About
75
Publications
45,824
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731
Citations
Citations since 2017
Introduction
Professor Arlene Archer is the director of the Writing Centre at the University of Cape Town. She convenes the South African Multimodality in Education research group . Her research employs a multimodal social semiotic perspective on ‘academic literacies’ approach to teaching and research to enable student access to Higher Education. She has co-edited four books on multimodality and writing, and has a British Academy Fellowship to investigate changing writing in a digital age.
Additional affiliations
January 1998 - September 1999
Stellenbosch University
Position
- English Academic Development Lecturer
Description
- Coordinator of the English Academic Development Programme
Education
January 2002 - June 2005
Publications
Publications (75)
University students in landscape architecture need to mobilize a range of resources in their design trajectories in order to resolve their designs. Often design education settings are influenced by design traditions of the global north, and thus may favour particular ways of knowing. This article aims to contribute to a multimodal pedagogy for dive...
This article focuses on the affordances of multimodal pedagogies in teaching English for academic purposes (EAP) in diverse and multilingual contexts. It draws on South Africa as an example of a multilingual, culturally diverse site in a recently decolonized country. Here theorizing and pedagogical practices around EAP often have a social justice a...
Extended Curriculum Programmes have a responsibility to validate the resources and experiences students bring to their learning environment. However, designing assessment practices that encourage diverse students to draw on their resources in order to both access and challenge disciplinary discourses can be complex. This paper is framed in terms of...
This paper explores the notion of “productive risk” as a way of understanding how diverse students can become re-makers of landscape architectural design practices and education. We trace the design trajectories of two first-year students at a South African tertiary institution and examine how the students negotiate the risk of drawing on their own...
Research in fields such as multimodality and semiotics has focused on creation of value in different forms: aesthetic, economic and symbolic. However, the destruction of value has attracted much less attention. The aim of this article is to identify social, semiotic and ideological functions of acts of destruction based on an analysis of the traces...
Today we are witnessing an increased use of data visualization in society. Across domains such as work, education and the news, various forms of graphs, charts and maps are used to explain, convince and tell stories. In an era in which more and more data are produced and circulated digitally, and digital tools make visualization production increasi...
This article investigates a semiotic phenomenon within the global fashion industry: the branding of designer jeans as 'authentic' and 'genuinely local', focusing on the Swedish brand Sarva. Drawing on a social semiotics approach, the authors see authenticity as a discursive construct and look at the ways in which Sarva authenticate their jeans as S...
Students come to Higher Education with a range of experiential and semiotic resources from their home and educational environments. Experiential resources include rural/urban lifestyles, local knowledges, and 'cultural capital' in the broadest sense (Bourdieu 1991). Semiotic resources include spoken, written, gestural, spatial and visual competenci...
Citation is fundamental in successfully constructing academic discourse. There has been much discussion concerning the considerable difficulties tertiary students experience when writing using sources, especially for those who speak English as an Additional Language. This paper interrogates the predominantly negative discourses that surround plagia...
This book chapter explores the semiotic realization of authorial stance and professional credibility in communication encounters with patients. Using a multimodal social semiotic approach combined with a critical realist perspective, we examine medical students’ production of personalized health promotion artefacts and written critical reflections....
Mind or concept maps have long been viewed as helpful tools to plan texts. The pedagogical focus is often focused on the end product as material artefact, with less pedagogical or assessment attention being paid to the process of mind mapping. A process-product approach to text and text-in-use can fulfil a variety of pedagogical goals that allow pa...
This chapter looks at mobility and communication from a social semiotic perspective in order to explore global / local discourses instantiated in and circulating around ‘upcycled’ artefacts, particularly plastic bottles. The chapter looks at semiotic resources, discourses, and narratives that are drawn on when ‘upcycled’ artefacts are used to make...
Citation is fundamental in successfully constructing academic discourse. There has been much discussion in the literature concerning the considerable difficulties tertiary students experience when writing using sources.1-3 One challenge frequently encountered is the predominantly negative discourse that surrounds the value and purpose of referencin...
This paper examines semiotic technologies, both in terms of the resources they harness and the practices developed around their use. It draws on data collected as part of an ethnographic investigation into the meaning-making practices deployed within civil engineering study. The data is used as a case study for examining semiotic technologies as so...
Although ‘voice’ is a contested concept used in many different ways, it is often used to indicate degrees of authorial agency and, as such, is useful for exploring interest and design in artwork and three dimensional artefacts. This paper investigates the semiotic signifiers of voice in artwork, arguing that the notion of materiality is crucial for...
This paper focuses on the affordances of multimodal pedagogies in writing centre environments to improve student writing. Writing centres have the potential to function as change agents, contributing towards changing the dominant attitudes to language and texts. Multimodal pedagogies encourage the use of a range of modes (such as talk, writing, mus...
Research on academic literacies has predominately focused on writing practices in higher education. To account for writing practices in the digital age, this paper emphasizes the importance of extending the focus of academic literacies beyond writing to include multimodal composition.
Drawing on social semiotics, we put forward a framework for unde...
Different methodological approaches allow varying access to the objects of inquiry and enable one to ask different kinds of questions. This paper explores the possibilities that emerge through the combination of multimodal social semiotics and autoethnography. We discuss the epistemological and methodological bases for each approach and show the po...
Multimodality in Higher Education showcases new directions in multimodal research and also focuses on teaching multimodal text production and writing pedagogy. It theorizes writing practices and writing pedagogy in Higher Educational contexts from a multimodal perspective.
The effectiveness of writing centre interventions on student writing in higher education has been well-documented in academic literacies studies. This paper changes the focus of investigation from student to consultant and, consequently, explores the way in which an academic writing centre can function as a mentoring environment for young academics...
This paper explores the ways in which multimodal classroom discourse could inform a social justice agenda through broadening the base for representation in the classroom. It identifies some of the challenges and opportunities of designing multimodal classrooms in diverse and developing contexts, where there are vast differentials in terms of access...
This paper aims to identify multimodal designs for learning in diverse and developing contexts, where access to resources remains vastly unequal. Using case studies from South African education, the paper explores ways of surfacing the range of students’ resources which are often not noticed or valued in formal educational settings. The studies sho...
This article explores the fluidity of modes in manga where the written mode is often treated as a visual and the visual treated as a written entity. The analysis focuses on a particular text, Naruto, by Masashi Kishimoto (2003). In manga, writing is a visual entity and is often governed by the logics of space where position influences value and seq...
Research on students’ academic literacies practices has tended to focus on the written mode in order to understand the academic conventions necessary to access Higher Education. However, the representation of quantitative information can be a challenge to many students. Quantitative information can be represented through a range of modes (such as w...
Preface, Carey Jewitt 1. Challenges and Opportunities of Multimodal Approaches to Education in South Africa Arlene Archer and Denise Newfield Part I: Recognising Resources: Multimodal Texts and Practices 2. "The Pen Talks My Story": South African Children’s Multimodal Storytelling as Artistic Practice Susan Harrop-Allin 3. Resources, Representation...
In studies of academic voice the focus has generally fallen on writing, yet academic student texts across disciplines rely on the co-presence of writing and image. In exploring voice in multimodal academic discourse, this chapter considers authorial engagement across writing and images in student texts in a first year History of Architecture course...
This article builds on and contributes to work in writing pedagogy, with a particular focus on multimodality. Research on writing and academic literacies have examined changing texts in higher education, yet there has not been a particular emphasis on how these texts are reconfigured in the multimodal moment. This article examines the implications...
Writing involves constructing and navigating multiplicity, manipulating and critiquing representations in multiple media, and using diverse technologies. This kind of multimodal composing reflects the environment in which students and professionals generate text. In addition, “social, cultural and historical factors influence and mediate how modes...
This volume offers the readers a diversity of insight into how multimodality works in texts, and the effects different modes have on generating and understanding meaning.
In higher education, genre theorists and academic literacy practitioners have examined evolving genres, but they have not specifically focused on the multimodal nature of texts that students need to produce for assessment purposes. This paper explores the increasing influence and incorporation of the visual into academic texts, and ways of enabling...
This article explores the extent to which colour functions as an independent mode in a particular context and explores the culturally produced regularities in the uses of colour in this context. Drawing on a Hallidayan metafunctional view of text, we look at how colour instantiated systems of knowledge and belief (ideational function) and social re...
"The primary aim of the text is to discuss the ways in which writing centres can contribute towards providing epistemological access in a context of high student failure and drop-out. It does this through a series of chapters that together consider issues of structures of writing centres, approaches used in writing centres and issues of writing cen...
Although studies on writing pedagogy and academic literacies have examined changing genres in tertiary education, there has not necessarily been an emphasis on how a range of modes and media have influenced texts in various disciplines. This paper explores the influence and incorporation of the visual into student texts in Higher Education, looking...
This paper examines how students' resources can be drawn on in curriculum design in tertiary education to develop a pedagogy of diversity. It asks what kinds of resources are privileged through existing academic practices, and how certain traditionally unused resources can be included in teaching, learning and meaning-making. With reference to a ca...
This paper examines the discourses that students draw on and propagate in a course on rural development in a first‐year engineering foundation programme. It looks at the way ‘rural’ is often constructed as ‘lack’ and therefore ‘other’, the dangers of constructing development as linear, the ways nostalgia and utopianism feed into discourses of devel...
Students need access to the disciplinary practices of engineering, but at the same time, these practices need to transform to the realities of the changing global environment and the profession. The site of this research is an engineering foundation programme for less advantaged students in South Africa and is thus perhaps well-positioned to look a...
Writing is one of the main means of assessment in tertiary institutions and helping stu-dents with writing could improve their overall academic performance and could ensure that students proceed to graduation. More and more, Academic Development initiatives are being 'driven to demonstrate their "success" by substantiating the rhetoric of their mis...
This paper reflects on a first year communication project in a South African engineering foundation programme which attempted to bring a cultural studies perspective to the teaching of academic literacy practices. In the project, students identify everyday objects that have symbolic meanings and examine these in a range of physical, cultural and co...
Studies into student identity have tended to focus on formal academic writing for assessment purposes. However, this is beginning to change with a shifting academic and semiotic landscape. More and more tertiary institutions are making use of the writing opportunities afforded by the online environment. Online forums are popular as they promote int...
An approach to writer's stance will differ depending on whether one looks at it from an analytic theoretical perspective or a developmental perspective. This article describes a training activity in the Writing Centre at the University of Cape Town which led the authors to evaluate the concept of writer's stance as used in corpus studies against th...
This paper explores the terms ‘mathematical literacy’, ‘quantitative
literacy’ and ‘numeracy’, in order to gain theoretical clarity on their
meanings and the ways in which they are used. The teaching-learning
situation and the learner are constructed in particular ways by these terms,
and different understandings of these terms may reflect the valu...
This paper reports on a first year project in a South African engineering foundation programme which attempted to bring a cultural studies perspective to teaching academic literacy. Students identify and investigate everyday objects that have symbolic meanings in their communities. Objects are seen as catalysts for enabling student narratives to em...
There has tended to be an overemphasis on the teaching and analysis of the mode of writing in ‘academic literacies’ studies, even though changes in the communication landscape have engendered an increasing recognition of the different semiotic dimensions of representation. This paper tackles the logocentrism of academic literacies and argues for an...
As our literacy landscape is changing and information and communication technologies (ICTs) are becoming an ineluctable part of our future, we need to become aware of the ways in which technology can be used to enhance our broad educational objectives. A multiplicity of representational and communicative potentials is important to explore in Higher...
In this article we describe and discuss a three-year case study of a course in web literacy, part of the academic literacy curriculum for first-year engineering students at the University of Cape Town (UCT). Because they are seen as ‘practical’ knowledge, not theoretical, information skills tend to be devalued at university and rendered invisible t...
Projects
Projects (3)
This is a a collaborative research partnership between Stockholm University and the University of Cape Town, South Africa. The partnership looks at the phenomena of recycling and upcycling from our combined vantage points in order to provide a new global perspective. We propose four aspects to the research, including investigating a social outreach programme in South Africa; exploring the mobility and recontextualization of artefacts through upcycling, using South African and Sweden as sites of study; looking at citation practices in academic texts; exploring how critical commentary can be realized through an artefact. The research will feed into PhD supervision, courses and training programmes at our educational establishments, and three PhD students are directly involved in the partnership. The organisation of the project includes four meetings in the shape of workshops and seminars during a 12 months period, three of which involve the key persons, and a concluding seminar in London involving the PhD students and a few high profile researchers from the field.
• to interrogate and develop forms of pedagogy appropriate to multilingual and diverse cultural contexts,
• to grapple with issues of assessment of multimodal genres and explore the new criteria that may be required,
• to contribute to the discovery and development of new semiotic resources and new uses of existing semiotic resources in particular educational contexts.
