Multimodal Pedagogies, Representation and Identity: Perspectives from Post-Apartheid South Africa

Abstract

Since 1994 South Africa has been transformed from an isolated, apartheid state into an Afro-modernist democracy linked to the rest of the world. Our chapter locates itself within this post-apartheid historical moment and reports on the findings of an ELT teacher research group, the Wits Multiliteracies Research Group that has focused, since 1996, on the applicability of multimodal pedagogies to multilingual, multicultural classrooms in Johannesburg (Cope and Kalantzis 2000; Kress and van Leeuwen 1996, 2001). Multimodal pedagogies work across semiotic modes, including the visual, written and spoken language, the gestural, the sonic, and the performative. In South Africa, writing culture is underdeveloped, except in educational institutions where success is unattainable without access to written language skills in English. Our research in early childhood, secondary, and tertiary classrooms reports on the limits and possibilities afforded through the use of different representational resources in the representation of meaning, suggesting that multimodal pedagogies can broaden the base for representation by opening up the third ground in the struggle between mainstream schooling literacy demands and cultural difference. In their multiple configurations, such pedagogies have the power to unleash creativity, intelligence, and agency through the creation of symbolic identity objects and practices that lead to creative rapprochements in a society struggling to heal itself after a painful, traumatic past.