Edusemiotics

Semiotic philosophy as educational foundation

Andrew Stables,Inna Semetsky

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317916963
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Bildung Allgemein

Edusemiotics addresses an emerging field of inquiry, educational semiotics, as a philosophy of and for education. Using "sign" as a unit of analysis, educational semiotics amalgamates philosophy, educational theory and semiotics. Edusemiotics draws on the intellectual legacy of such philosophers as John Dewey, Charles Sanders Peirce, Gilles Deleuze and others across Anglo-American and continental traditions.

This volume investigates the specifics of semiotic knowledge structures and processes, exploring current dilemmas and debates regarding self-identity, learning, transformative and lifelong education, leadership and policy-making, and interrogating an important premise that still haunts contemporary educational philosophy: Cartesian dualism. In defiance of substance dualism and the fragmentation of knowledge that still inform education, the book offers a unifying paradigm for education as edusemiotics and emphasises ethical education in compliance with the semiotic unity between knowledge and action.

Chapters contain accessible discussions in the context of educational philosophy and theory, crossing the borders between logic, art, and science together with a provocative theoretical critique. Recently awarded a PESA book award for its contribution to the philosophy of education, Edusemiotics will appeal to an academic readership in education, philosophy and cultural studies, while also being an inspiring resource for students.

1 Introducing edusemiotics

A philosophy of/for education

Andrew Stables and Inna Semetsky

Semiotics as a whole, while broadly defined as the study of signs, their communication and signification (meaning), remains a developing and sometimes contested discipline. Traditionally semiotics takes its inspiration from American or French schools of thought exemplified in the figures of Charles S. Peirce and Ferdinand de Saussure with their distinctive approaches to “semeiotic” (Peirce) or “semiology” (Saussure). While Saussure’s structuralist perspective addressed largely linguistic signs, at least in the early stages, Peirce’s philosophy did not limit signs to verbal utterances. Many later semioticians have stressed that signs also perfuse the non-human world in a variety of guises. Peirce’s perspective was pansemiotic and naturalistic and emphasised the evolutionary process of signs& growth and change called semiosis. The term “semiosis” derives from the Greek σημείωσις, sēmeíōsis; a derivation, in turn, of the verb sēmeiô meaning “to mark”. Human experience is marked by signs, and all thinking and living proceeds in signs. Edusemiotics sees all living and learning as semiotic engagement, in which “things” function as potentially meaningful signs: for me, for you, for us, for others; for novices or for experts. Semiotics offers a systematic framework for considerations of education, learning, childhood and human development in general.

A semiotic approach makes learning not simply a matter of understanding or not understanding, but rather of exploration and growth, of experience broadly understood as implication in events and processes, just as life itself changes and grows through semiosis. Edusemiotics is the semiotics of becoming and learning to become. In all traditions of semiotics, signs say something to those who are ready to get their messages and respond accordingly. By responding to such indirect, often subtle and never “clear and distinct” messages, which thus need to be interpreted (in the guise of words or actions alike) so as to become understood, those who receive them also become signs, and the pre-existing signs are modified through their interpretation. Signs thus have a creative capacity to produce meanings, and semiosis is both endless and inevitably developmental. While the various schools in semiotics offer different insights and perspectives, there is much more to draw them together than to pull them apart. Influential contemporary semiotician Winfried Nöth (2010), for example, has noted that teaching and learning are embedded in semiosis, while the study of processes of learning and teaching is part of, and contributes to, the study of the ontogeny of signs and communication as a theoretical branch of semiotics.

In academia, semiotics has tended to feature mainly in departments of linguistics, media and communication, or cultural studies. When marginally present in the departments of education, semiotics tends to be reduced to its applied function derived, by and large, from its uses in linguistics and the visual arts, or from the legacy of Russian cultural psychologist Lev Vygotsky. Semiotics in education thus so far has tended to remain within the confines of behavioural and social sciences as the paradigm for educational research addressing multiple artefacts that serve as educational aids and mediating tools. The International Journal of Applied Semiotics explicitly relates semiotics to teaching or counselling practices, but pays much less attention to philosophy of education and educational theory. With respect to the latter, semiotics continues to be underexplored and the focal point of semiotics per se serving as a theoretical base for education is missing. Our book addresses this shortcoming: its purpose is to theorise edusemiotics, presenting it as a portmanteau word for a new direction in, specifically, philosophy of education so as to conceptualise a novel educational foundation. We thus propose a new theoretical base for education: semiotics as philosophy for education, or edusemiotics. Edusemiotics does not limit itself to the analysis of educational texts and artefacts but offers a framework for reinterpreting education broadly in all its manifestations, within or without schools or other institutions. By representing a new direction in the philosophy of education, edusemiotics is simultaneously a novel branch of theoretical semiotics per se. Significantly, it was launched as such at the twelfth World Congress of the International Association for Semiotic Studies (IASS) at the new Bulgarian University, Sofia, Bulgaria, in September 2014; an event that importantly coincides with the publication of this book.

We therefore position edusemiotics firmly as an innovative research direction within theoretical semiotics, while also exploring its diverse possibilities for applied semiotics. Among the existing interdisciplinary branches of theoretical semiotics are biosemiotics, ecosemiotics, zoosemiotics and ethnosemiotics, each of which presently has its own programme of research and development. This book helps to add edusemiotics to this list, presenting it as both a novel branch of theoretical semiotics and a new direction of research in educational theory. Notably, theoretical and applied dimensions are to be considered as complementary and not contradictory, and the chapters in this book address educational semiotics also in terms of its multiple implications for teaching, learning, educational policy making, and human development at both formal (schooling) and informal (cultural, including environmental) levels. Edusemiotics, in line with its general rejection of closed systems, brings to the fore an environmental context which importantly is not limited to schooling but also extends to encompass posthuman and post-formal education.

The term “edusemiotics” was coined by Canadian semiotician Marcel Danesi as a subtitle of his Foreword to the volume Semiotics Education Experience (Semetsky 2010f). Danesi referred to the late Russian-Estonian semiotician Yuri Lotman (1922–1993) who stated that we are born into the system of sign-use, the “semiosphere”, that determines how we come to view the world by means of experiential inquiry comprising sign interpretation and sign creation. The semiosphere is all-embracing, encompassing the umwelt of our immediate signifying environments, the lebenswelt of culture and the subjective innenwelt. Unlike much educational theory, edusemiotics does not suffer from limitation of scope. Indeed, it is central to our case that nothing should be considered either in isolation or as complete in itself. From an edusemiotic perspective, the realm of human knowledge cannot be reduced to brute facts but includes potentially meaningful interpretations; indeed, even “brute facts” can only be understood as elements of broader contexts and further explanations. An interpretive function is thus germane to edusemiotics. Education cannot limit itself to merely factual or evidential knowledge: it is incomplete if it disregards the existential domain of meanings and values. The subject matter of edusemiotics therefore embraces the construction of meanings.

Signs are always involved in semiotic engagement, participating in interdependent dynamics rather that remaining static substances independent of each other. The philosophy of stable substances prevalent in Cartesian dualism with its separation of res cogitans from res extensa that still tends to inform, even if implicitly, educational discourse, gives way to the philosophy of sign-relations as processes and events. We agree with philosopher Alfred North Whitehead who posited the fallacy of simple location: the priority of process is a defining characteristic of edusemiotics. Signs are relational entities, and edusemiotics in effect takes a dynamic relation, and not a stable thing, to be ontologically basic. With Descartes, philosophy became prone to strong mind-body dualism exemplified by a sharp distinction between idealism and empiricism. Interrogating Cartesian dualism together with problematising analytical philosophy of language with its logic of identity are, conceptually, the red flags of edusemiotics. A semiotic, versus linguistic, turn in the philosophy of education furthermore extends the province of signs to encompass non-verbal messages and signs that function as signals lurking in nature. Signs, via the dynamics of multiple interpretations, incarnations and translations into other signs, evolve and furnish both human mind and non-human nature (cf. De Tienne, 2003): they cannot be confined inside the isolated cogito who declares “I think” with certainty.

Signs function as intelligent selections perceived by senses, intuitions and rational processes (given that semiotics rejects the mind-body dualism that underpins these distinctions) as being meaningful, significant, or otherwise useful. Danesi remarked that research in education “has traditionally turned to psychology to help it transform teaching into a more ‘learning compatible’ and ‘performance-oriented’ activity” (2010: x). The shift to philosophy provided by edusemiotics, however, brings into sharp focus the often missing dimensions of epistemology, ontology, ethics, and deep perennial questions positing these as especially valuable for education and in urgent need of exploration. With the emphasis on evocation and interpretation rather than on pre-existing concepts or norms, “right” and “wrong” cease to be rigid terms of opposition, and knowledge is seen as intersubjective and contextual. Learning becomes an exploratory process of inquiry that exceeds the usual product of the educational system as a measurable quantity of certain empirical facts. This perspective removes unhelpful constraints on teachers, students, and educational aims and highlights the existential formation of human subjects as both the process and product of education.

The volume Semiotics Education Experience is not the only source addressing semiotics in the context of educational philosophy. There exist several important prequels by the present authors. They represent our earlier research conducted largely independently from, yet in affinity with, each other. Stables’ work in this area begins with a series of papers in the late 1990s and early 2000s on forms of environmental literacy, which explore various construals of the environment—text interface (Stables, 1996; 1998a, b; Stables and Scott, 1999; Bishop et al., 2000; Stables and Bishop, 2001; Stables, 2001a, b; Stables and Scott, 2001b; Stables, 2006). Insights from this influenced more explicitly philosophical pieces on the ethical and policy implications of an account of nature as semiotic process (Stables and Scott 2001a; Stables, 2004a, b, 2006c, 2007; Hung and Stables, 2008; Stables, 2008a, b, 2009, 2010a, b; Gough and Stables, 2012; Stables, 2013), and on pieces specifically addressing schools and other educational organisations as semiotic communities (Stables, 2003a, b; Stables and Gough, 2006; Hung and Stables, 2011). In the book Living and Learning as Semiotic Engagement (2006a), Stables draws together several strands of this thinking to argue that all living, incorporating that which we construe as learning, can be fruitfully understood as semiotic engagement, and examines the implications of this for learning theory, the practice of teaching, management, policy and research. Childhood and the Philosophy of Education: an anti-Aristotelian perspective (2008c/2011) applies this fully semiotic perspective to a consideration of childhood as the basis of a new approach to education, while Be(com)ing Human: Semiosis and the Myth of Reason (2012) develops the insight in the previous book that conceptions of childhood tend to rely on a fixed conception of adulthood, to a new view of humanity as a regulative ideal rather than a fixed state, and the implications of this for education and social policy.

Semetsky’s works, as examples of the early seeds of edusemiotics, began with a presentation titled The Adventures of a Postmodern Fool, or: the semiotics of learning at the 1999 annual meeting of the Semiotic Society of America (SSA). It subsequently won the first SSA Roberta Kevelson memorial award and was re-published as a book chapter (Semetsky, 2001a). A number of research articles and book chapters that explored semiotic approaches to educational theory followed (including, among others, Semetsky, 2000, 2001b, 2003a, b, 2004a, b, 2005a, b, c, 2007a, b, 2009a, b, c, d, e, 2010a, b, c, d, e, 2012a, b, 2013a, c, d, e; 2014). Deleuze, Education and Becoming (2006) was Semetsky’s first monograph that traced commonalities between pragmatic and continental philosophical thought in the educational context and addressed education as a creative process of becoming other, embedded in experience and implicated in signs. This book was followed by Re-Symbolization of the Self (2011) that employed the method of hermeneutics to explore adult development as the process of moral and intellectual growth within the school of life, which is at once symbolic and real and comprises meaningful events and experiences. The Edusemiotics of Images (2013b) addressed the educational and ethical significance of non-verbal, cultural and natural signs capable of crossing the perceived boundaries of national or language differences while also demonstrating the logical necessity and the physical possibility of a semiotic relation between a number of categories that are traditionally considered opposite, such as art and science. This book also posited signs as information in addition to matter and energy in physics. Several edited volumes and special journal issues (for example, Semetsky, 2013d; Semetsky, 2007c, 2008; Semetsky and Masny, 2011, 2013) brought to the fore the broader international scholarship across educational theory, philosophy and semiotic...