ERAM 557

Credit: 4 hours.

Addresses the ways in which knowledge is represented, with special reference to the knowledge representations of teachers and learners. Its interdisciplinary bases are functional linguistics, semiotics, philosophy, history of ideas, media/communication studies, and ontology in computer science. The focal point of the course is the five questions about meaning posed by Cope and Kalantzis in their transpositional grammar: "what is this about?" (reference); "who or what is doing this?" (agency); "what holds this together?" (structure); "how does this fit with its surroundings?" (context); and "what is this for?" (interest). Along these lines of inquiry, a transpositional grammar addresses language, image, embodied action, object and space. "Transposition" refers to the movement across these various forms of meaning, intensified in the era of pervasively multimodal, digitally-mediated communications. Applied to education, not only does this provide a valuable heuristic to reframe literacy teaching and learning (the original impulse for the development of this grammar). It also offers an integrated account of meaning-to-learn across all subject areas, including pedagogical content knowledge and learner knowledge representations. Conceived in the broader terms of social-scientific research methods, transpositional grammar is an attempt to overcome the narrowness and logocentrism of "the language turn" which dominated social sciences in the twentieth century. In a practical sense, semiotics of the kind explored in this course also provides tools for reading and interpreting multimodal texts and research data.