Multimodality and Learning: Desiderata for Designing Social Futures

This chapter reflects on the applications of multimodality on learning and maps the terrain by introducing three dimensions—multimodality for learning, multimodality as learning and multimodality in learning. Multimodality for learning involves the use of multimodal resources to support language and subject content learning, in recognition of the multimodal nature of disciplinary knowledge representations. Multimodality as learning extends literacy beyond language, with a focus on multimodal meaning-making in the development of students’ multimodal literacy skills as well as assessing students’ multimodal literacy and evaluating their artefacts. Multimodality in learning focuses on teachers’ orchestration of multimodal resources in the classroom as embodied teaching. It also includes studies on the multimodal critical discourse analysis of classroom resources as well as the use of multimodal learning analytics and artificial intelligence for analysing students’ signs of learning and measuring engagement in the learning process. I discuss the desiderata, or things desired, as work still to be done to advance the field and future research directions in relation to the three dimensions of multimodality and learning.