14 April 2026 - Seminar on 'Image, Text and Meaning-Making in the Primary Classroom’

Young learners today are immersed in a world where images dominate and captivate. It becomes all the more imperative to teach them to critically navigate, make sense of, and generate meaningful images for themselves. In the first part of this seminar, Donna Lim explores the use of picturebooks to develop literacy, enrich language, and encourage critical thinking by drawing from the interplay of text and images to create meaning. This multimodal approach equips young learners with essential skills for reading, communication, and making sense of the visually-rich world around them.

In the second part of the seminar, Helen Jones will share her doctoral research into the creation of comics by 9-11 year olds in an after-school club in the UK. We will explore what an after-school club can offer as a ‘third site’ of learning between home and school. The funds of knowledge children bring to the creation of multimodal texts will be discussed in relation to how children inhabit their comics making and use the site of the page as a place for play, reimaginings and identity building.