Chapter 7 distills from the empirical studies their implications for emoji theories overall and for their applicability to the educational and healthcare realms. The studies have borne a number of concrete implications for emoji theory in general, including how they fit in with communication theories, including nonverbal aspects. Several theoretical notions are developed as well, generalizing them from previous chapters, including the apparent function of emoji as “annotators” of meaning, not just conveyors of prosodic or gestural features in writing. Another notion is that of episodic meaning, whereby the placement of an emoji in the episodes that constitute a message adds to it semiotically. Emoji grammar is thus more appropriately characterized as an episodic grammar.

Using both the Petcoff and Palaganas studies as a point of departure, this chapter looks at the more general educational implications of bringing emoji into pedagogical practices. The underlying premise is that emoji not only are highly understandable images, aiding learning but also can create a positive environment, making teaching and interaction congenial and open to all learners, no matter their backgrounds or learning capacities, since emoji give them an equal voice. Emoji allow for a destigmatized approach, especially for disadvantaged learners who might not be able to adequately speak for themselves. Emoji are a psychological conduit that can easily open up lines of interaction to virtually everyone. Once this is achieved, any subject matter, from English to mathematics, can be imparted broadly through any type of learning style.

Chapter 2 summarizes the findings of a research project conducted by Petcoff in which she explores using emoji as a viable literacy and postsecondary writing teaching tool. Her work chronicles the teaching situation in a Texas community college, whereby an integrated reading and writing project was devised in which students attempted to demonstrate mastery of State-mandated literacy content areas using both traditional writing and the emoji code. The project provides data-driven findings that allow for the exploration of semioliteracy as a teaching approach, as well how the shared meanings of emoji by students constitute an unconscious semiotic domain. The Petcoff study offers opportunities for further research with similar groups of learning, via iconographic tracking and rendered ecologies with a particular focus on advancing literacy within the framework of first-year and postsecondary writing instructional efforts. Parallels between semioliterate qualities used in reading and writing instruction and healthcare, as well as healthcare professional education, are discussed at the conclusion of the chapter.

The historical relationship between semiotics and healthcare is explored in Chapter 3. The authors look specifically at the link between education and healthcare communications that is established by the use of emoji in such communications. The semioliterate nature of healthcare and its implications for respective education are explored, particularly as these relate to early diagnoses based on physical signs and symptoms. Parallels are then drawn between the semioliterate qualities of emoji in the Petcoff study (Chapter 2) and the potentiality of emoji as an effective doctor-to-patient healthcare communicative tool. The chapter concludes by considering how the emoji code can be inserted into traditional healthcare professional education settings, so as to show students how effective it can be in practitioner–patient interactions.

Chapter 1 offers an in-depth, historically based discussion of the research on emoji and on matters of general concern regarding this unique type of visual character, along with a rationale for the need for a comprehensive treatment of emoji in education. The authors describe the reasons for focusing on higher education, particularly health professional education. They begin by examining the background work on emoji theory and research and offer initial insights into the discourse and semiotic functions of the emoji code. Such functions form the basis for considering the emoji code as a teaching tool that may be used to craft hybrid literacy-focused instruction (textual and visual). The discursive and recursive properties of emoji form the basis of semioliteracy, a theory that one of the authors (Petcoff) contends offers a basis for emoji use in developmental reading and writing and across several higher education academic fields. Specifically, the chapter addresses the potential use of emoji as a literacy instruction tool in both higher education and healthcare professional education.

This chapter reports on a study that examines the cultivation of values in teaching ancient history in an Australian junior secondary school classroom. We focus on how the values of ‘democracy’ are discussed in learning about ‘city-states and governments in Ancient Greece’. Our analysis makes visible the language resources used to establish ‘democratic’ values and how these values are transmitted in the discourse of teaching and learning. We first identify three sources of evaluation – including the school’s history perspective, the teacher’s perspective, and the perspective of Australian citizens. We show that as the source of evaluation changes, different types of ‘democratic’ value are enacted. Democracy is formulated as a set of values enacted by clusters of evaluations, in opposition to what is evaluated as ‘non-democracy’. We also consider how the teacher confirms or rejects instances of evaluation as they work to form ‘bonds’, aligning students into a community of shared values. The chapter makes explicit the fact that in building knowledge of history, ‘what you know’ and ‘how you feel’ construct ‘who you are’.

In this chapter we explore the teaching of ancient history in an Australian junior secondary school classroom, focusing particularly on how the knowledge of government in city-states in Ancient Greek are developed. We show that an important part of knowledge building in ancient history involves ‘factoring out’ the meanings which are condensed in technical terms – characterised informally as ‘flexi-tech’ because of the weakly classified nature of the terms. Throughout two history lessons, the teacher guides the students to think ‘critically’ about how types of government are categorised. We show that while Spartan government is referred to in different pedagogic materials as a monarchy, an oligarchy, or a military state, as the lessons unfold the teacher repositions Spartan government as a complex structure – comprising elements of different kinds, including specific elements of democracy. Our analysis focuses on how this repositioning is achieved and what kind of ‘critical thinking’ is involved.

This chapter explores how written Spanish is used to construe causality in history discourse. It particularly examines the realisation of sequences in a Chilean secondary school textbook, when dealing with the implementation of neoliberalism in Chile. The study shows that the official teaching material draws heavily on logical metaphors to construe sequences. Owing to its focus on discourse semantics, this work offers clear criteria for identifying different types of logical metaphors, beyond the isolated causal lexis that might be found in a text. Based on different combinations of figures and connexions, realisations of sequence are scaled from the most congruent to the least congruent. Thus, the chapter delves into the lexicogrammatical particularities of written Spanish to metaphorically realise connexions. In addition, it reveals that logical metaphors interact with other discourse semantic systems and, therefore, make an enlarged meaning potential available for writers in history texts.

This chapter adopts an extended SFL perspective on pedagogic discourse, in dialogue with Bernstein’s work on regulative and instructional discourse and Maton’s work on autonomy codes. The model proposed establishes a framework for analysing shifts to and from disciplinary knowledge and values as curriculum genres unfold. Examples are taken from secondary school classroom discourse, a history lesson on castles in particular. Resources for scaffolding these shifts are reviewed, including internal connexion, semiotic entities, text reference, periodicity, linguistic services, and ‘internal’ attitude. The model is intended as a practical framework for designing and monitoring the role of disciplinary and extra-disciplinary knowledge and values in pedagogic discourse and as a theoretical framework for interpreting the accommodation of unity and difference in coherent text.

This chapter explores the development of empathy as a particular kind of historical sensibility that relates others’ historical experiences to interpreter’s affective semiotic processes. The chapter analyses negotiations of meaning about historical films in a university course to describe students’ affective involvement and moral engagement with the history of others. Learning about others’ history entails engaging in semiotic work to reconstruct past experiences which creates affordances for the past to become relevant in the present in axiological and affective terms. The chapter shows how through response papers and discussions about a film that depicts traumatic historical events, students display their positioning and the construction of axiological communities that connect past and present. The discourse analysis draws on the SFL concept of interpersonal meanings as construed through attitudes (Martin & White, 2005) and point of view (Unsworth, 2013) realising affective and moral orientations to others’ experience. The findings of this study offer some insights into Spanish interpersonal meaning-making resources and the potential of historical film as a tool to develop historical sensibility.

This chapter examines how the language resources used to incorporate written historical evidence contribute to the negotiation of values regarding Mapuche people in primary and secondary Chilean official history textbooks. The study considers as a starting point the broad categories proposed by the ENGAGEMENT subsystem of the APPRAISAL system (Martin & White, 2005). Then it explores in detail the metaphorical, more or less evident and non-metaphorical interpersonal and experiential realisations involved in ENGAGEMENT in Spanish, adopting an interstratal tension perspective on the relation between discourse semantics and lexicogrammar strata. The study shows that the monoglossic orientation as well as the heteroglossic orientation of dialogic contraction tend to be realised by history textbook authors through non-metaphorical realisations. However, the inclusion of external voices as [expand: attribute] tends to be done by both metaphorical and non-metaphorical experiential realisations, and also by lexicogrammatical structures that although they cannot be considered as interpersonal or experiential grammatical metaphors, make the external voices less ‘recoverable’.