Multimodality and literacy in special education
Izabel Magalhães, Universidade Federal do Ceará/Universidade de Brasília
Special education has changed considerably over the last two decades with the proposal of including learners with disabilities in mainstream schools. As part of an ethnographic project taking place in schools and education centres for students with disabilities in Brazil, this talk will examine text trajectory in two education centres. Looking at text as language and/or image that is produced in one social context and that can be entextualised or recontextualised in a different context, I am interested in the ways that text meaning can be co-constructed as it follows a given trajectory. Two trajectories have been examined so far: from the State to the centres and from the centre multidisciplinary team to the administration. In the first of these trajectories, the centre administration produces a local Pedagogic Project based on the federal government Inclusion Policy. The second trajectory starts when the different professionals meet to comment on the learners under their responsibility. These different trajectories suggest the need to adopt an integrated theory of multimodality and literacy to account for sign meaning in artifacts that are part of (special) education practices. In these practices, artifacts can construct roles, activities and the professionals´ identities. This integrated theory is based on the relationship between Social Semiotics and the New Literacy Studies that view literacy as a social practice.