Towards a Social-Semiotic Topography of University Learning Spaces: Tools to Connect Use, Users and Meanings

Abstract

This chapter addresses the complexity of university learning spaces by recasting them as communicative texts, that is, meaning-making environments that say something to and with students and teachers in their design and their social and cultural location . This enables a focus on the process of meaning-making between students and aspects of spatial design, in order to reveal communicative patterns which create social relations, facilitate activities, and which bring all the different elements together into a coherent whole. The approach developed here is a social-semiotic, multi-modal one, laying the foundations for a social semiotic topography of university learning space designs, which incorporates the use of physical, virtual and social learning affordances. It outlines the underlying parameters of such a topography and illustrates them in relation to one particular type of learning space, an 'active learning space'. Ultimately, the aim is for such a topography to account for complex definitions of meaning across multiple configurations of learning situations, and to do so in a way which provides particular insights on learning spaces as communicative texts, insights which complement those which can be provided by other perspectives and which can be used to provide feedback into practice, in terms of both design and use of these spaces. [For the complete volume, "Spaces of Teaching and Learning: Integrating Perspectives on Research and Practice," see ED611164.]