Transmodal Moments During Teaching of Writing in Emergency Remote Education: Cultural and Semiotic Practices

Teachers and students constantly recreate meanings, conditioned by the digital media used in remote education during the pandemic. Semiosis is designed by teachers as learning games, involving students in the simulation of cultural practices in which didactic writing sequences are realized in chains that shift meanings between different semiotic modes, giving rise to transmodal moments. This study combines three theoretical approaches: socio-semiotic, anthropological-didactic, and didactic-disciplinary. Our objective is to explore semiosis in the transmodal moments that occur in the virtual interaction during a didactic sequence. From the qualitative point of view, this case study examines the simulation of cultural practices of a female student in the fourth year of Chilean elementary education, using the integrated analysis of semiotic chains and Hybrid Text-Image-Sound Systems (HTISS). The findings offer a description of the learning games associated with two cultural practices, whose cores of meaning shift between six links. The semiotic tracking reflects the tension between the agency of both meaning-makers: the didactic meanings proposed by the teacher and the thematic meanings proposed by the student realized in the semiotic ensembles of teaching and learning mediated by a digital platform, in which the recycling of videos and documents is utilized. However, the feedback reveals that visual meanings remain invisible.