Disciplinary Affordance vs Pedagogical Affordance: Teaching the
Multimodal Discourse of University Science
The natural sciences have been extremely successful in modeling some specific aspects
of the world around us. This success is in no small part due to the creation of generally
accepted, paradigmatic ways of representing the world through a range of semiotic
resources. The discourse of science is of necessity multimodal (see for example Lemke,
1998) and it is therefore important for undergraduate science students to learn to
master this multimodal discourse (Airey & Linder, 2009). In this paper, I approach the
teaching of multimodal science discourse via the concept of affordance.
Since its introduction by Gibson (1979) the concept of affordance has been debated by a
number of researchers. Most famous, perhaps is the disagreement between Gibson and
Norman (1988) about whether affordances are inherent properties of objects or are
only present when perceived by an organism. More recently, affordance has been
drawn on in the educational arena, particularly with respect to multimodality (see
Fredlund, 2015 for a recent example). Here, Kress et al (2001) have claimed that
different modes have different specialized affordances.
In the presentation the interrelated concepts of disciplinary affordance and pedagogical
affordance will be presented. Both concepts make a radical break with the views of both
Gibson and Norman in that rather than focusing on the perception of an individual, they
refer to the disciplinary community as a whole. Disciplinary affordance is "the agreed
meaning making functions that a semiotic resource fulfills for a disciplinary community".
Similarly, pedagogical affordance is "the aptness of a semiotic resource for the teaching
and learning of some particular educational content" (Airey, 2015). As such, in a
teaching situation the question of whether these affordances are inherent or perceived
becomes moot. Rather, the issue is the process through which students come to use
semiotic resources in a way that is accepted within the discipline. In this characterization
then, learning can be framed in terms of coming to perceive and leverage the
disciplinary affordances of semiotic resources.
In this paper, I will discuss: the disciplinary affordances of individual semiotic resources,
how these affordances can be made “visible” to students and how the disciplinary
affordances of semiotic resources are ultimately leveraged and coordinated in order to
make science meanings.
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