Aiming to enhance inclusion
Anders Björkvall (School of Humanities, Education and Social Sciences, Örebro University), Arlene Archer (Centre for Higher Education Development, University of Cape Town), and Zach Simpson (Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment, University of Johannesburg) are interested in understanding how technology, text-making and teaching practices might promote hybrid/experimental forms and foster greater inclusion in higher education, and in education in general.
“We want to deepen understanding of what inclusion means in higher education and how to be more inclusive,” explained Simpson. “It’s about trying to include all students despite different background knowledges.”
They explained that research has shown that there are many avenues towards access to and inclusion in education. Their work speaks to these alternate paths and explores how inclusion is realised differently across contexts.
“One of the vehicles for exclusion could be an over-reliance on certain dominant educational genres,” said Archer. “These genres can potentially lock individuals into more restrictive knowledge-making practices and stifle more creative forms of expression. In this way, they may also serve to limit the kinds of meaning-making privileged within education. Using a multimodal lens, which frames communication as occurring through more than language alone, we investigate the affordances of a range of meaning-making resources to foster engagement.”
Archer explained that South Africa has a long track record of research on these issues and offers a unique vantage point. “The democratic transition meant that universities had to transform rapidly leading to cutting-edge research across disciplines and contexts,” she explained. These ranged from early approaches in primary and high school English, looking at English for academic purposes, and expanding to multilingual education and discipline-specific approaches – like in the health sciences.
Enabling voice
Archer’s work at the Writing Centre at the University of Cape Town looks at the role of process genres as ways of enabling voice and argument in academic writing.
She explained the concept of boundary artefacts which are items that have a common identity, are recognisable but have different meanings and are adaptable to local needs. Boundary artefacts draw on students’ prior knowledges and resources to better connect them to what they are learning.
She also explained that multimodality is generally applied to communication incorporating the visual, spoken and gestural but it also provides a rich way of describing and practicing data analysis and applies to pedagogy that goes “beyond the written and spoken word, to include different relationships, histories and competencies.”
Multimodal approaches for teaching and learning in education, focus on how these can provide ‘critical access’ to dominant genres. “When all genres are accommodated, meaning and knowledge making are always in tension. There is a pull to convention and a push to more hybrid open forms. We try to provide access while critically investigating different genres and recognising diversity,” she said.
She explained that the centre’s work aims to foster one-on-one consultations with students which opens up all kinds of spaces. “It’s a recognition of the student’s resources and agency, and valuing and applying that in a range of contexts. We aim to see students as agents in contrast to other models that focus on what the student is lacking.”
This includes activities like discursive play, free writing, constructing fairy-tale genres, forced fictional connections, lateral thinking, writing within word or time constraints, mind mapping and visuals. “We also draw on multilingual research – free writing in the first language, as well as on the semiotic repertoire – including gesture and images. This is about disrupting the dominant role of English and ‘anglonormativity’.”
She pointed to an example of how conventional norms may be disrupted – namely the foregrounding or backgrounding of voices in academic texts. “Students have to decide how to use various voices and also how to present arguments in the most appropriate way possible for specific audiences.”
“All modes have potential to make arguments but in different ways. An artefact can make an argument. But it is still often complemented by a written component. Although speaking as a mode of assessment is becoming more acceptable. Talking allows a certain kind of knowledge production and writing another kind of knowledge – both are valuable.”
The mighty pen – digitisation in schools
Björkvall focused on his work on semiotic technologies for writing and drawing in the form of digital pencils, showing how such artefacts can bridge practices across analogue and digitalised classrooms.
He explained that there has been a huge focus on digitisation in schools in Sweden which established a Digitalisation Commission in 2012. “Digitisation of education was a really big deal in Sweden,” he said. “It was about acquiring the digital skills needed to function in the workplace and in basically all other sectors of society.”
“We are now at the stage where all schools in Sweden are comprehensively digitalised. This means that writing by hand is not being taught to the same extent. A number of policy changes are pushing the literacy practices in schools in the direction of going back to basics, with paper – so there is massive de-digitisation and a return to analogue.”
“We are asking how digital pencils as boundary objects can connect literary practices in fully digitised classrooms to analogue counterparts?”
Björkvall believes this offers the potential in sub-Saharan Africa to improve digital literacy. He explained that digital pencils are partially used in the same way as traditional pencils. They can therefore function as a boundary object that embraces new, digital literacy practices, without fully throwing out old practices and skills (like handwriting).
“Obviously we want a better path without going through all the stages,” he said. “It’s never about promoting bad or good. It’s about choosing the most apt digital or analogue tools for teaching and learning. Digital and analogue have different affordances – it’s not one or the other, you must use the most apt to make meaning. And to learn.”
Interim representations
Simpson’s work examines how lecturers use ‘interim representations’ in the engineering classroom to facilitate access to knowledge.
He explained that engineering is generally representational. “It’s about converting the material world into something that can be manipulated. But there is often an ontological gap. Engineering students see the abstract representation but struggle to see the real-world variables. They get hung up on the formulae and rules.”
“Technology is also obscure – there is a need to broker meaning. In the same way as bridging texts, you might need a boundary object to get from a picture to a readable table and to factor all the intermediate steps into the production of knowledge.”
Standing in class?
Their collaborative project, titled ‘Inclusive participation in higher education in Sweden and South Africa’ (funded by the Swedish Research Council, 2024 – 2027) investigates whether multimodal pedagogic practices can reconfigure traditional education texts and genres and better leverage the resources that students bring with them into higher education. The goal is to deepen understanding of what inclusion looks like in educational contexts, moving beyond physical access, towards envisioning inclusion of practices, knowledges and identities. The project aims to demonstrate how inclusive (re)design of pedagogical genres can be achieved in different contexts and is looking at practices enacted across Sweden and South Africa and extracting principles for (re)design that are more inclusive, context sensitive and ecologically aware.
For example, Simpson also discussed designing classroom spaces to teach programming in small, separated but not isolated groups in which students can learn from each other, where each gets time to write on the board. He explained how different classroom layouts and practices influence learning.
“In this context, the standing classroom has potential,’ he said. “and the design could also be adapted to different contexts.”
“We are looking to surface the principles for how to describe pedagogy for inclusion,” he continued. “We are interested in how the principles might scaffold. How the educational environment may or may not foster inclusion. But they need to be clearly in context, not a one-size-fits-all.”
“One of the things we are very interested in is fostering inclusion in resource-constrained settings,” he added.
Michelle Galloway: Part-time media officer at STIAS
Photograph: SCPS Photography