Undergraduate Teaching with Multiple Semiotic Resources: Disciplinary Affordance vs Pedagogical Affordance

Since its introduction by Gibson (1979) the concept of affordance has been discussed at length by a number of researchers. Most famous, perhaps is the disagreement between Gibson and Norman (1988) about whether affordances are inherent properties of objects or are only present when perceived by an organism. More recently, affordance has been drawn on in the educational arena, particularly with respect to multimodality (see Fredlund et al 2015 for a recent example). Here, Kress et al (2001) have claimed that different modes have different specialized affordances. In this paper the interrelated concepts of disciplinary affordance and pedagogical affordance are discussed. Both concepts make a radical break with the views of both Gibson and Norman in that rather than focusing on the perception of an individual, they refer to the disciplinary community as a whole. Disciplinary affordance is "the agreed meaning making functions that a semiotic resource fulfils for a disciplinary community". Similarly, pedagogical affordance is "the aptness of a semiotic resource for the teaching and learning of some particular educational content" (Airey 2015). As such, the question of whether these affordances are inherent or perceived becomes moot. Rather, the issue is the process through which students can come to see semiotic resources in a way that corresponds to the disciplinary affordance accepted within the discipline. The power of the term, then, is that learning can now be framed as coming to perceive the disciplinary affordances of semiotic resources. In this paper I will briefly discuss the history of the term affordance, define the terms disciplinary affordance and pedagogical affordance and illustrate their usefulness in a number of educational settings. References Airey J. (2009). Science, Language and Literacy. Case Studies of Learning in Swedish University Physics. Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis. Uppsala Dissertations from the Faculty of Science and Technology 81. 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