Following a class of fourteen-year-old students through their scheduled week’s lessons, this ethnographic study has the aim to contribute to the understanding of lower secondary school subjects as literacy practices from a multimodal perspective, and thereby illuminate what it can mean for students to create meaning as they move within and between these subjects. The research questions focus on how teachers offer students opportunities to create meaning and how students create representations of their meaning-making. The study is grounded in social and multimodal perspectives, theoretically framed by new literacy studies, social semiotics, and designs for learning.  

The empirical material, collected over four weeks and encompassing eight school subjects, consists of video observations, documented artifacts, and interviews. The analyses are conducted from different perspectives and levels of detail, using tools such as the learning design sequence model, the writing wheel, and categories from systemic functional grammar for multimodal analysis. 

The analyses reveal a pattern of two types of literacy offerings. In the first offering, the teacher provides knowledge representations of subject content, and students are given the opportunity to transform these into oral and written representations as tools for learning. Many students choose not to create such representations, and the written representations that are created seem to become tools for learning only to a limited extent. In the second offering, students are given the opportunity to create their own knowledge representations, which are then displayed for assessment or presented as a contribution to the subject content. The multimodal design of the knowledge representations emerges as a knowledge area in its own right, and all students participate in some way with outward-directed meaning-making. 

The in-depth analyses provide a more multifaceted picture of the two literacy offerings: students’ movement within and between different school subjects is also a movement between different patterns of how resources, purposes, and acts of meaning-making are used. The study’s results further highlight the dynamic nature of literacy practices, both in the relationship between the teacher’s offering and the students’ participation, and through the presence of literacies from various social practices.