Digital competence and multimodality in Swedish curricula: possibilities, challenges and tensions

The presentation focuses on recent changes in the Swedish curricula for compulsory school and explores to what extent and how multimodal meaning-making is conceptualized. The changes are supposed to adjust education to a digitalized society and support students’ in their development of “adequate digital competence”.

 Digitalization potentially facilitates multimodal meaning-making, providing students with a wide range of opportunities through modes and media. Meanings are shaped in new and hybrid formats, and acknowledgement and understanding of the semiotic choices and intentions of students, as well as and the potential of multimodal design (Serafini, 2012), becomes an equity issue (Sofkova Hashemi, 2017; Bezemer & Kress, 2016).. Previous studies of multimodality in teaching and assessment show that teachers do not have enough, or accurate, competences to teach or assess multimodal meaning-making on a modal specialized level. Even if teaching encourages the use of several modalities and multimodal meaning-making, most attention is given to the verbal written text in the assessment of students’ work (cf. Oldham, 2005; Matre et al., 2011; Godhe, 2014; Silseth &Gilje, 2017).

 We present an analysis of if, and how, the recent changes in the Swedish curricula for compulsory school relate to and support multimodal meaning-making. Content analysis was used to categorize the changes as additions, changes or deletions (Boyatis, 1998; Braun & Clarke, 2006). The analysis show some support for the inclusion of multimodal meaning-making, implicitly pointing to other modalities than the verbal and to a redefinition of the concept of ‘text’. However, the majority of the changes address the ‘use of digital tools’ as a technical skill. Based on the analysis, questions concerning the implications for teaching, teacher education and possibilities for redefining knowledge and learning (cf. Lankshear & Knobel, 2009; Kalantzis & Cope, 2012), are raised and discussed.