This final chapter, rather than rehearsing the argument made thus far, reframes the discussion in a practical light in an effort to more concretely articulate mechanisms by which engagement and connection to the arts can be deepened and enriched. The chapter does so by highlighting four key “habits of mind” to engage in during art-appreciating and art-making: slowing down, embracing uncertainty, self-reflecting, and engaging in shared meaning-making.

Written in February 2025, well after the completion of the monograph, the epilogue reflects on the fall of the Assad regime as a historic rupture while acknowledging the uncertainty of Syria’s post-revolutionary trajectory. While revolutionary ideals have been reaffirmed in historical narratives, their translation into governance, justice, and political inclusion remains unresolved. New actors now compete to define Syria’s future, shaping its ideological and institutional landscape. The chapter highlights how discursive battles over key political concepts – such as democracy, secularism, and governance – mirror a broader crisis of democracy, where increasingly questioned. It argues that the post-Assad moment has not ended Syria’s struggle for meaning but has transformed it into a contest over the principles that will shape the new order. The epilogue concludes that while something undeniably good has happened – the fall of a brutal dictatorship – the revolution’s aspirations remain incomplete. The task ahead is not to declare its success but to create the conditions in which its meaning continues to unfold.

This chapter explores the central theme of meaning-making within the Syrian revolution. It focuses on how exiled intellectuals grappled with the loss of hope and disenfranchisement as the revolution became increasingly militarised. Intellectuals in exile worked to construct new frameworks of meaning, using revolution as a source of existential and cultural significance. The chapter examines how revolutionary language and narratives were liberated from state-controlled discourse and reinterpreted by intellectuals to align with their visions for Syria’s future. However, the chapter also addresses the growing sense of disenfranchisement as these intellectual narratives lost impact amid the rise of competing ideologies and factions within the revolutionary movement.

In the ‘betweens’ of art, research and teaching, this chapter adopts an a/r/tographic approach to explore children’s learning through media art within the Anthropocene, a proposed epoch that acknowledges human impact on Earth’s geology and ecosystems. This learning is thought of as ‘connected learning’, a type of learning that emphasises the integration of educational experiences across various settings, leveraging new media to foster innovative approaches to knowledge creation. The idea of connected learning aligns with the linked concept of children’s lifeworlds – which Arnott and Yelland take to encompass the everyday interactions that children negotiate in daily life as well as the less visible social, technical and material forces that shape those experiences – and the significance of Land as a participant in children’s learning. Children co-labour (or collaborate) with words, materials, technologies and Land to make meaning with their lifeworlds (e.g. semiosis as a process of wording and worlding). They do this in situated practice and through speculation (e.g. by asking “What if...?) to examine possible futures and alternative realities.

This chapter explores young children’s semiosis (meaning-making) and transformations when immersed with artworks that were made by professional artists. Paintings and sculptures (static, moving and sound-making) ‘resided’ (were installed) in their classroom for two school terms. The first part of the chapter provides a brief context for how artworks as mediating tools elicited children’s meaning-making through individual and social activity and describes how the children’s communication and representation of meaning was multimodal. The second part of the chapter delves into Illustration of Practice 7.1 based on recent research, where semiosis was studied through two key processes: (1) noticing, or becoming aware of signs within artworks, based on an individual’s perceptions, knowledge and emotions; and (2) immersion into the artworks. Immersion involved mediating signs through perezhivanie (a cognitive-embodied-emotive encounter that requires working-through) and transmediating (translating meaning from one mode of expression to another). Illustration of Practice 7.1 highlights how young children’s representation and communication of meaning are socially mediated, cognitive, affective and embodied.

This chapter provides theoretical and practical examples of how children’s meaning-making is enriched through teachers’ mediation. It shifts attention away from a traditional literacy perspective to a semiotic orientation that honours young children’s symbolic communication through art, music, play and dance. Exemplars are given of how children’s sign-making practices in the arts are of equal significance, and are the precursors, to sign-making in language and literacy. Indeed, the arts are children’s ‘first literacies’ because they help children find their way into the sign systems of reading and writing. Illustration of Practice 8.1 demonstrates the notable link between playing and drawing, and how children cross between graphic, narrative and embodied modes to communicate meaning. Illustration of Practice 8.2 foregrounds art making in a Reggio-inspired preschool classroom. Concluding sections focus on the building blocks of meaning-making, with an emphasis on its co-creation and the importance of documenting and interpreting children’s creative processes and learning.

This chapter discusses the role of creativity, narrative inquiry and meaning-making in making sense of systemic global crises and affirms their important role to play in helping young people deal with climate distress. Drawing on field work with the Dark Mountain Project, a cultural movement that grew out of the Dark Mountain manifesto published in 2009, it also describes how narrative repositioning can offer possibilities for opening up new ways of thinking and being. Using human–nature relationships as the focus for creative practice and inquiry into the narratives that frame each of our lives, participants in this project have broadened their experience of reality and worked through the difficult emotional states that arise with a growing awareness of the crisis occurring in the natural world. This kind of transformation of the ontological and epistemological foundation which frames a person’s lifeworld has the potential to engender a greater sense of belonging, especially if it is undertaken in a larger community of inquiry. By attending to processes of meaning-making in the way we address social and environmental problems, we may open up new avenues for thinking and acting, which help young people to become whole, healthy and resilient human beings in a time of global crises.

Drawing on recent developments from translanguaging theory, we argue in this chapter that translating and interpreting are by default translanguaging practices of meaning-making, during which process multilayered “translanguaging spaces” are being constantly and accumulatively created by dynamic interactional “moments” (Li, 2011) between the translator/interpreter and the external environment within the broader social–cultural contexts. These emerging insights from the key tenets of the translanguaging lens give rise to the construction of a unified theory of translating and interpreting aptitude consisting of a Macro level, Meso level, and Micro level (i.e., the 3M model), each level subsuming multiple interplaying elements interacting dynamically to generate multilayered translanguaging spaces of meaning-making.

Children begin to make meaning from the moment they are born. Their emerging abilities to communicate are central to the development of their thinking and imaginations; expression of their feelings and emotions; access to their cultural heritage(s); and, growth of their own unique identities. Learning how to mean and becoming literate continues to be critically important in shaping children and young people’s life chances. Yet it does not follow the same pattern for all children and cannot be reduced to a simple, linear hierarchy of skills (Ewing, 2020) or a one-size-fits-all approach to teaching those skills. Perhaps, because of its centrality to our lives and learning, becoming literate remains a complex and challenging area in education, broadly, but particularly in the primary classroom, where it is riddled with controversy. This book is underpinned by research and practice and reflects our serious commitment to every child’s entitlement to a rich and creative English and literacies education in the primary classroom.