Edusemiotics

What is EDUSEMIOTICS?

The novel term “Edusemiotics” was coined by Marcel Danesi in an introduction to Semiotics Education Experience (2010, ed. by Inna Semetsky). Edusemiotics will be formally launched as the name of a workshop and a direction in the theory and philosophy of education and semiotics at the next IASS congress in September 2014, Sofia Bulgaria.

Edusemiotics is a branch of theoretical semiotics alongside biosemiotics, ecosemiotics etc. Analogically as biosemiotics stresses the overlapping of the core objects of research of biology and semiotics: life or bios in biology and signs or semiosis in semiotics, edusemiotics stresses the overlapping of semiosis, signification and communication with growth, learning, education and Bildung.

Edusemiotics is not meant to be merely the application of existing semiotic theories and methods to the study of education and still less a translation of existing educational theories into semiotic jargon. Rather its aim is to contribute to the development of theory of both semiotics and education.

Edusemiotics (or educational semiotics) is not a subdivision of the science(s) of education like psychology of education or sociology of education but rather it rather takea an holistic view of the whole of education as sign and meaning based action and process.

Although edusemiotics is (and has been) strongly theoretical it does not undervalue the necessity of empirical research and the needs for practical applications.

As a branch of semiotics edusemiotics will integrate theoretical views from biosemiotics to anthroposemiotics. Although naturally most interesting application is the area of human education, it should not restrict itself to social semiotics or “human chauvinism”. The core character of any living being is continuous reinterpretation of its environment and itself. So the human (like other living beings) is a being whose existence, as life, consists of experiencing, interpreting and creating meanings. Thus human beings are signs themselves - for themselves and for others. Only more than other living beings humans collect, create and modify objects and their meanings by action, in the the formation of culture.

The human condition is the condition of exploring the possibilities of being human. Education is the action and process of that exploration - at both individual and collective levels.

Until now edusemiotics has been concerned with interpreting the intellectual legacy of major thinkers such as Peirce, Dewey, Deleuze, Wittgenstein, Greimas, Kristeva, Derrida, Saussure, Merleau-Ponty, Burke, Tarasti and others, from an edusemiotic perspective.

The themes stressed in the discussions around edusemiotics encompass among others anti-dualism, process ontology, included middle, post-humanism, existential experience, ethics etc.

[Based of discussions in the conferences and mail list of Semiosis & Education Network. / EP]