Arlene Archer
Arlene is the co-ordinator of the Writing Centre. She teaches academic writing and communication in a number of contexts, including Engineering and Humanities courses, and is particularly interested in the changing nature of literacy (including multiliteracies) and how diverse students from a range of language, class, cultural and gender identities access disciplinary knowledge. In her PhD, she looked at the relationship between the multimodal representational resources of diverse students and the expectations of the academy.
Her research for the next few years has two main objectives. Firstly, it looks at changing multimodal texts across disciplines in Higher Education, including new modes and new media. In doing this, the aim is to investigate the features of academic discourse in a multimodal environment. Secondly, it focuses on understanding how to better enable student access to these discourses through the use of multimodal pedagogies. The focus will fall on defining the features of multimodal academic discourse in different disciplines, outlining visual-verbal linkages in the selected texts, and looking at the affordances of modes and media in the construction of different disciplines.
Contact Details
E-mail: Arlene.Archer@uct.ac.zaPhone: +27 21 650 3319
Fax: +27 21 650 5045