* Central to our work as language and literacy teachers are the exploration of conceptual and practical issues in relation to representation and the activity of meaning making in classrooms. A major pedagogical challenge is to bring knowing to the surface of consciousness, to help students render knowledge as material culture; in other words, to help them transform what they know, remember, sense, feel, and believe into a paragraph of writing, a lively dialogue, or a scrapbook of images. A starting point for addressing this challenge is to reconceptualise representation in the classroom. Drawing predominantly on the work of Kress (1997) and others (Kress & Van Leeuwen, 1996) in social semiotics and multimodality, the process begins with conceptualising classrooms as semiotic spaces in which human beings who are the agents of their own meaning making produce multimodal texts-visual, written, spoken, performative, sonic, and gestural. Each text produced can be viewed as a complex sign. In the act of making meaning, learners produce multiple signs in textual forms across semiotic modes, drawing on different representational resources in order to succeed in that domain. The design of such texts is constrained by the genres, languages, and discursive practices that are valued within the broader sociocultural and political context of education and the nation-state.