Abstract

This article discusses the promotion of multiliteracy in educational artifacts from the perspective of information design. In the current social context of multiple languages and media, there is a dialogue about the emerging presence of multimodal resources in school environments. From this perspective, the objective is to identify which of these are most present in Portuguese textbooks for the Second Cycle, adoptable for 2022/2023. The aim is also to indicate which characteristics contribute to the development of multiple literacy in children. The theoretical, interdisciplinary path between design and education is based on precepts about the modes of symbolization of graphic language, social semiotics, and multimodality in learning. The exploratory research in the collected textbooks made it possible to check the symbolic modes in 4,396 pages. The examples presented went through direct observation and description of the structural characteristics of the contents. As a result, the most present multimodal ecosystem, whether to represent process cycles, timelines, spatial or quantitative data, was the infographics. This, however, requires urgent investigations into its construction, analogue-to-digital relationship, and decoding with the target audience.