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Research on academic literacies has predominately focused on writing practices in higher education. To account for writing practices in the digital age, this paper emphasizes the importance of extending the focus of academic literacies beyond writing to include multimodal composition. Drawing on social semiotics, we put forward a framework for understanding and analysing multimodal academic argument. This framework views argument in relation to features that make up text, namely mode, genre, discourse, and medium. We also look at ways in which multimodal resources are appropriated into argument through citation. Becoming more explicit about the ways in which academic argument is constructed is important for enabling student access into the discourses and practices of academia.

Extended Curriculum Programmes have a responsibility to validate the resources and experiences students bring to their learning environment. However, designing assessment practices that encourage diverse students to draw on their resources in order to both access and challenge disciplinary discourses can be complex. This article is framed in terms of how students balance their own experiential knowledge while engaging with the disciplinary discourse. It aims to interrogate students' negotiation of the "contact zone" and how they negotiate their brought-along resources with assessment guidelines. A multimodal social semiotic approach is taken to explore ways of contributing to a socially just pedagogy by enabling recognition of a range of students' resources, while at the same time acknowledging the need to access the conventions of the discipline. We argue for recognition as the positive side of assessment, which could enable more diverse students' resources to be acknowledged. We interrogate the meaning-making trajectories of two students, Xola and Sonwabo, in a first-year landscape architecture course. While both students bring their own resources into a spatial model project, they each have varying "success" in mediating these in relation to the dominant conventions of landscape architectural design.

This paper explores the notion of "productive risk" as a way of understanding how diverse students can become re-makers of landscape architectural design practices and education. We trace the design trajectories of two first-year students at a South African tertiary institution and examine how the students negotiate the risk of drawing on their own experiences and resources in order to access conventionalised disciplinary practices. It is important to recognise students' brought-along resources, but we also need to recognise the risk involved for the students and teachers in drawing on these resources. This risk needs to be seen in the light of a history of colonised education where diverse resources and experiences were often disregarded or devalued. We show how these students contextualise landscape architecture in terms of their own experiences and draw on their resources as prompts to space-making for the imagined users of their designs. We surface the risk in terms of students' experiential resources as well as the use of unusual model-building materials and techniques. The high levels of engagement that these two students demonstrate in their design trajectories reveal the importance of making a connection between diverse contexts and the landscape architectural classroom. We argue that a pedagogy that embraces risk as productive can recognise and validate the rich knowledge, resources and experiences that students bring with them.

The effectiveness of writing centre interventions on student writing in higher education has been well-documented in academic literacies studies. This paper changes the focus of investigation from student to consultant and, consequently, explores the way in which an academic writing centre can function as a mentoring environment for young academics. As a collaborative learning space encouraging transition and transformation, the writing centre is an important site in which postgraduate student consultants are able to explore facets of their academic identities. The role the writing centre plays in the transition from consultant as student to professional is surfaced through a thematic analysis of interview data. We examine the textures of these transitions and the effect writing centre principles have had on teaching practice with particular reference to dealing with English additional language students and the incorporation of an "academic development" perspective into mainstream teaching.

This article takes a multimodal social semiotic approach to analysing educational textbooks. We are interested in the ways in which educational textbooks contribute to designing our social futures by constructing both the student and the discipline in a particular manner. While a textbook's primary purpose is to provide the reader with knowledge content about a specific topic, it also serves to conventionalise and entrench certain discipline-specific practices and values. A textbook simultaneously competes in an economic environment where the reader has a choice of many textbooks. The text, therefore, takes on a hybrid form, where marketisation and conversationalisation co-exist in dialogue with academic discourse. The article analyses the discourses of Pharmacology as constructed in two widely used Pharmacology textbooks in South Africa. We take a systemic functional approach which views texts as realising meaning in three ways, namely the ideational, the interpersonal and the textual. The analysis shows how one of the textbooks tends to establish a more democratic relationship between authors and readers, while constructing Pharmacology within a scientific discourse of drugs. The other textbook constructs a more traditional and hierarchical relationship between author and reader, yet tends to reinforce a clinical, patient-centred approach to Pharmacology. We argue that this kind of analysis is important when interrogating curriculum, as textbooks are crucial sites of struggle over discourse, meaning and power.

This paper explores the ways in which multimodal classroom discourse could inform a social justice agenda through broadening the base for representation in the classroom. It identifies some of the challenges and opportunities of designing multimodal classrooms in diverse and developing contexts, where there are vast differentials in terms of access to resources. It focuses on the ways in which multimodal classrooms could recognise a range of student resources, whilst at the same time enabling access to dominant forms. This includes access to the discourses and knowledges of official curricula and formal methods of assessment, as well as the creation of dispositions towards meaning-making outside of the classroom. Formal education often closes down access to a range of semiotic resources and multimodal classrooms can potentially recover "recognition" of these. This paper explores ways of designing multimodal classrooms for social justice in order to bring to the surface the range of students' resources which are often not noticed or valued in formal educational settings. It proposes the following: the questioning of boundaries between domains, harnessing students' representational resources, developing metalanguages for reflection and creating less regulated classroom spaces.

This paper reflects on a first year communication project in a South African engineering foundation programme which attempted to bring a cultural studies perspective to the teaching of academic literacy practices. In the project, students identify everyday objects that have symbolic meanings and examine these in a range of physical, cultural and communicational contexts. These objects are seen as catalysts for enabling student narratives and understandings to emerge. Objects also become a way of exploring notions of culture and cultural practices in the classroom and the tensions between convention and change they often index. This paper focuses on a particular manifestation of this tension, in the form of a moralistic discourse, or a discourse of 'propriety'. The pedagogical implications of this kind of cultural studies project are explored, including the importance of opening up less regulated spaces to allow different competencies to be validated and, crucially, ways of framing and critiquing students' resources in order to harness these constructively. (Contains 1 table and 2 figures.)

Students need access to the disciplinary practices of engineering, but at the same time, these practices need to transform to the realities of the changing global environment and the profession. The site of this research is an engineering foundation programme for less advantaged students in South Africa and is thus perhaps well-positioned to look afresh at some mainstream disciplinary practices. Rather than students conforming to a narrow sense of appropriate behaviour, a dialogue needs to be set up between what students bring and what the institution expects, in order to evolve innovative spaces within the curriculum. This paper explores what these spaces can offer and looks at how students negotiate complex identity positions in their writing, specifically in terms of agency and affect. It emphasizes that both educators and engineers need to learn to draw on own knowledges and experiences rather than imposing knowledge in a top-down process.

There has tended to be an overemphasis on the teaching and analysis of the mode of writing in "academic literacies" studies, even though changes in the communication landscape have engendered an increasing recognition of the different semiotic dimensions of representation. This paper tackles the logocentrism of academic literacies and argues for an approach which recognises the interconnection between different modes, in other words, a "multimodal" approach to pedagogy and to theorising communication. It explores multimodal ways of addressing unequal discourse resources within the university with its economically and culturally diverse student body. Utilising a range of modes is a way of harnessing the resources that the students bring with them. However, this paper does not posit multimodality as an alternative way of inducting students into academic writing practices. Rather, it explores what happens when different kinds of "cultural capital" (Bourdieu, 1991) encounter a range of generic forms, modes and ways of presenting information. It examines how certain functions are distributed across modes in students' texts in a first year engineering course in a South African university (specifically scientific discourse and student affect) and begins to problematise the visual/verbal distinction.

In this article we describe and discuss a three-year case study of a course in web literacy, part of the academic literacy curriculum for first-year engineering students at the University of Cape Town (UCT). Because they are seen as practical knowledge, not theoretical, information skills tend to be devalued at university and rendered invisible to the students. In particular, web-searching skills are problematic, given the challenges that the Web poses to academic values and traditional research practices. Consequently, the technical skills of web searching are often taught separately from academic curricula or left entirely unaddressed. We illustrate an alternative, integrated approach to the development of this aspect of information literacy. We apply a critical action research methodology to document, evaluate and reflect on students use of evaluative frameworks. Focusing on the facilitation of critical and evaluative use of the Web for exploratory learning, we interrogate the role of cultural capital and evaluate the effectiveness of the scaffolding provided by the course design. We find important connections between developing knowledge of academic discourse and successful academic use of the Web, and note that, for students to transfer their skills to a range of contexts, these skills will require sustained attention throughout the undergraduate curriculum. We present evidence that the most effective strategies integrate everyday practical knowledge of research techniques with teaching about academic discourse and building students knowledge in a specific domain.

Discusses a numeracy course, focused on project work around HIV/AIDS, that has been constructed for first-year university students in South Africa. (Author/VWL)