement.