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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.

Writing centres have had to adapt to many challenges, including the move to online learning during the Covid-19 pandemic. In South Africa this move was complexified by differential access to digital environments and contextual issues such as lack of electricity and rolling blackouts. Writing centres also need to consider the increasing massification of higher education and ways of harnessing diverse resources to enrich communication. This paper explores writing centre approaches to research and pedagogy within a social justice agenda, including combining an academic literacies approach with a multimodal social semiotic approach. It also investigates innovative approaches to teaching writing in diverse and multilingual contexts, including expanding the repertoire of resources used in writing consultations. It argues that the explicit utilisation of a range of modes can enhance writing production and enable writers to actively explore different modes for constructing meaning. The paper reflects on developing inclusive multimodal writing centre materials. It then explores the changing function of modes in online and face-to-face consultations (post-pandemic lockdowns), including talk as mode, silence as mode, visual modes, and the use of time. The aim is to interrogate our academic practices concerning the diverse languages and various forms of communication that students possess, whether in virtual or physical learning environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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.

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)

University students in landscape architecture need to mobilize a range of resources in their design trajectories in order to resolve their designs. Often design education settings are influenced by design traditions of the global north, and thus may favour particular ways of knowing. This article aims to contribute to a multimodal pedagogy for diversity exploring the ways in which diverse students mobilize resources to move between spatial, verbal and visual modes in a landscape architectural design trajectory. It specifically traces the resources that one student brings to her learning environment in a university in South Africa, and identifies the experiential, social, semiotic, interactive and pedagogical resources she deploys. The authors demonstrate how these resources shape and prompt the student's meaning-making processes, and how she mobilizes these resources to move her design trajectory forward. They do this by building on Kress and Van Leeuwen's Reading Images (2006) model of visual grammar, adapted for three-dimensional space, and Kress's notions of design in Multimodality (2010). The concept of resemiotization is key here to recognizing and understanding the meaning-making potential of modes. The authors argue that the affordances of different modes prompt resemiotization of resources at different times in the design trajectory, moving between material expression and nonmaterial (re)conceptualization. The processes of resemiotization can thus generate emergent meanings and transform them within the student's landscape design trajectories. This approach to pedagogy can valorize the agency, identity, ways of knowing and resourcefulness of diverse meaning-makers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the affordances of multimodal pedagogies in teaching English for academic purposes (EAP) in diverse and multilingual contexts. It draws on South Africa as an example of a multilingual, culturally diverse site in a recently decolonized country. Here theorizing and pedagogical practices around EAP often have a social justice agenda in order to redress the inequalities of the past. The importance of recognizing the multilingual and multimodal resources of students is highlighted in the teaching of academic writing. To this end, the article examines talk as an important mode in improving writing, drawing on multilingualism as a resource, working on screen versus page, the affordances of mind‐mapping and visualizing academic argument. The contention is that multimodal pedagogies can acknowledge students as agentive and creative meaning‐makers. This is particularly relevant in a context in which autonomous and decontextualized models of student support persist and students continue to be constructed as 'lacking' in resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research in fields such as multimodality and semiotics has focused on creation of value in different forms: aesthetic, economic and symbolic. However, the destruction of value has attracted much less attention. The aim of this article is to identify social, semiotic and ideological functions of acts of destruction based on an analysis of the traces these acts leave on the urban environment. Five overarching acts of destruction are discussed, but the authors' main focus is on what they call transformation-driven and social presence-driven destruction, with two examples from Sweden and South Africa. The article discusses sanctioned destructive acts that are largely in compliance with dominating semiotic regimes at a certain time and place, as well as disruptive actions that challenge or even disobey those regimes. The analysis shows how a distinction between sanctioned and disruptive is in no way clear and often depends on complex power distributions between semiotic regimes at a given time and place. In fact, traces in the physical environment that may point to or index highly destructive acts can, in relation to other semiotic regimes, be regarded as creative and constructive. The authors argue that the semiotic processes of destruction and the traces they leave deserve more attention from research in the fields of multimodality and semiotics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the extent to which colour functions as an independent mode in a particular context and explores the culturally produced regularities in the uses of colour in this context. Drawing on a Hallidayan metafunctional view of text, we look at how colour instantiated systems of knowledge and belief (ideational function) and social relations and identities (interpersonal function) in South Africa during the last decade of the apartheid government. In this type of repressive socio-political context, colour was a less policed mode, and thus had different affordances to images and the verbal modes. We argue that colour can function as an independent mode under certain conditions, such as stringent press restrictions, where the use of colour in a range of media (clothing, flags, posters) can play a crucial role in communicating. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines how students' resources can be drawn on in curriculum design in tertiary education to develop a pedagogy of diversity. It asks what kinds of resources are privileged through existing academic practices, and how certain traditionally unused resources can be included in teaching, learning and meaning-making. With reference to a case study in engineering in South Africa, an argument is made for a 'reciprocal curriculum', an exchange of cultural practices and not just bridges to established norms. In this conception of curriculum, students' practices and resources can be utilised, whilst the discourses and knowledge of the discipline can also be made accessible. The parameters of 'science' and scientific discourse are explored by analysing students' texts from a multimodal social semiotic perspective. The paper ends by proposing that students' resources be harnessed through using metalanguages to describe and reflect on their own practices as well as on academic practices, and the need to create less regulated spaces in the curriculum in order to enable this reflection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the discourses that students draw on and propagate in a course on rural development in a first-year engineering foundation programme. It looks at the way 'rural' is often constructed as 'lack' and therefore 'other', the dangers of constructing development as linear, the ways nostalgia and utopianism feed into discourses of development and how 'propriety' serves to maintain boundaries between nature and people, society and individuals. Different modes and media, coupled with the degree of regulation in the classroom, may enable alternate discourses to emerge or to be suppressed. This paper argues that the curriculum needs to engage with students' views in order to understand, interrogate and critique the kinds of realities they feed into. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An approach to writer's stance will differ depending on whether one looks at it from an analytic theoretical perspective or a developmental perspective. This article describes a training activity in the Writing Centre at the University of Cape Town which led the authors to evaluate the concept of writer's stance as used in corpus studies against the way it is used by academic literacy practitioners working in developmental fields. Corpus analysts tend to construct a general and theoretical conceptualisation of writer's stance, while academic literacy practitioners who work in complex developmental fields focus on what actually happens (or needs to happen) when individual readers or writers grapple with texts within particular social environments such as academic disciplines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Different views of society, nature and technology inform engineering activity and proposed developmental interventions. This paper examines the discourses that students both draw on and propagate in a course on rural development in a first year engineering foundation programme. Students' texts reflect and recycle different discourses, some of which may complement each other, and others may compete or represent conflicting interests. A range of modes and media, coupled with the degree of regulation in the classroom space, may enable different discourses to emerge or to be further suppressed. This paper looks at the way rural is often constructed as 'lack' and therefore 'other', as well as discourses of nostalgia and utopianism and how these feed into notions of development. The agenda underlying this investigation is about facilitating student access to the engineering curriculum and contributing to the theorizing of a pedagogy of diversity that utilizes rather than ignores or devalues diverse subjectivities [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports on the first year project in a South African engineering foundation program designed to bring a cultural studies perspective to teaching academic literacy. It says that students identify and investigate everyday objects that have symbolic meaning in their communities. It explores some of the complexities around development in contexts of diversity and change, relocalization and globalization.

‘Mathematical literacy’ is soon to be introduced as a subject in South African schools. This has generated numerous debates in various educational arenas, such as tertiary institutions and professional bodies. This paper looks at the differences between mathematics and Quantitative Literacy (QL) and examines the implicit QL demands and conventionalized QL practices in Higher Education curricula. Although certain practices are highly valued, they are not necessarily explicitly taught to students, especially those from non-dominant or disadvantaged positions in the power structures of the university and the society. This paper explores ways in which the implicit Quantitative Literacy demands can be made explicit and can be used to provide a rich environment to facilitate mathematical and statistical concept acquisition. We look at conventionalized practices in academic disciplines (focusing our analysis on the use of charts) and propose a number of principles of curriculum design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]