About this research strand
This strand examines the ways in which multimodal communication and its related practices transverse across a wide range of educational discourses and open up expansive opportunities to reconsider policy, curricula, and pedagogies. These examinations include how researchers and practitioners methodologically analyse multimodal interactions that are entangled with material learning resources and the ways in which technology is mediated by dialogue within shared digital knowledge artefacts.
Strand Leaders
Emma Cooper and Alison Twiner
Projects include
‘Whose Objects, Whose Stories?’ (WOWS)
The Fitzwilliam Museum and CEDiR: 2026 to present. Kate Noble, Emma Cooper and Alison Twiner, with Sherice Clarke
Funded by Cambridge Humanities Research Group funding (2026-27)
WOWS builds on the Talking Objects project, seeking to address critical gaps in research by examining how museum-based outreach programmes support young learners (aged 12-13) and educators to talk about complex issues, and how multimodal approaches enable learners to ‘show’ as well as ‘tell’ evolving understandings.
RPEP: Day-in-the-Life
A new project planned for in collaboration with colleagues at Canadian universities. The project will focus on critical reading practices within initial teacher education courses employing a day-in-the-life methodology. This project will expand on the Reading Pedagogies of Equity Project (SSHRC, held by PI: Professor Rachel Heydon, Western University and others).
‘Talking Objects’
The Fitzwilliam Museum, CEDiR and Camtree: 2024-2026. Kate Noble, Alison Twiner and Sara Hennessy
Funded by Collections, Connections and Communities research initiative (2024-2025; and Faculty of Education Researcher Development Fund (2025-2026)
‘Talking Objects’ was a collaboration between Kate Noble at the Fitzwilliam Museum, and Alison Twiner and Sara Hennessy at CEDiR and Camtree, offering a unique intersection of museum pedagogy, multimodal dialogue and educator professional development. Specifically it was a research and development project to explore how museum objects can be used to spark meaningful conversations, thinking and understanding in young learners; and to develop and share educators’ pedagogy in this area through practitioner inquiry.
Analysing multimodal dialogue
CEDiR: 2018 to present. Sara Hennessy and others.
Development of an openly available, systematic coding scheme for analysing technology-mediated dialogue (Tech-SEDA) at different levels of granularity and across diverse educational settings.
Application in doctoral research projects and ongoing extension.
Dancemotion: Making sense of emotions through dance-based movement
Open University: 2019-2021. Alison Twiner, with Mathijs Lucassen and Mimi Tatlow-Golden.
In collaboration with the Anna Freud National Centre for Children and Families, and Dance Educates, two projects addressed the challenge that understanding our own and others' emotions is an important, early area of development; but that developing understandings of such abstract concepts for young learners through predominantly-language based means can be difficult. We conducted pilot work in primary schools, working with teachers to support young children in making contextualised meanings around a variety of emotions, through movement alongside talk and other resources; and ran workshops with practitioners interested in implementing such an approach in their contexts.
Digitalised Dialogues Across the Curriculum (DiDiAC).
Research Council of Norway: 2016-20. Warwick, Major, Cook & Vrikki.
In collaboration with colleagues at the University of Oslo (Project Leader: Ingvill Rasmussen), investigating the potential of micro-blogging to enhance existing (and promote new) forms of classroom dialogue and critical thinking in Year 7 classrooms.
