Understanding semiotic technology in university classrooms: a social semiotic approach to PowerPoint-assisted cultural studies lectures

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a social semiotic approach to studying PowerPoint in university classrooms. Our approach is centred on two premises: (1) PowerPoint is a semiotic technology that can be integrated into the pedagogical discourse of classrooms, and (2) PowerPoint technology encompasses three interrelated dimensions of social semiotic practices: the design of the software, the composition of the slides and the slideshow-supported presentations, i.e. lectures. Using this approach, we explore how PowerPoint has been used in seven cultural studies lectures in an Australian university. Our analysis demonstrates how multimodal resources in PowerPoint have been used for pedagogic recontextualisation. More specifically, it shows how different semiotic resources have been deployed and combined to recontextualise two key types of knowledge – signifying practice and subjectivity – in the classroom discursive space, and how different strengths of pedagogic framing are achieved multimodally.

Keywords:

• PowerPoint
• university classrooms
• pedagogic discourse
• semiotic technology
• social semiotics
• multimodality

Acknowledgments

The paper is part of a larger project, “Towards a Social Theory of Semiotic Technology: Exploring PowerPoint’s Design and its Use in Higher Education and Corporate Settings”, which is supported through an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant.

Notes

1. For other studies of classroom discourse from a Bernsteinian perspective, see for instance Pedro 1981; Buzzelli and Johnston 2001; Morais 2002; Zammit 2011; Straehler-Pohl and Gellert 2012.

2. In defining pedagogic discourse, Christie replaces Bernstein’s choice of term discourse (as in regulative discourse) with register and embedding with projecting in order to locate the notion more comfortably in the conceptual framework of SFL.

3. Although the presentation itself does not directly produce a semiotic artefact, the process of the presentation, through video-recording technology, can be turned into an artefact, which can then be employed in other semiotic practices such as research or training (see Bezemer and Kress 2008 on the scope, uses and challenges of video-based social research).