starting point the notion that ‘realism’ is a social and semiotic construct. Different
specific forms of realism are embedded in each of these school disciplines: and in the
move from page to screen these forms of realism are reshaped and newly made in
significant ways. I argue that educational practitioners and software designers need to be
aware of the potential reconfiguration of the curriculum and of the epistemology of
school subjects brought about by the move from the traditional resources of the classroom
to the resources of the screen. More specifically they need to have a sense of the
potential impact of this reshaping on what is presented to students as ‘that which is to be
learnt’.
School English recontextualises, in certain domains, the work of literary theory, which
has produced various forms of the object ‘the literary text’ and of its elements; in the case
of this thesis, the element ‘character’ is the focus. These appear in recontextualised form,
still recognisable in the English curriculum. In the move from the literary entity ‘novel’
in the mode of writing and the medium of the book, to the multimodal representation of
the medium of the screen there is a shift from the literary entity constructed in one theory
and its notion of ‘realism’ to a new entity. This new entity may be most conveniently
described as a ‘quasi-documentary’ and its different notion of ‘realism’ consisting of
‘historical’ records and information (maps, photographs, biographical information and so
on). This effects, among many other changes, the notion of ‘character’ for instance,
which shifts from its position in literary theory to one in a social theory. The concept of
character that is realised in the ‘novel as CD-ROM’ is transformed from an entity
embedded in the history of Literature and school English to one of the lived reality of
people. Through the representational resources of voice, image, gesture, movement and
the facilities of the screen the ‘characters’ are brought into existence and presented as
‘real’ historically existent people. In this way the literary meaning of character and its
potential to impact on the moral life of the reader is reconfigured.
School Mathematics offers a theoretical repositioning of students everyday
understandings of phenomena in the form of mathematical concepts represented in a
scientific (technical) realism. The move from the resources of page to the resources of the
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