Evolutions in the Multimodal Design of Italian Textbooks

Abstract

In the Italian school system, the textbook is an essential scaffolding tool for the teacher both in the phase of the design of didactic paths and for the action in class, and the retracing and the documenting.

This role is therefore an international phenomenon: it can be considered as a planetary object and for this it seems appropriate to highlight its impact of the teaching-learning process on the whole.

In this perspective, it is possible to observe how the textbook is evolving in a multimodal object, where the textual dominance, typical of last century’s textbooks, leaves the way to iconic, visual, graphic forms concurring to the building of meanings.

This contribution aims at analysing such a transformation, comparing three primary school Italian textbooks dating back at the end of the XX century and three published after 2010.

The questions we would like to answer are basically two:

• How do the representation of consciousnesses and the organisation of contents evolve from a textual and narrative dimension to a visual and multimodal one?
• How do the layout, the page composition influence and are influenced by the didactic transposition of knowledge?

The conclusions of the analysis open new research leads, concerning the need of facinga didactics of multimodality, both in the classes and in the teachers’ training.

In addition, the multimodal analysis points out that the aspects characterizing the epistemological content determine the layout and it is possible to see how they are underlined, framed, meant by the modes.