Educators’ uptake of Kress’s ideas on meaning-making and literacy: a case study from South Africa
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Denise Newfield
Denise Newfield received her PhD in multimodal semiotics from Institute of Education, University of London. Her research interests include multimodal pedagogies, poetry in education, educational transformation and new materialisms. Her most recent book is
Multimodal Approaches to Research and Pedagogy (Routledge, 2014). Her publications include edited books, journal issues and articles, including the award-winning ‘Modalising and mobilising poetry’.
Abstract
This article is a practitioner-based account of the uptake of Kress’s ideas on literacy, literature and meaning-making in South African educational contexts, in particular, his integration of politics, semiosis and literacy. It examines the affective force of these ideas in South African classrooms in certain institutions during the immediate post-apartheid period from 1994 onwards, showing how Kress’s key concepts and principles provided a transformative theoretical framework for the work of progressive educators. A Kress-inspired framework propelled new conceptualisations of literacy and meaning-making in these classrooms and beyond – at all levels, from primary through to tertiary – and fuelled research from 1994 into the first decade of the new millennium. Given Kress’s insistence on the social, as in social semiotics, and his stress on the integration of representation, communication and situatedness, this article focuses on his ideas in context, how and why they were put to work and what their outcomes were. It is proposed that the South African case – although unique in many ways – may be relevant to postcolonial and decolonising educational contexts in the South more generally.
About the author
Denise Newfield received her PhD in multimodal semiotics from Institute of Education, University of London. Her research interests include multimodal pedagogies, poetry in education, educational transformation and new materialisms. Her most recent book is Multimodal Approaches to Research and Pedagogy (Routledge, 2014). Her publications include edited books, journal issues and articles, including the award-winning ‘Modalising and mobilising poetry’.
Acknowledgments
With thanks to reviewers and editors for their constructive comments, and in honour of Gunther Kress and the generations of inspired teachers, lecturers and students at the University of the Witwatersrand and beyond who used multimodal pedagogies in their classrooms.
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© 2023 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Editorials
- Gunther Kress and the craft of meaning making
- Gunther Kress - Explorer of the Semiotic Landscape
- Research Articles
- Motivated signs and multimodal analysis in Gunther Kress’s semiotics
- Bold and impactful: a reappraisal of Gunther Kress’s (social) semiotic legacy in the light of current multimodality research
- What modes can and cannot do: Affordance in Gunther Kress’s theory of sign making
- Meaning-making and transformative engagement – notes on Gunther Kress’s social semiotic and multimodal approach to learning
- Determination and agency in the work of Gunther Kress
- Educators’ uptake of Kress’s ideas on meaning-making and literacy: a case study from South Africa
- Epilogue
- Epilogue
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Editorials
- Gunther Kress and the craft of meaning making
- Gunther Kress - Explorer of the Semiotic Landscape
- Research Articles
- Motivated signs and multimodal analysis in Gunther Kress’s semiotics
- Bold and impactful: a reappraisal of Gunther Kress’s (social) semiotic legacy in the light of current multimodality research
- What modes can and cannot do: Affordance in Gunther Kress’s theory of sign making
- Meaning-making and transformative engagement – notes on Gunther Kress’s social semiotic and multimodal approach to learning
- Determination and agency in the work of Gunther Kress
- Educators’ uptake of Kress’s ideas on meaning-making and literacy: a case study from South Africa
- Epilogue
- Epilogue
