Verbal/visual Narrative Texts in Higher Education

Book excerpt: The present is a time of major change in the world of higher education. Conceptions of knowledge and learning as well as course provision are being powerfully altered by current socio-political agendas, constantly evolving technology, demographic developments. The question of identity and its construction in narrative are central to reflection on these issues. Indeed the construction of multimodal/hybridized narratives involves discoursal processes where perceptions of culture and identity, attitudinal and evaluative stances are represented, negotiated, marginalized, transformed. This volume presents a rich variety of perspectives on verbal/visual narrative texts in higher education coming from Europe, North America, South Africa, China and Australia. It includes case studies and original research from a wide spectrum of disciplinary domains (political science, law, medicine, biology, ICT, teacher education) set in a range of different education contexts (online communities and classrooms; native-speaker/nonnative-speaker, intercultural and multilingual/multiethnic milieus).