The path to xenopedagogy

3.2.1 Umwelt

In modern biology, the concept of the ecological niche describes the sum of conditions for a particular setting that allows organisms within that setting to thrive. As Hoffmeyer (2008: 171) puts it, in describing the umwelt, “one might say that the umwelt is the ecological niche as the animal itself apprehends it” (italics his). Kull et al. (2009) extend the notion of an umwelt as an ecological niche to that of a semiotic niche:

A semiotic niche is defined as the totality of signs or cues in the surroundings of an organism – signs that it must be able to meaningfully interpret to ensure its balance and welfare. The semiotic niche includes the traditional ecological niche factors, but now the semiotic dimension of these factors is also emphasized. The organism must distinguish relevant from irrelevant food items and threats, for example, and it must identify the necessary markers of the biotic and abiotic resources it needs, namely, water, shelter, nest-building materials, and mating partners. The semiotic niche thus comprises all the interpretive challenges that the ecological niche forces upon a species. (Kull et al. 2009: 172, italics theirs)

If we are assuming that we are dealing with extraterrestrials that are capable of engaging in educational activities, that is, participating in acts of teaching and learning, it is further reasonable to assume that these extraterrestrials will further experience our environment as an ecological or semiotic niche where some things are potentially advantageous and other things are not. When we have a creature in an umwelt, that creature, human or terrestrial, is not going to be indifferent to the settings it finds itself in. Everything in that niche, no matter what, will mean something. Even if the umwelt of the extraterrestrial in no way resembles the nature and form of the umwelt’s experiences by humans, it is nonetheless a significant expectation that such an umwelt exists. A critical step for xenopedagogy, then, is to look for some sort of umwelt overlap between humans and extraterrestrials.

3.2.2 Semiosphere

While the notion of umwelt is a powerful tool for connecting environments and organisms, by itself it is not enough to elucidate the operating of more complex systems like culture. While the notion of umwelt connects the individual organism to other entities, both living and non-living, that share its space, it still remains an individual perspective. To move into the cultural realm requires an ongoing collective dynamic. To this end, Yuri Lotman (1990) built a bridge from experience at the biological level, as characterized by the umwelt, toward a transformation to cultural experiences. He called the domain of this next level of experience the semiosphere:

The semiosphere is the result and the condition for the development of culture; we justify our term by analogy with the biosphere, as Vernadsky defined it, namely the totality and the organic whole of living matter and also the condition for the continuation of life (Lotman 1990: 25). It is not unreasonable to assume that extraterrestrials advanced enough to travel to Earth would possess a working model or models of culture. However, consider the extreme case of a creature that has no culture whatsoever; it is a sole and solitary being. As such a being, it does not have the most basic prerequisite of a culture – other like beings. In that case, its semiosphere would be identical to its umwelt, and the conditions for xenopedagogic umwelt connections apply. It is more likely that any extraterrestrial will be accompanied by other members of its species, in evidence if not in presence. In this case, xenopedagogy will depend on such exchange parameters found in the overlap of our semiospheres.

3.2.3 Biosemiotic exchange

Biosemiotics most often constitutes environments in terms of umwelt at the micro level and semiosphere at the macro level. At both levels, Tønnessen (2016) models the threefold interactions all living creatures participate in to try to maintain survival, at least:

In this perspective, communication can be understood as a sign exchange between a sender and receiver, signification as semiosis in the absence of a true sender, and representation as semiosis in the absence of a true receiver. (Tønnessen 2016: 158–159)

The possibility of successful xenopedagogic efforts would then depend upon, initially, how each species represents those embodied things that they consider crucial for teaching and learning (e.g. the uses of deictic moves to focus attention). To the extent that these embodied activities have at least some common point of departure, we then can have a set of actual “tools” that can serve as the starting point for communication. In other words, it will be necessary to expand the operationalizations of communication, signification, and representation so that points of intersection between humans and extraterrestrials can be establish at all three levels. This leads us to the place where a consideration of some kinds of common cognitive actions need to be addressed.

5.1.1 Semiotics and education

There are two ways to look at the relation of semiotics to education. The first, and the oldest and most common way, is to consider what role semiotics can play in the field of education. This view is clearly illustrated by Nöth (2014), where he says that “semiotics offers tools of analysis in the teaching of school subjects teaching verbal, nonverbal, and visual languages, and the teaching of semiotics itself […] has didactic implications as well (1).” Here we have the sense of semiotics as a tool that educators can use in various ways.

5.1.2 Education as semiotic

Proponents of edusemiotics take great care to distinguish themselves from those who consider semiotics as one more educational tool. Edusemiotics is not the process of adding semiotic concepts and techniques to education. It is realizing that education is fundamentally semiotic in the first place. As Semetsky (2015) clarifies:

Edusemiotics represents an integrative conceptual framework for education that uses “sign” as a minimal unit of description. Sign by definition is a relational rather than substantial entity and it cannot be reduced to an individual thing or person. Standing for something other than itself, a genuine sign, ultimately, integrates this “other” in itself by virtue of engaging in a series of relations and translations eliciting a series of transformations. (Semetsky 2015: 131)

5.1.3 Awareness and transformation

Oltneau and Campbell (2018) add strong and clear support to Semetsky’s definition of edusemiotics:

Let us be clear, edusemiotics does not mean semiotics applied to education, as a pedagogical aid or teaching/research tool. Edusemiotics is a growing global research project that, like Augustine, thinks semiotics as the foundation for educational theory and practice at large. (Oltneau and Campbell 2018: 246, italics theirs)

Stables (2013, 2016 has argued that edusemiotics represents a dramatic shift in the philosophy of education in a number of ways, including shifting the focus of education from concepts to signs and viewing teachers and learners not in the mind–body paradigm but as embodied organisms.

5.1.4 Refiguring the rhetoric of teaching

Edusemiotics is not just about reconfiguring education from a semiotic perspective. It is also concerned with reconfiguring the practice of education. One of the most important aspects of teacher performance is teacher rhetoric. Pesce (2013) describes how teachers typically employ rhetoric: “teachers are taught to use a specific rhetoric, one that is assumed to favour the transmission of knowledge” (Pesce 2013: 771). Edusemiotics changes the tenor and focus of the application of rhetoric in that, “schooling is not only about communication, but also about hermeneutics. It is no longer an individual process but is instead a collective one, and […] it considers the future of a knowledge that remains to be built” (Pesce 2013: 771).

5.1.5 The meaningful experience

Kukkola and Piukkarainen (2016) emphasize that, at the most basic edusemiotic level, meaningful experiences don’t involve linguistic or semantic concepts or even referential and semiotic sign making. Instead, “we mean something quite immediate, the meaning of an object or an event to the subject who experiences it: How does the object feel?” (Kukkola and Puikkarainen 2016: 207). Meaning, at this most fundamental level, involves the basic and simple task of finding similarity between things (Olteanu 2016).

It is not abstract or theoretical, but instead edusemiotics demands that even our most basic connections with meaning are both embodied and relational. Furthermore, it breaks down the barriers between formal and informal learning. As Yu (2017) noted: “While we keep advocating the necessity of life-long education, a point that has been missed is that it may be an inevitable process already” (Yu 2017: 374).

5.2.1 Moving from the practice of semiotics in education to edusemiotics

When we look at the potential role for semiotics in education, the temptation is to think of semiotics as yet another set of tools we can apply to education as we find it. Instead, we throw out not only prevailing models about what education is, but also the practices that are directly linked to those models. This is extremely hard to do when talking about current models of education, but it becomes surprisingly easy when formulating xenopedagogy. In fact, starting with current models of education is a hindrance to xenopedagogy. Whatever we might speculate about extraterrestrials, I think it is safe to say that they will be different from us in deep and fundamental ways. Ironically, a comprehensive model of xenopedagogy might be a useful starting point to implement the edusemiotic approach to replace our current approach, since we are not incumbered with the historical residue of centuries of looking at not only educational practice, but also teachers and students, in “tried and true” ways.

5.2.2 Education as semiosis

As we build xenopedagogy from scratch from edusemiotics, our starting place is logically the pervasive understanding of education as semiosis.

5.2.3 Education as irreducibly relational

Xenopedagogy can reject the notion that ideas and practices in education serve as the building blocks of education per se, and accept the fact that any aspect of xenopedagogy, no matter how basic, is relational and intentional. By this, for example, I mean that we cannot look at students as individual entities and learners. The fact that someone (or in our case, some being) is a learner means that they are by definition a student of something. That is, the very nature of being a student is intentional. In a similar fashion, none of the facts, ideas, and concepts we teach stand by themselves but instead exist within an ongoing and changing web of relations attuned to the context of the educating moment. For example, there is no definitive understanding of “morning” per se, without an understanding of the relation of morning to such concepts as day, night, waking up, and on and on. When we teach and learn these sorts of things, we do so through contingent networks of intentionality, not as facts and concepts that stand by themselves. This is extremely important for xenopedagogy, since presumably when we encounter extraterrestrials, we cannot expect any pre-existing networks of relations and intentions. We must directly face the notion of how we begin from a ground zero that we have never experienced before.

5.2.4 Education as collective and hermeneutic

In traditional models of education, we use the notion of “collective” as the basis for assigning roles like “teacher” and “student.” Hermeneutic considerations usually deal with laying the ground rules for our lessons and practices, and almost invariably come from the teacher. Neither of these approaches are viable in xenopedagogy. Any effective xenopedagogy will not only have to transcend trivial things like the assignment of teacher and student roles but must also find some way to come together to communicate by transcending not only species differences, but also products of what we can assume to be radically different semiospheres. Such efforts will require both humans and extraterrestrials to strip away roles that might have been effective to foster collective communication on their respective homeworlds to find some common denominator for communication. But communication without signification is not semiosis. Both humans and extraterrestrials must learn to “read” each other as creatures who embody their understanding of their homeworlds, and to bring that together to foster mutual acts of shared signification.

5.2.5 The basic roles of similarity and difference

What are the common grounds between humans and extraterrestrials we can use to make xenopedagogy possible? Of course, we have no common language, or conventional set of gestures, or even patterns of shared significations through embodied signification. But even if we discover the nature of each other’s embodiments, we have no reason to suspect that our senses operate in the same way; and even if they did, we have no further reasons to expect that each of our sets of senses have a similar role to play in processing our environments. Instead, we have to assume that in order for xenopedagogy to work, both humans and extraterrestrials engage in semiosis, and those acts of semiosis need to have something in common. The sine qua non for semiosis is relation, and the most fundamental relations we as humans (and presumably as extraterrestrials) share is the awareness that things are either the same or different. Similarity and difference are such fundamental aspects of our ability to navigate our semiospheres that they are the most likely Rosetta Stones for connecting humans and extraterrestrials. If we can find how each of us perceives and subsequently represents similarity and difference, we could well be on the way to mutual communication and signification.

5.2.6 Education as an inevitable life-long practice

Peirce (1992 [1878]) might argue the engine of education is not the task to build edifices of knowledge, but to resolve genuine doubt. Edusemiotics, with its emphasis on semiosis, allows all of us to start with our own experiences of genuine doubt as the starting place for education. So, the educated person no longer merely acquires and accumulates information and knowledge per se in order to be an informed member of society. Instead, through the path of crafting ongoing resolutions of genuine doubts, that same person becomes more skilled in finding interpretative paths so that, with more and more practice, that person can navigate the world without being totally thrown by new unexpected experiences brought about by the inevitable presence of new genuine doubts. In summary, the old strategy is to be more knowledgeable in order to navigate the world, while the new strategy is to become better in navigating the world in order to be more knowledgeable. This second path holds out a lot more promise as a way to conduct xenopedagogy.

6.2.1 Communication

Communication would require the forging of some type of lingua franca that takes into account the daunting physical and biological differences between these two species. Such a communication system might draw at the start on some form of deictic interchange. This assumes that humans and extraterrestrials share at least some common sensory modes. In humans we would start with pointing as a visual act. The corresponding sensory mode for extraterrestrials is anyone’s guess, but it would have to be found before communication moves along.

6.2.2 Signification

Just because humans and extraterrestrials might be able to craft a sort of a communication code, there is no guarantee they share the same referents. Referents are finally grounded on the impacts of various components within each species’ umwelts and semiospheres. Once a common code has been established, it first needs to be used in service of “decoding” aspects of each umwelt. From there, we could painstakingly build a proper exchange function between communication and signification. Only then would an adequate basis for xenopedagogy would be established.

6.2.3 Eventual xenopedagogy

At first, xenopedagogy is grounded in issues of identity. Who are you? Who am I? What is my species like? What is your species like? What do you value? What do you avoid? How are we alike? How are we different? No matter what, we must be open to surprise at every turn. All of the things we presume about each other – individual identity, learning from our senses, forming and working within societies, and many others cannot be assumed. Hard as it will be, the primary task of a xenopedagologist is to remain as much in a state of genuine doubt as is humanly possible for a very long time and within very many encounters and efforts to connect in an educational fashion. Making assumptions based on limited facts and experiences is the death of xenopedagogy.