How Digital Storyboards Support the Transaction of Practice: The Semiotic Infrastructure of Representations of Practice

Increasingly, mathematics education researchers and mathematics teacher educators have been using representations of practice, including digital storyboards, in their work. This chapter begins to lay out aspects of the architecture of the semiotic system behind such uses of storyboards. The work presented in the chapter can support mathematics education researchers in examining the meaning potential of representations of practice used in teacher education activities or scenario-based research questionnaires. To accomplish this goal, the chapter makes use of systemic functional linguistics (SFL), a theory of language that describes the role of language as a social semiotic – that is, as a resource to make meanings in social context. Using SFL’s metafunctions to guide us, we examine the meanings a particular storyboard makes available when it becomes part of a transaction of instructional practice and identify resources that the storyboard multimodality makes available more generally.