Teaching and assessment of digital, multimodal texts: exploring the possibilities to support educational practices

Two parallel ongoing studies in lower and upper secondary school, aiming to explore and develop teachers’ professional competence regarding teaching and assessment of digital, multimodal meaning-making, are presented and discussed in this presentation. The goal of the projects is to develop models for teaching and assessment practices linked to digital, multimodal meaning-making.

 In a practice-close design-based approach, teachers and researchers meet regularly in workshops with the aim to illuminate established meaning-making practices and teachers’ understanding, teaching and assessment of multimodal texts. The predominance of the verbal mode in education (Godhe, 2013; Öman & Sofkova Hashemi, 2015) is  being challenged by digital multimodal texts and the presence of multiple semiotic systems in the representation of meaning needs to be recognized. Moreover, teaching and assessing multimodality requires an understanding of semiotic specialization (Kress & van Leeuwen, 1996/2006; Serafini, 2012; Bezemer & Kress, 2016).  In the workshops, teachers and researchers try out different models that explicitly focus on multimodal meaning-making (e.g. Bearne, 2009). Multimodal and digital aspects of meaning-making are addressed in relation to teaching goals and curricula, in order to develop a common knowledge as well as concepts and a metalanguage needed to be able to describe contemporary meaning-making. In-between workshops the teachers try out the models in their classrooms and in the following workshop the models are refined based on their classroom experience.

 The presentation discusses preliminary findings from the studies focusing on the aspects of multimodal teaching and assessment that appears to be most problematic. The contribution of a common metalanguage for teachers’ understanding and competence in teaching and assessing multimodal meaning-making is also highlighted. Moreover, to what extent and how the models that have been tried out were helpful in developing the teaching and assessment practices in the classrooms will be discussed.