Bayview Beach Resort, Batu Ferringhi Beach, Penang, Malaysia

27-30 September 1999

Transmodal travel: learning through the crossing of modes in a tertiary classroom in South Africa.

Denise Newfield

Department of English, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa.

Abstract

This presentation is part of a larger research project exploringthe pedagogic and cognitive consequences of transmodalism. Transmodalism is a pedagogic method based on multimodality, specifically the shifting of representational and communicative modes in the interests of facilitating learning. The session explores three-dimensional texts produced by learners in relation to the study of verbal texts. I shall show an extract from a video in which South African postgraduate students represent their understandings of a canonical text (in this case, Shakespeare's The Tempest) in non-canonical, multimodal ways. The session will explore whether pedagogic spaces open up when learners travel across semiotic modes, for example when they
cross from the verbal to the visual or performative. The research is attempting to find out what happens in the process of transmodal shifts, whether, for example, there are affective, cognitive and semiosic consequences, and whether, and to what extent, transmodalism might be a valuable representational and communicative activity for the 21st century, suggesting a pedagogy of transliteracies along with multiliteracies.