Multimodal Narratives in Nursing Education

Nursing education is driven by emerging challenges of scientific, technological, and professional advances that require the use of strategies that promote students' development of critical thinking for decision making in different contexts. It also requires that teachers constantly reflect on their pedagogical practices and (re)think them using strategies that allow their enhancement. The use of multimodal narratives (MNs) can be an important tool for teachers' professional development, namely to improve their classroom practices. Given the novelty of the use of MNs in nursing education, this chapter presents an analysis concerning the experience of making a MN and how it has been reflected in the authors' pedagogical practices. With this experience, potentialities of continuing to use MNs in nurse education are explored.

Accessing Science Museum Educators' Discourse Through Multimodal Narratives

Museum educators play an important role in science communication, as they connect elements of an exhibit with visitors through emotion-driven experiences that are meaningful to them. Language is their main modus operandi in face-to-face interactions, but little is known of how they use it to communicate science, in part because little attention has been given to their practices and professional development. Nowadays, museums are changing, and science communication has become more demanding as these institutions exhibit hot themes of science. In this context, it is important that museum educators become aware of how they communicate science with an intended audience and reflect on how their practice can be improved. In this chapter, the authors focus on the way multimodal narratives can be used as a tool to access museum educators' discourse as well as how to promote museum educators' reflection about their practice and their professional development.

Researching One's Own Practice

This chapter aims to link the known research results on the teaching and learning of linear algebra to research on teaching practices. The same person, as a teacher and as a researcher, plans and implements a teaching sequence, constructs multimodal narratives (MNs) for some classes, and reflects on his own practice, based on the emerging categories from content analysis of the MNs. Regarding the methodology and focusing on the role of MNs in this research, it is worth highlighting the value attributed to MNs because they function as an instrument that embodies the practices of the teacher and aid him in reflecting on his own practice.

Researching Science and Technology Teachers' Decisions Through Multimodal Narratives

This chapter aims to identify certain interaction dynamics between pedagogical decisions and students' epistemic practices (EPs) that occur during science and technology lessons conducted by teachers at two different teaching levels. A content analysis was undertaken of multimodal narratives (MNs) of lessons based on two case studies of secondary and higher education teachers. MN excerpts are used to illustrate the interaction dynamics between pedagogical decisions and students' EPs for each teacher. Results show that the secondary education teacher makes more pedagogical decisions than the higher education teacher and that the secondary school students engage in fewer EPs than the higher education students. The results also show that it is possible to use MNs as an instrument to develop research on teachers' pedagogical decisions. Teachers' pedagogical decisions are an important asset for teacher professional development as they have an impact on students' epistemic work in the physical science classroom.

Researching Epistemic Practices Development With Multimodal Narratives

This chapter describes an empirical study using multimodal narratives for research into students' development of epistemic practices in the classroom. Multimodal narratives can give access to classroom events, preserving their complex and holistic nature. Through content analysis, they allow a good comprehension of the multimodal nature of teaching and learning practices. The results of this work highlight the importance of multimodal narratives as a research instrument. Their importance is based on the richness of elements they contain that allow the identification, categorization, and characterization of teacher mediation actions that promote, scaffold, and enlarge students' epistemic practice development. This chapter seeks to describe both their multiple potentialities as an instrument and their limitations when researching the development of students' epistemic practices in the physical sciences classroom.

The Importance of Making Teaching Practices Public, Shareable, and Usable

It is acknowledged that to improve the value of the learning process and outcomes in areas such as science, technology, engineering and math, the teaching quality needs to be enhanced. Therefore, it is crucial to have access to real teaching practices. The multimodal narrative (MN) tool allows teaching practices to become public, sharable, and usable (open science perspective), preserving their holistic, complex, and ecological nature. This tool has characteristics and a structure that enable an in-depth study of teaching practices, in different contexts, with several purposes (e.g., teacher education, professional development, and research). This chapter presents MNs and the necessary steps involved in collecting multimodal data, structuring the narrative, and validating the document. MNs can be used by teachers and researchers, or other professionals, with multiple specific objectives, globally contributing to improving professional practices.

Researching Language and Semiotic Registers in Chemistry Lessons Using Multimodal Narratives

The main objective of this chapter is to extend the discussion of language and the use of semiotic registers in chemistry lessons. Audio and video recordings, students' notebooks, photographs of content, and activities recorded on the blackboard in chemistry lessons for high school students taught in a public school in the interior of the State of São Paulo enabled the construction of multimodal narratives (MNs). The qualitative analysis of the MNs allowed the identification and understanding of the semiotic registers present in eight lessons conducted by a chemistry teacher. The study revealed several semiotic registers present in the lessons, but there is little exploration of the processes of conversion between semiotic registers by the teacher and therefore by the students. The use of different semiotic registers without the necessary understanding of them can result in difficulties in the teaching and learning processes of chemical concepts.

Using Multimodal Narratives in Science and Technology Education Research

This chapter begins by presenting how multimodal narratives were developed and how they have evolved in time as a research tool. Their characteristics are explained, as well as their potential for use in research studies. One important aspect discussed in this chapter is the versatility of this tool, which allows for many possible investigative approaches. In particular, it addresses how multimodal narratives can be used to carry out studies in science and technology education research. Several examples are provided of such studies that were developed within a research community which has been working with multimodal narratives for over a decade.

Assessing Teaching Practices Development With Multimodal Narratives

This chapter focuses on teachers' professional development, on the task design and on experimental work, as well as on the role of the teachers' mediation in the quality of student learning. The research problem was how the teacher can promote self-directed professional development, namely, improving the quality of teaching practices to influence the quality of students' learning, in their engagement in experimental tasks and epistemic practices. A longitudinal research methodology was followed during 10 years, based on a qualitative case study, from a curricular approach in secondary education. The analysis of data collection on teaching practices and students' learning over time and the teachers' professional pathways allow to formulate the following conclusions: (1) new traits of teaching practices were identified that promote students' productive engagement; (2) changes to the task design were enough to trigger differences in teachers' mediation, with consequences for students' epistemic practices and their productive engagement.

Using Multimodal Narratives to Study Relationships Between Concepts

In conceptual teaching and learning, relationships between concepts play a key role. This chapter describes a case where two conceptual fields, water and energy, were treated in order to promote understanding of relationships between them. It deals with the importance of “potential relationships” and describes how multimodal narratives contributed to those elucidations and to these practices in the classroom and their interpretation, as well as to the professional development of teachers. The chapter elucidates concept use, relating concepts, ways of discerning relationships between concepts, loss of relationship opportunities that were created by students, and ways of verifying that certain relationships were achieved.