Educators’ uptake of Kress’s ideas on meaning-making and literacy: a case study from South Africa

This article is a practitioner-based account of the uptake of Kress’s ideas on literacy, literature and meaning-making in South African educational contexts, in particular, his integration of politics, semiosis and literacy. It examines the affective force of these ideas in South African classrooms in certain institutions during the immediate post-apartheid period from 1994 onwards, showing how Kress’s key concepts and principles provided a transformative theoretical framework for the work of progressive educators. A Kress-inspired framework propelled new conceptualisations of literacy and meaning-making in these classrooms and beyond – at all levels, from primary through to tertiary – and fuelled research from 1994 into the first decade of the new millennium. Given Kress’s insistence on the social, as in social semiotics, and his stress on the integration of representation, communication and situatedness, this article focuses on his ideas in context, how and why they were put to work and what their outcomes were. It is proposed that the South African case – although unique in many ways – may be relevant to postcolonial and decolonising educational contexts in the South more generally.