Supporting the Legitimacy of Quality Criteria for Multimodal Production in School

Abstract

Creativity, communication and information literacy are among the competences often mentioned as required for students in the 21st century ('ATC21S', n.d.), and thus the competence to produce digital multimodal texts has become crucial. Furthermore, multimodal student production understood as a meaning-making activity can be viewed as valuable for learning (Selander and Kress, 2012). Accordingly, the national curriculum for the Danish school includes a description of the student as a 'goal-oriented and creative producer' in every school subject under the heading of 'IT and media' (Undervisningsministeriet, n.d.b). Unfortunately, international studies on computer and information literacy (ICILS) show that multimedia production tools are rarely employed by teachers (Fraillon, Ainley, Schulz, Friedman and Gebhardt, 2014) and that Danish students do not carry out more advanced forms of digital communication as frequently as students of the same age in other countries (Bundsgaard, Pettersson and Puck, 2014). Furthermore, a national study on student products and assignments in Danish, Mathematics and Science show a tendency with teachers to encourage monomodal rather than multimodal productions, leaving potentials of meaning making through multimodality unrealised (Sloth, Hansen and Bremholm, 2016). In other words, it seems that learning potentials of digital multimodal student production are not fully utilised in the school subjects in Denmark. From a social semiotic perspective, learning is an activity of sign-making, where the meaning of signs is socially and culturally defined (Selander and Kress, 2012). But in a school set up for more traditional literacy genres, teachers often fail to acknowledge how new multimodal genres communicate meaning (