The Affordances of Visual Modes in Pedagogy on the Physics of Motion in Physiotherapy Education.

The concept of angular motion is foundational knowledge in physiotherapy, applied for example in measuring joint range of motion. Yet research points to university students' poor understanding of the concept. Visuals are commonly promoted as valuable for creating opportunities for meaningful learning of the physics of motion. In this chapter we report on a lecturer's use of the affordances of visual modes-images, gestures and objects-in pedagogy on angular motion in the first year of a professional physiotherapy degree programme at a South African university. Using a multimodal social semiotic perspective that positions multimodal language as contextualised, motivated and central to meaning-making, we analysed recorded lectures and an interview with the lecturer. We show that, in organising her pedagogy, the lecturer used affordances of the image mode to create static images representing the spatial arrangement of multiple concepts and their relations simultaneously. This mode was the central site used to promote conceptually meaningful problem-solving, but was strengthened by her use of the affordances of gesture and an object to communicate motion. The lecturer strategically integrated the modes of verbal speech and written text into the visual complex, supporting the development of conceptual meaning and the acquisition of the language modes employed for problem-solving procedures. Her choices were motivated by a deep, contextual understanding of the role of physics in physiotherapy and of the diverse knowledge, language experiences and resources of first-year students. Our findings regarding the affordances of visual modes can inform collaborative education development within the health sciences.

Conceptual Tools to Inform Course Design and Teaching for Ethical Engineering Engagement for Diverse Student Populations.

Contemporary engineering education recognises the need for engineering ethics content in undergraduate programmes to extend beyond concepts that form the basis of professional codes to consider relationality and context of engineering practice. Yet there is debate on how this might be done, and we argue that the design and pedagogy for engineering ethics has to consider what and to whom ethics is taught in a particular context. Our interest is in the possibilities and challenges of pursuing the dual imperatives of socialization and critique. Socialization involves creating opportunities for all, in a diverse cohort of students, to access and engage with the dominant professional engineering ethics knowledge, while critique involves engaging with a range of ways of knowing, valuing, being and using language as relevant in contemporary engineering practice. We identify conceptual tools from engineering ethics and ethical pedagogy in education scholarship for our context. We illustrate how we use these tools systematically to strengthen our reflective practice in a first-year university engineering ethics module to a deeper form of reflexivity. Specifically, we explore the ways in which we attend to the dual imperatives and also highlight opportunities that we miss. We identify as key opportunities design choices such as how we formulated questions and prompts, and how we attended to content, context and language in selecting classroom texts. Other key opportunities were pedagogical choices of when and how to use student contributions in discussion, and what was made explicit in the classroom and assessment. We share our plans to take our learnings forward in our practice and consider the generative possibilities of these learnings and the concepts in other contexts.