ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Commun.
Sec. Multimodality of Communication
Volume 10 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fcomm.2025.1562515
Multimodality and Disciplinary Learning: The Case of Purposeful Transformation in the Sciences
Provisionally accepted
Anastasios Kapodistrias*
John Airey- Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden
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In this paper we discuss disciplinary learning and the roles that different modalities can play in the process. We first describe the extant research in the field of social semiotics with an emphasis on the functions of affordance and transduction in university science, before presenting the comparatively sparse research on transformation. Taking the discipline of cosmology as our point of reference, we identify an important, hitherto undescribed type of meaning-making-purposeful transformation-and demonstrate its importance in the teaching and learning of natural sciences.
Keywords: Social semiotics (SocSem), Transduction, transformation, cosmology, multimodality
Received: 17 Jan 2025; Accepted: 25 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Kapodistrias and Airey. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Anastasios Kapodistrias, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden
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