Experiences of Multimodal Teaching Through a Serious Game: Meanings, Practices and Discourses

The aim of this chapter is to report on school teachers’ perceptions and approaches to multimodality using a serious game. STEAM is a game designed for helping school teachers to gain awareness of how multimodality may be enacted in the classroom for enhancing the student learning experience. The game embraces the notion of multimodal teaching and learning, as a way to present multiple representations of content such as text, images, video, audio and pervasive media, by augmenting modes with tools, teaching strategies and locations as means to create ideational, interpersonal and textual meanings. A questionnaire was employed to school teachers (n = 54) for understanding how multimodality was experienced through using the serious game as (1) stipulating diversity and increasing knowledge retention, (2) developing senses for attaining deeper understanding of the subject topic, (3) involving students into learning design and (4) supporting student’s autonomy and self-direction. The findings revealed an explicit connection between theory and practice as experienced through the game’s semiotic domain whilst contemplating on attempts to transcend experiences of in-game multimodality to lived classrooms.