Volume 2007, Issue 164

The astute reader may have noted that my title for this special issue refers to semiotics and education rather than semiotics of education or indeed an education semiotic . The meager conjunctive suggests that the two, semiotics and education, can be usefully considered side by side but the extent to which they are mutually constituted remains to be demonstrated. I (Cunningham 1992) have previously called for ‘steps toward and educational semiotic’ but in my opinion the steps have been small and of uncertain direction. It is my hope that the present volume can contribute some guidance to this quest.

Peirce's notions of diagrammatic reasoning and hypostatic abstraction are relevant to educational research in areas where diagrams and abstraction play an important role. In this paper, I analyze an example from statistics education in which diagrammatic reasoning created opportunities for hypostatic abstraction. For instance, where students initially characterized data points as being ‘spread out,’ they later said, ‘the spread is large.’ This is a prototypical example of hypostatic abstraction — taking a predicate as a new object that can have predicates itself. More generally, the notion of diagrammatic reasoning proved helpful to identify the key learning processes involved in learning to reason about statistical concepts.

In this paper, I describe what I consider to be some of the similarities between semiotics and second-order cybernetics. Particular attention is paid to the importance of interpretation and recursion in both fields. A distinction is made between the concept of representation in representational realism and representation as the stand-for relationship. Two models derived from cybernetic theory, ‘a recursive theory of communication’ and ‘levels of experience,’ are discussed from a semiotic perspective and possible educational implications are described.

As students are participating in group work in writing classes, what are they talking about and how is their interaction organized? This study analyzes the structures of talk and embodied interaction in student group work in university writing classes. Using video data of naturally occurring interactions, the study draws from conversation analysis (CA) and from analytic approaches to the way talk, gesture, and other forms of embodiment join in a semiotic ecology to produce social action in the course of interaction (see C. Goodwin 1984, 1986, 2000, 2003). Students in group work ‘share their ideas’ in highly structured ways. Their ‘reports’ to each other about work they have completed outside of their group work are similar to the ‘storytelling’ structures of ordinary conversation (Sacks 1974, 1995). This paper looks at those structures in detail and also makes a case for the ‘institutional’ nature (Drew and Heritage 1992; Schegloff 1992) of group work talk.

This paper explores semiosis as an instrument to be used in the classroom in the development of democratic education and a democratic society. In doing so we show the important links between Peirce's later semiotic theory and Dewey's theory of education. The argument is made that later Peirce's works on semiotics should be understood within its Pragmatic context. Semiotics' major contribution to the human condition is as a process and not as a definition. Therefore, even though Peirce wrote far less about the more process-oriented semiosis, this is the aspect of Peirce's theory that is most complementary to Dewey, especially his concept of inquiry, and has the most to offer education. What should be emphasized most are the democratic processes leading to meaningful object-sign-interpretant relationships — active inquiry engendering solutions to relevant community problems. We see two important aspects in using semiosis as a progressive instrument in the classroom. The first is the need to dispense with a concept of mediation that can be isolated from the process of semiosis as a whole. Considering mediation as an isolated phenomenon serves no useful purpose and might actually be deleterious to the community as a whole. The second aspect, dependent on the first, is the recognition that social capital plays in the process of semiosis. Trust between participants is the key ingredient in communication.

Signs do not only ‘represent’ something for somebody, as Peirce's definition goes, but also ‘mediate’ relations between us and our world, including ourselves, as has been elaborated by Vygotsky. We call the first the representational function of a sign and the second the epistemological function since in using signs we make distinctions, specify objects and relations, structure our observations, and organize societal and cognitive activity. The goal of this paper is, on the one hand, to develop a model in which both these functions appear as complementary and, on the other, to show that this complementarity is essential for the dynamics of scientific activity, causing a dialectical process of generating new epistemological and representational means. This will be demonstrated with an example of how two scientists with different background knowledge analyze educational data collaboratively.

Maguru panggul pedagogy is a traditional form of instruction used to teach Balinese Gamelan that literally means the teacher is the mallet. This pedagogy is presented as a semiotic apprenticeship where students become active participants by not only learning the music, but by also contributing their knowledge about it during negotiated classroom interactions. Three examples from research conducted in two Balinese Gamelan classrooms in the United States are analyzed utilizing the theory of mediated discourse analysis, and discussing these examples in terms of distributed cognition. Maguru panggul is revealed as a semiotic apprenticeship that draws upon several semiotic modes.

This paper introduces the concept of the palimpsest as a tool for examining teacher and administrator beliefs about teaching, learning, and managing. The palimpsest is integrated into a Peircean semeiotic framework utilizing von Uexküll's Lebenswelt. Three typical cases enrolled in a learning program that engages teachers in a process of systematic and intentional inquiry were chosen. Raw responses from the three cases were examined. Of particular interest, all three participants tended to reason from premises that currently fit their belief structures and seem to hand pick clues to examine. Finally, the palimpsest appears to be a useful and flexible concept to examine the consistencies and inconsistencies of beliefs.

Idiosyncratic comments or questions in classrooms are often considered errors or indicate that the learner was off-task. Yet, these types of utterances can be considered meaningful when viewed through a semiotic lens, indicating the personal interpretation of the learner. In this qualitative study, I identify students' questions and comments of this type in elementary classrooms. Then, drawing on a semiotic process and the Mind as Rhizome metaphor, which both honor the unique nature of the meanings that individuals will make, I demonstrate how semiotic elements could be potentially useful in a meaning-making process.

The paper examines Gilles Deleuze's metaphor of rhizome as a new image of thought. Multiple connections enabled by multidirectional rhizomatic lines contribute to the creation of concepts. Deleuze's potential contribution to educational theory is specified in terms of the pedagogy of the concept. The creation of concepts is a function of experience and is inseparable from affects and percepts. Deleuze's method of a-signifying semiotics is posited as indispensable for interpreting and evaluating experience and creating new meanings. The paper contends that Deleuze's semiotic approach may be considered as representing a significant contribution to learning theories, specifically in terms of becoming as learning from experience. The paper concludes by suggesting that creativity and novelty become the necessary outcomes of the learning process and as such may be considered as educational objectives embedded in the transformational pragmatics of sign-process.

As soon as Tom heard his phone ring in the middle of the night he knew to listen for the chop-chop of the helicopter blades. By the time he had dressed and brushed his teeth, the chopper was waiting. He ducked the rotors and climbed into the seat.

Art education is reluctantly but steadily shifting from a modernist disciplinebased field towards a more interdisciplinary and semiotic approach to visual culture studies. This interdisciplinary approach to our field connects directly with Peirce's ideas on pragmatism, plays of musement, and especially his notion of the importance of a community of inquiry. This paper will consider the ideas of Charles Sanders Peirce and his followers as they relate to contemporary art education. Semiotics, with its emphasis on codes, signs, and their interactions, is especially appropriate for rethinking the learning and teaching processes in art, as well as parameters which may constrain learning in the art education field.

The word ‘silhouette,’ we are told, ‘was satirically derived from the name of the parsimonious mid-eighteenth century French finance minister É tienne de Silhouette, whose hobby was the cutting of paper shadow portraits (the phrase à la Silhouette grew to mean ‘on the cheap’)’. Education à la Silhouette results from education practice and discourse that is not informed by semiotic understanding. Language and other resources that could be used as signs mediating access to the world for learning and participation become, instead, flat and opaque substitutes for knowledge, and occlusive obstacles to learning and understanding. Propositional and procedural ‘knowledge’ are presented and learned (whether by memorization, or by active construction) with the idea that such propositions and procedures are, in themselves, bits of positive knowledge, rather than being used as sign-elements for cognitive participation in the world through mediative semiosis. The fundamental difference between positive and semiosically mediative conceptions of meaning implicates profound consequences for education practice and policy.