Educating for Agency and Solidarity: A Social Semiotics Knowledge Base

Chapter 6, Educating for Agency and Solidarity: A social semiotics knowledge base, describes powerful knowledge to develop positive and critical multiliteracies. The chapter explains what a functional language ontology looks like in curriculum and teaching practice. Leaning on Systemic Functional Linguistics, Systemic Functional Semiotics and Legitimation Code Theory, the chapter details a body of semiotics resources from Genre, Discourse Semantics and Lexicogrammar to multimodality, register variety and a framework to analyse knowledge which a language educator can use both to analyse their students and disciplinary colleagues’ needs (in EAP contexts for example) and to design curriculum which develops agency and criticality. Examples are provided from disciplines such as Engineering and Music, along with the analytical steps to approach a complex genre such as the Lecture Recital, engaging the multi-framework toolkit. The chapter concludes that beyond the ethics and scholarship advocated in the previous chapter, this type of expanded knowledge base can help develop practitioners’ impact on student learning, but also shape their capital, status and influence in higher education.