Full Description
This book proposes a relational turn in higher education by conceptualizing knowledge and pedagogy as relational and multimodal, analyzed through three dimensions of relationality: social, technological, and environmental.
The volume draws on interdisciplinary approaches that make a case for integrating these interconnected and distinct dimensions in higher education theory and practice. Its novelty lies in combining such a variety of perspectives with Peircean semiotics to explore what it means to learn and live relationally. It emphasizes the importance of critical reflection, rooted in an environmental understanding of knowledge and digital media. This approach integrates materiality, place, and space in higher education, positioning caring, critically reflective and imaginative interactions and interpretations as central for knowledge growth. The volume features practical case studies of relational pedagogy through dialogues with diverse higher education practitioners, which embrace expression and creation through more than one dominant modality of communication and being. The book envisions students and educators as relational agents, with relational awareness and responsibility, aware of their multimodal identities. It highlights how a relational multimodal paradigm can serve as a way forward for universities to address global challenges concerning social, (post)digital, and environmental futures.
This innovative book will be of interest to scholars, students, teachers, and policymakers in higher education, semiotics and multimodality, as well as postdigital, sociomaterial and futures studies.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Part I: Setting the Ground
1. Introducing Relational and Multimodal Higher Education
2. Learning from and with Everyday Connections
3. Educational Relationality through Meanings: A Semiotic Approach
Part II: A Postdigital Higher Education
4. Rethinking Higher Education through Social Relationality
5. Learning with More-than-Humans and Digital Media
6. How Does Learning Happen?
7. Developing Higher Education through the Environment and Others
8. Social, Material, and Digital Semiotics at Universities
9. Challenging One-Dimensional Literacy, Media Culture, and Identity
10. Multimodal Identity in Higher Education, An Identity+
Part III: Examples through Practice
11. Posthuman Pedagogy as a Relational and Multimodal Practice: In Conversation with Kay Sidebottom
12. Mapping and Counter-Mapping Pedagogies: In Conversation with Shibboleth Schechter
13. Graduate Employment Futures and Relational Employability: In Conversation with Elizabeth J. Cook
14. Using Images to Explore the Self as Self-Other and Troublesome Concepts in Higher Education: In Conversation with Denise MacGiollaRí
15. Pedagogy with Digital Artefacts, Materiality, and Social Media: In Conversation with Zoe Hurley
Index
