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Classrooms and the Design of Pedagogic Discourse: A Multimodal Approach

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DOI: 10.1177/1354067X05055519

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Article

Abstract This paper offers a social semiotic analysis of the school

classroom, in this case the subject English classroom, as a material
instantiation of pedagogic discourse. The classroom is looked at
as a multimodal sign: the semiotic ‘residue’ or ‘sediment’ of
discursive practices over time. In particular it discusses how
visual displays and spatial design in the English classroom can be
thought of as signs of school English. From this perspective a
teacher’s classroom can be understood as a sign of how she or he
mediates ‘official’ government and school discourse. Drawing on
three illustrative examples of English classrooms from three
different schools, the paper argues that the variation between
these classrooms can be understood in part as a consequence of
the complex web of social relations that mediate and
institutionally frame pedagogy.

Key Words activity theory, multimodality, school English, social

semiotics

Carey Jewitt
Institute of Education, University of London, UK

Classrooms and the Design of

Pedagogic Discourse: A Multimodal
Approach
There have been a number of different approaches to classroom
displays and the classroom as a pedagogic space. The starting points
for this paper are sketched below. The rationale and process of turning
a multimodal lens on the classroom as a designed space are then
mapped. The need to look beyond the teacher as an individual to the
ways in which broader social and policy issues shape the design of the
classroom is raised, and the benefits of combining multimodality and
activity theory are discussed. Finally, through three illustrative
examples of school English classrooms, the process of the design of
pedagogic discourses is explored using this theoretical approach.

Pedagogic Discourse and the Classroom

The classroom, like any other physical, constructed site, is designed
with built-in values and purposes that contribute to shaping the work
Culture & Psychology Copyright © 2005 SAGE Publications
(London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) www.sagepublications.com
Vol. 11(3): 309–320 [DOI: 10.1177/1354067X05055519]
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Culture & Psychology 11(3)

and behaviour of the teachers and students who occupy it (Fiske, 1995;
Seaborne, 1977). In other words ‘the pedagogical order of the classroom
is mediated in its spaces’ (Lawn, 1999, p. 72) at the same time as being
constantly transformed by those who act in and on it.
Most classrooms contain one form or another of visual display.
Classroom displays are often discussed in terms of the ways in which
they might create an attractive environment for learning (Williams,
1989). From a more critical perspective, display can be charged with
naturalizing the classroom environment and with making opaque the
exercising of power (Foucault, 1991). The starting point for this paper
is the idea of the multimodal design of discourse, of which spatial
organization and display are aspects (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2001).
The design of classroom arrangements and displays is, then, the
product of living labour, the work of teachers that has been performed
out of hours. These displays and arrangements do not remain as an
‘inert’ or ‘pre-created’ background to the work of a class; they are acti-
vated, or re-activated, by classroom pedagogy. In this respect, the
teacher’s role is central: the teacher mediates what is displayed and
what is enacted in the classroom; it is the teacher who connects the
spatial material display of English to other aspects of the subject’s real-
ization. In this sense, classroom arrangement and display provide
pedagogic resources; they are part of the technology of teaching and
serve to transmit to students the pedagogic practices and ‘fundamental
regulatory principles’ that govern a school (Daniels, 2001, p. 169).
Displays, activated by the teacher, relay the regulatory framework of
the curriculum and the criteria that are taken to signify appropriate
learning within a school; they also socialize students through their
activity into the expected competencies of a classroom and the
teacher’s desired models of good practice. Visual displays and the
arrangement of the classroom are thus a ‘pedagogic tool’, a medium to
communicate the qualities and expectations of the teacher or school in
a language that is to be lived as an identity-building and identity-
confirming experience (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2001).
Teachers’ work of display and their re-activation of display through
pedagogy both legitimate the work of students and draw them into
pre-established systems for classifying knowledge and skills. In some
classrooms this is an explicit aim of pedagogy: the classroom is under-
stood and designed as an attempt to broaden the knowledge base of
students—to increase their cultural capital.

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Jewitt Design of Discourse

Turning a Multimodal Lens on the Classroom

A multimodal approach to classrooms as places and spaces offers a
way of looking at this process in detail—a way to think about the
relationship between the different modal semiotic resources (i.e. the
resources of and for making meaning) and teacher’s meaning making
in the design of classrooms. Social semiotics and multimodality offer
conceptual tools for the analysis of meaning making but do not attend
to its socially situated character. Multimodality is complemented by
the heuristic framework of activity theory (Daniels, 2001; Engestrom,
1987) to give due attention to the socially situated character of meaning
making. Bringing these theoretical approaches together enables them
to be reconfigured in significant ways for thinking about discourses of
school English and pedagogy more generally—one aspect of which is
the design of classroom itself. Bringing activity theory in conjunction
with multimodality constitutes a challenge to activity theory to ‘look
beyond’ language alone. Positioning language (speech and writing) as
‘one part’ of a multimodal ensemble serves to insist that semiotic medi-
ation is also multimodal. This theoretical combination refocuses multi-
modality to look at meaning making ‘beyond’ individual teachers and
as something that is situated within the broader social and policy
context of education.
Semiotic resources of modes are shaped by how people use them to
make meaning—the social functions that they are put to. Halliday
(1978) classified these social functions into three meta-functions, three
different kinds of meaning. Every sign simultaneously tells us some-
thing about ‘the world’ (ideational meaning), positions us in relation
to someone or something (interpersonal meaning) and produces a
structured text (textual meaning). Halliday and others explored how
these three kinds of meaning are ‘held by’ the grammar and elements
of language.
Multimodality takes up the concept of the meta-functions and
applies them to all modes. Another way of thinking about the meta-
functions is as meaning potential that is ‘what can be meant’ or ‘what
can be done’ with a particular set of modal resources. As meta-func-
tions are a higher order of meaning, it is reasonable to assume that
these are in play in communication whatever mode is used. The meta-
functions have been extended in different ways to visual communi-
cation (Kress & van Leeuwen, 1996) and other ‘non-linguistic’ modes
(Jewitt, 2005; Kress, Jewitt, Ogborn, & Tsatsarelis, 2001; Kress et al.,
2005). The idea of meta-functions is applied in this paper in order to
think about the meaning potential of image, colour and spatial

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Culture & Psychology 11(3)

arrangements as they feature in the classroom and the realization of

discourses of English. The ideational meta-function enables a focus on
how a teacher’s classroom design presents ‘the world’: what is
included and excluded and how what is displayed shapes curriculum
knowledge. The interpersonal meta-function, meanwhile, facilitates
exploration of how the classroom design positions learners in relation
to knowledge. Finally, the textual meta-function provides a tool by
means of which one can assess how the arrangement of elements in the
classroom organizes the discourse.
Social semiotics focuses on people’s process of meaning making, this
being a process in which people make choices from a network of
alternatives: selecting one resource (meaning potential) over another
(Halliday, 1978, 1985). The process of interpreting a sign also involves
people in the selection of meaning potentials. When making signs,
people bring together and connect the available forms that are most apt
to express the meaning they want to express at a given moment.
Thinking about signs as motivated and transformative highlights the
continuous social ‘work’ involved in producing and maintaining the
conventions of meaning. So the grammars and conventions of modal
resources are upheld by the activity of people—in this case teachers—
rather than the arbitrary relationship of form and meaning. The degree
of choice that teachers have in the resources that they use and the
breaking of conventions depends, on among other things, their social
context, their ‘willingness’ (or power) to bear the consequences of
resisting convention, and the extent to which they have been inducted
into the social conventions of the school.
Viewing signs as motivated and transformative raises the question
of what motivates a teacher’s choice of one semiotic resource over
another. Kress (1993) developed the idea of interest in response to this
question. Interest connects a person’s choice of one resource over
another with the social context of sign production. The modal
resources that are available to the person are a part of that context. In
this way the relationship between a signifier and a signified is a trace
of the characteristics of the person who made the sign and what he or
she wants to represent. From this perspective the classroom as a sign
is a product of the complex interaction of the teacher’s ‘physiological,
psychological, emotional, cultural, and social origins’ (Kress, 1997,
p. 11). It is the teacher’s ‘interest’ that motivates his or her selection of
semiotic resources—his or her decision of what it is criterial to repre-
sent. But this does not account for the broader social context that
teachers operate and make meaning within. It is necessary to under-
stand the relationship between the social organization of people and

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Jewitt Design of Discourse

the production of signs: the fundamental connection between sign and

society in which ‘the forms of signs are conditioned above all by the
social organization of the participants involved and also by the
immediate conditions of their interaction’ (Vološinov, 1973, p. 21).
Understanding the social context is crucial to thinking about the sign
maker’s interest. Bringing together multimodality with activity theory
offers a way of thinking more clearly about meaning making and
discourse as situated within a social activity system that extends
‘beyond’ the individual. This combination enables the teacher’s design
to be connected with social histories (of the subject domain, the school,
the class, etc.) involved in the production of pedagogic discourse that
a multimodal approach does not easily invoke.

Activity Theory
Activity theory (Daniels, 2001; Engestrom, 1987) provides a framework
for thinking about the interconnection of modes, the process of
meaning making, learning and social context. Activity theory was
developed building on the cultural-historical approach to learning of
Vygotsky (1981, 1986). Society is seen as embedded in tools (Cole,
1996). A person’s interaction with tools (which can be either physical
or mental tools) to achieve a particular outcome and goal is described
as semiotic mediation. Activity theory represents the social relations
that underpin semiotic mediation as an activity system: ‘a flexible unit
of analysis (theoretical lens), which allows us to train our gaze in differ-
ent directions and with different levels of “magnification” to help us
answer the questions that puzzle us’ (Russell, 2002, p. 67).
Applying the activity system framework to classrooms highlights
three aspects of social relations that underpin teachers’ design of
discourse. There are explicit or tacit rules, norms and values, and
routines that inform how teachers design the classroom. These include
school rules of behaviour, the timetable and lesson length, the values
of the English national curriculum and other policies, the teacher’s
‘version’ of school English, and expectations of the students. Notions
of community also shape the activities of teacher and student in the
classroom. Both are part of a class, members of a school and of social
communities. Teachers are also members of other communities of
practice like professional bodies while students are members of peer
groups, and so on. Within the classroom, teacher and student have
specific roles, what could be called a division of labour, that shapes the
activities that they engage in. All of these aspects are apparent in the
design of the school classroom.

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Culture & Psychology 11(3)

Activity theory enables social, historical and cultural elements

beyond the immediately observable classroom to be drawn into
analysis. This includes among other things the teacher’s purposes in
the lesson, the focus and demands of the curriculum, and the traditions
and histories of school subjects.

Three Classrooms—Three Pedagogic Discourses

The fundamental connection between external signs and learning
enables teachers’ material expressions—the classroom—as one kind of
‘evidence’ of their pedagogic discourse: a discourse that informs the
production of teacher and student subjectivities in the classroom.
This framework enables three central questions to be addressed.
First, what do the texts, objects and furniture in a classroom represent
as a part of English? Is literature included, and if so, what kinds of
literature? What resources are the students offered for their learning,
and how are they positioned, physically and conceptually, in relation
to this knowledge? Second, which representational and communica-
tional modes are used to represent English? Which modes are used to
explore aspects of English? Which modes are foregrounded and by
what means? Third, what is given importance or made central through
the resources of visual display and spatial arrangement?

English as Competence in Language Communication

The Springton School1 English department (of which the classroom
focused on here is a typical teaching room) is preoccupied, and not
without reason, in getting students, mainly from ethnic minorities and
working-class families, to perform well in GCSE exams.2 It assumes
that it has to privilege a particular version of ‘official knowledge’. This
is materialized in the many official texts on the wall, which are
mounted, framed and placed in prominent positions. The teacher
selects and adapts the official policy (e.g. criteria and grades, key
words in examination papers) and mediates these into sets of instruc-
tions for students that focus on examination. The layout of the class-
room in neatly arranged group tables is another echo of departmental
(and national) policies on group work and differentiation. In the
process it conveys to students that they are the kind of people who
need a basic level of assistance to cope with assessment demands. In
this sense it provides an example of a strategy for distributing ‘cultural
capital’ in what are seen—in both economic and cultural terms—as
impoverished places. Distribution, in this context, involves rationing.
We shall compare the classroom displays of three teachers from

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different schools: Susan (Springton School), Lizzy (Wayford School)

and Irene (Ravenscroft School). Susan’s use of visual resources and her
arrangement of these in the classroom displays combine to produce
English as a coherent, ‘boundaried’ and univocal space filled with
language. The posters and displays are primarily written and word-
processed—and only a few include images. The content of the displays
concerns writing—genres for writing, instructions on how to start a
sentence, and so on. There is only one poster with several images on
it: these are of Leonardo DiCaprio in the Baz Luhrmann film produc-
tion of Romeo & Juliet. The images are derived from popular culture but
are in a very literal sense cut down and tightly framed, so that the very
thing that appears to have engaged many young people in Lurhmann’s
filmic reshaping of Shakespeare’s play—the display of masculinity
(through the use of rap, dress and imagery of gang fighting)—is the
subject of the teacher’s critique, and occupies a minor position in a
classroom which is a strongly ‘boundaried’ place—clear, sparse, and
uncluttered, like the version of English that is produced there.
In this classroom ‘What English is’ is constituted as a completely
explicit entity. The curriculum is displayed, the language of examina-
tion is literally written on the walls, the deadlines are clear. The politics
of the English curriculum as articulated in this classroom is ‘access to
language’: language is, literally, made available as a resource. The
posters on the cupboard doors, for example, act as a further resource
for writing by offering ways of starting a sentence. The visual display
of the classroom fits into an instructional genre. Policy in the form of
the National Curriculum is selected, condensed and strongly framed.
Everything else has vanished. The curriculum is so pervasive that it is
difficult to overlay it with anything. This genre of instruction positions
the teacher and student in a particular relation to the production of
English, beyond the obvious power relation that they are in. The
teacher represents English as a series of competencies that the students
are to learn—the classroom display reminds them why they are there,
why they must work. They are to aim for the teacher’s idealized
student text.

English and the Life-Worlds of Students

The furniture and spatial arrangement of Lizzy’s classroom (Wayford
School) can be seen as an example of how the organization of the
‘progressive primary school’ can find its way into the secondary school
classroom and in the process redefine the learning space and the future
of the school (Stuebing, 1995). The teacher has bought soft furnishings
into her classroom: a carpet, several soft swivel chairs, a soft armchair,

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Culture & Psychology 11(3)

and a sofa—creating a home-like space in her classroom. She regularly

re-organized the furniture and desks in the room, and the arrange-
ments were always non-symmetrical.
Lizzy’s ‘design’ of her classroom can also be seen as a rejection of
formal secondary school arrangements and an attempt to create a
learning environment in which the curriculum is, as she
commented,’only a small part of what is actually going on within the
whole learning experience’. Lizzy’s classroom home furnishings all
serve to (attempt to) distance the classroom from the school as an insti-
tution to produce it (and, by implication, ‘school English’) as a ‘pseudo-
liminal’ space that is neither school nor ‘out of school’, bordering on
the style of a ‘teenager’s room’. This is echoed in the posters stuck quite
literally all over the walls, overlapping, angled, struggling for space in
a jumble of film and music icons of youthful despair and early death
(Kurt Cobain, James Dean, Tupac and more). The images from TV are
cultish programmes that are scheduled late, and many of the film
posters are for films certificated/rated as unsuitable for the students.
Alongside this cultural mix Lizzy has displayed students’ texts—
which are also highly visual collages drawing on pop and film icons to
represent the characters and relationships from, for example, Macbeth.
These elements of the display re-construct the relationship between
writing and text within the domain of school English. In contrast to
Susan’s use of popular culture as a visual annotation of aspects of the
English curriculum, Lizzy has re-framed English as popular culture
(and in doing so she has re-framed popular culture as English). In short
her visual display serves to position English and popular culture as
interconnected forms of ‘knowledge’. The meanings of popular culture
are foregrounded and the position of English in this is backgrounded
(changed). The display shapes the relationship of popular culture
(media) and English as a more traditional set of texts and work on
language into a new form that reflects Lizzy’s comments on school
English and literacy as being about ‘different ways of reading the
world and reading the text’.
The sign—or complex of signs—realized via the visual display of
Lizzy’s classroom is one of English as a repository of the life-worlds of
students—not to mention that of the teacher, present in the form of her
own kung-fu posters. Here the world of popular culture is pervasive,
and the curriculum is laid over it—gently, offering the students a filter
of ‘school English’ for viewing this everyday world in another way.
The mesh of references on display is not placed in any hierarchical
order through their position in the classroom, nor through the use of
colour, size, framing devices or lamination. There is no narrative

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journey mapped through them; instead there is a dynamic between the

texts and the frame of the ‘English classroom’. The question ‘what is
English?’ is raised, and the suggestion is that students might explore
this in relation to the artefacts of their worlds.

English as the Means for ‘Having Your Say in the World’

The classroom arrangement and furniture in Irene’s classroom (Ravens-
croft School) is ‘traditional’—single desks are arranged in three neat
rows, with the teacher’s desk at the front-centre of the classroom. This
arrangement is most typically associated with transmission pedagogy,
high teacher authority and low student participation. However, while
Irene maintains her pedagogic authority within the class, she encour-
ages the students to participate in debate very actively and encourages
them to challenge her (an instance of which is discussed in Bourne and
Jewitt, 2003). In doing so, the students often ‘slouch’, lying across their
desks. In a sense through their body posture they challenge this sign
of a pedagogic tradition that the teacher has established in the class-
room. Analysis of interview data with the teacher supports the sugges-
tion that the creation of an environment in which ‘tradition’ can be
challenged and ‘authority’ questioned is the pedagogic strategy of this
teacher; it is part of her pedagogy of English.
The National Curriculum is not displayed directly in the classroom;
nonetheless it is present in the teacher’s organization of the displays.
In these displays, made by Irene, there are two large titles that are
arranged in the centre: ‘wide reading’ and ‘NEAB English and English
literature’; these titles mediate the National Curriculum. The most
salient displays are those of students’ texts framed by the curriculum
headings. These are the largest displays, and use a bright yellow back-
ground with red and black frames. All of the student texts are boldly
framed for display and arranged in a strongly rectangular manner. The
careful framing of every text on display presents each one as a ‘thing
in and off itself’—a product of student labour. The selection of poems
on display relate to the anthology for English and the National
Curriculum. As in Lizzy’s classroom, the teacher-made texts are few; it
is Irene’s arrangement, creation of titles and framing of the texts that
is the main evidence of her activity in relation to the classroom
displays.
The displays include posters showing famous singers and footballers
reading; these provide a connection to the popular culture of the
students, but it is more restrained, and with clearer boundaries than
those surrounding the use of the images of popular culture in Lizzy’s
classroom. By contrast, here popular culture is framed in the context of

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Culture & Psychology 11(3)

English, in a manner that maintains both the centrality of writing and

reading, and the focus on ‘valued literature’.
A key priority of this English department is to improve the students’
writing skills—to ‘develop writers’. The orientation of the displays in
Irene’s classroom is towards ‘production’. Through the visual displays
the students in this classroom are positioned as ‘emergent authors’
with the potential to publish. From this perspective, English is about
learning to write for expression and for future publication.
The importance of writing in Irene’s classroom is not linked to the
(official) curriculum alone; Irene links it also to the social situation of
the students, coming from a variety of social backgrounds and experi-
ences.
In the two other classrooms discussed in this paper there is not that
same meshing of published works and student texts that there is in
Ravenscroft School. English as it is displayed here is essentially about
the students’ work in reading, reflected in their writing, in responding
to the written model texts: English is the means for having ‘a say’ in
the world.

Conclusion
Classrooms can be seen as multimodal signs which instantiate insti-
tutional discourses of pedagogy and subject curriculum. Applying a
multimodal and an activity theory lens to the school classroom enables
the designed character of these discourses to be opened up for exami-
nation. This also serves to emphasize some of the social forces that
operate on the process of classroom design, thus moving us away from
the rather romantic idea of the individual teacher unconstrained by
policy and dislocated from the institution of the school to a more
complex view of the teacher as agentive but acting within the realm of
the school and educational policies.
Classroom arrangements and displays often appear heterogeneous,
in that the physical sediments of earlier practices co-exist with
the results of newer work. But this heterogeneity is not accidental: the
material environment of the English classroom offers insights into the
relation between ‘old’ and ‘new’ and into the tensions and relations
between educational policy and pedagogical practice. Certainly, there
is no single set of signs that convey an authoritative and widely agreed
meaning of English; and the English encountered in these classrooms
is a divided and complex practice. The visual displays and spatial
arrangements of the (English) classroom can be understood as multi-
modal signs mediating a diversity of historical and cultural scripts. The

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Jewitt Design of Discourse

displays and arrangements, like any other resource made available,

constitute constraints and possibilities for meaning making, and, like
all resources, how they are taken up and used varies with teachers,
students and instances of teaching.

Notes
1. Pseudonyms are used for the schools, teachers and students named in this
paper.
2. In the UK General Certificate Secondary Education examinations are taken
in specific subject areas by students aged 16 years old.

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Biography
CAREY JEWITT is a UK Research Council Academic Fellow at the London
Knowledge Lab, Institute of Education, University of London. She conducts
research and writes on aspects of visual and multimodal communication,
technologies and learning. Carey is co editor of the journal Visual
Communication (Sage). Her recent publications include English in Urban
Classrooms (RoutledgeFalmer, 2005) with Gunther Kress and colleagues, and
Technology, Literacy, Learning (RoutledgeFalmer, 2005). ADDRESS: Carey
Jewitt, The London Knowledge Lab, 23–9 Emerald Street, London, WC1N
3QF. [email: c.jewitt@ioe.ac.uk]

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