The present is a time of major change in the world of higher education. Conceptions of knowledge and learning as well as course provision are being powerfully altered by current socio-political agendas, constantly evolving technology, demographic developments. The question of identity and its construction in narrative are central to reflection on these issues. Indeed the construction of multimodal/hybridized narratives involves discoursal processes where perceptions of culture and identity, attitudinal and evaluative stances are represented, negotiated, marginalized, transformed.

This volume presents a rich variety of perspectives on verbal/visual narrative texts in higher education coming from Europe, North America, South Africa, China and Australia. It includes case studies and original research from a wide spectrum of disciplinary domains (political science, law, medicine, biology, ICT, teacher education) set in a range of different education contexts (online communities and classrooms; native-speaker/nonnative-speaker, intercultural and multilingual/multiethnic milieus).

Contents:

Martin Solly: Introduction - David Block: Narrative, Identity and Interviews: A Personal Reflection on Key Constructs and Analytical Practices - Lawrence M. Solan: Talking like a Person, Thinking like a Lawyer (and Vice versa) - Davide Simone Giannoni: Biomedical Laboratory Narratives: Linguistic and Disciplinary Traits - Ying Danjun/Huang Aifeng: Narratives in Interaction: Co-constructing Teacher Identity within Classroom Discourse - Martin Solly: Narrative and Identity in Contemporary Language Learning Policy - Robin Goodfellow: Digital Literacies: Texts, Knowledge and Power in Higher Education - Carey Jewitt: A Multimodal Take on School English - Sandra Campagna: The Truman Show of the High-fliers Market: a Case Study of Educational Identity - Margaret Rasulo: The Concept of 'Identity Formation' within Online Professional Learning Communities - Anthony Baldry: What is Multimodality for? Syllabus Construction in English Text Studies for Communication Sciences - Felix Banda: Contrasting Discourse Practices and Interaction Strategies among Urban and Rural Black Students in English Tertiary Education Contexts in South Africa - Robyn Woodward-Kron: Learner Medical Discourse and Intercultural Clinical Communication: Towards a Contextually Informed Teaching Framework - Michelangelo Conoscenti: Intercultural Issues in a Virtual Diplomacy SIG: A Discourse Analysis Approach - Maria Cristina Paganoni: Local and Global Identity on News Sites: Al Jazeera's English-language Website - Giuseppina Cortese: Focus on Narrative. Linguistic and Textual Empowerment in Learning as Action Research.