April 2025 Featured Member Spotlight

 

Sophia Diamantopoulou, Associate Professor, UCL Institute of Education, Culture, Communication and Media, London.

Book Chapter: Student agency in the creation of multimodal texts: A political project

 

The chapter discusses the concept of agency from a multimodal social semiotic perspective, using as examples four primary students’ multimodal texts, produced in an educational research project at the archaeological site of the Ancient Agora of Athens.  In multimodal  social semiotic research, agency is understood as an implicit constant, underpinning all  semiotic work, given that the agentive engagement of meaning makers is a prerequisite for their  semiotic production alongside their personal interest. However, agency has not been explicitly anchored on the materiality of  semiotic work. The chapter argues that agency is visible in the materiality of student’s texts as agentive designs for their learning. The students, in their principled engagement with  semiotic resources, exercise their agency as a way of positioning themselves in relation to the overall pedagogic discourses. Their agency is visible in their choice to endorse or defy to various degrees these discourses, thus making their  semiotic work a political and social practice.

 

To cite

Diamantopoulou, S. (2024). Student agency in the creation of multimodal texts: A political project. In  Starc, S. and Komninos, N. (eds)  Multimodal Literacy in Education: Perspectives from Global Practices.  Peter Lang Verlag. https://www.peterlang.com/document/1494636

Link to Article