“You've Just Got to Learn How to See”: Curriculum Subjects, Young People and Schooled Engagement with the World
✍ Scribed by Gunther Kress
- Publisher
- Elsevier Science
- Year
- 2000
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 104 KB
- Volume
- 11
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0898-5898
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
In this article, the author begins by addressing questions surrounding the issue of ``literacy'' and reflects on some aims of literacy curricula in culturally plural postindustrial societies. He then adopts a social semiotic multimodal approach to data analysis in which there is a sharp focus on the semiotic modes that are in play and on the forms of classroom learning that they facilitate. He makes a decisive break with theories that have been more or less dominant through the twentieth century, that have insisted that we are language (or sign) users, but that we do not affect the shape of the system. Essentially, Kress works from the theoretical position that the sign-maker is constantly transformative of the set of resources of the group and of her/himself. In the analyses, he shows how learning in the art class is a different kind of learning to that engaged in the drama class, and in the analysis of a media text or a novel in the English classroom. The final section of the article raises questions for a curriculum of communication in schooling.