'Multimodal Teaching and Learning: The Rhetorics of the Science Classroom achieves the rare goal of explicating multimodality as both theory and practice. This is an importantly concrete analysis, derived from extended, careful, and interdisciplinary observation, which challenges our thinking about how meaning and knowledge are shaped by our modes of communication. The book appeals to a wide range of scholars and practitioners far beyond the science classroom.' Professor Ron Scollon, Department of Linguistics, Georgetown University. This book takes a radically different look at communication, and in doing so presents a series of challenges to accepted views on language, on communication, on teaching and, above all, on learning. Drawing on extensive research in science classrooms, it presents a view of communication in which language is not necessarily communication - image, gesture, speech, writing, models, spatial and bodily codes. The action of students in learning is radically rethought: all participants in communication are seen as active transformers of the meaning resources around them, and this approach opens a new window on the processes of learning.
This work suggests that communication proceeds by many modes, of which language is one and not necessarily the dominant one. It asks what are the roles of other modes and whether language may be occupying a co-equal or even a minor role in relation to the mode of image, for instance.
