Vol. 10 No. 17 (2026): Teaching materials, multimodality and actor perspectives

Learning Tech #17 features five exciting articles that contribute to new perspectives on instructional materials and research about instructional materials.

The articles fall into two tracks:

• One track is about how we can analyze subject-specific use of graphic elements in educational texts.
• The second track is about how instructional materials are created in a negotiation between both human and non-human actors, and how the learning material subsequently becomes an actor in education.

Subject-specific use of graphic elements in educational texts

Publication of poor reading results in international reading assessments such as PISA 2022 (Gissel, 2023) and PIRLS 2021 (Fougt et al., 2023) has once again brought attention to students' (lack of) reading competencies. Particularly noteworthy in this context is the finding that Danish students read fictional texts better than informative ones, and their reading proficiency in informative texts has significantly declined since 2016 (Fougt et al., 2023, p. 14). The informative texts are characterized by a high degree of multimodality.

Both analog and digital learning materials employ various representational forms. Images play an ever more salient role in learning materials (Bezemer & Kress, 2008; Janko & Knecht, 2014). The purpose of this may be to create a motivating layout and to improve the readability of the texts for students; in this case we are talking about academic reading in general. However, these different forms of representation are also used to communicate academically within a particular subject in subject-specific ways; this presupposes disciplinary reading competence (Shanahan & Shanahan, 2012) on the part of the reader. In school education, students must acquire the language and modes of thinking specific to each subject, and consequently, learn to read and understand the multimodal representations of academic texts in a subject-specific manner. However, research on multimodal subject-specific reading is currently underexplored.

This special issue of Learning Tech seeks to enrich multimodality theory from a social semiotic perspective (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2021) with insights from disciplinary literacy theory (Shanahan & Shanahan, 2012). Disciplinary literacy theory addresses how subject-specific goals are achieved through a subject-specific approach to reading, but the theory has thus far primarily focused on the reading of verbal-linguistic representational forms.

This special issue of Learning Tech investigates this cross fertilization of the two theoretical strands and the need to understand what types of multimodality students encounter in learning materials in and across disciplines.