Edusemiotics

"It is through signs that we learn what things are”.
- Augustine, De Doctrina Christiania ([397AD], book 1, line 2)

"Learning is the means by which we pass from ignorance to knowledge".
- C. S. Peirce, What Is a Sign? (1894)

“An education which gave due place to semiotics would destroy at its foundations the cleavage and opposition of science and the humanities".
- Charles Morris, Signs, language, and behavior (1946)

Winfried Nöth: Signs are educators. This is the sense in which one can say that we learn from signs, whether from words or numbers, drawings or pictures, gestures or sense data conveyed by “our great teacher Experience,” per C. S. Peirce (CP 5.51, 1903). The semiotic premises of this Peircean pedagogy are the following:

1. First, the definition of the sign: signs occur in processes of semiosis, in which they represent an object, a term which includes mental images and ideas, and they create an interpretant, an idea, a feeling, or an action resulting from the sign.
2. Second, the cognitive premises that “all knowledge comes to us by observation” (CP 2.444, 1903) and that “all our thought and knowledge is by signs” (CP 8.332, 1904), and:
3. Third, the premise of the agency of the sign, according to which “every symbol is a living thing, in a very strict sense that is no mere figure of speech” (CP 2.222, 1901).

Inna Semetsky: "Edusemiotics purports to deal with signs, taking as its starting point the rejection of non-contradiction that says: if this is this, it cannot also be that. Logic as semiotics says it can, because “this” is always becoming “that”. People are also signs: in learning, in interpreting signs, they grow and become, as Peirce would say, more developed signs...” Semetsky went to great lengths to introduce, explain, and offer for discussion the distinguishing features of edusemiotics – that include, but are not limited to, the priority of process over product in education, the relational nature of experience and subjectivity, and the ontological priority of relations as such. "The semiotic reality is not the world of substantial things: this or that. Signs are relational entities, which are defined as such by virtue of “mediation”, of the “included” middle without which the evolutionary process of semiosis is unconceivable. Signs – via interpretants (that is, “thirds” as a middle term in a relation) always become other signs: they evolve." Peirce’s theory of semiosis as an infinite progress of becoming, by which signs and meanings are connected by the mind, leads to the insight that knowledge is a process, not a static structure to be learned and remembered.

Social semiotics reveals relationships among people, and some of these relationships are more clearly structured/constrained than others. In occupations, for example, there are usually clear expectations and standards of performance. Training to fulfill these roles begins at a young age. Children are socialized in school to take on more responsibilities and exercise self control and autonomy from caregivers. At graduation (sometimes much earlier) youth take on the roles of adult members of society with attendant responsibilities. During this entire process children undergo many other changes. Their bodies mature, interactions with peers change as a result, and the new signs present both internally and externally can make navigating this environment difficult. There are many ideas on how to raise children, and regardless of whether they focus on behavioral, emotional, cognitive, or environmental factors, they are all generally amenable to a semiotic analysis. How should a youth engage with others and their environment to support their healthy growth and maturation? Growing up and becoming an adult is a process of finding meaning and establishing relationships among ideas, and thereby expanding one's semiotic freedom.

Morten Tønnessen wrote “The healthy development – growing up, coming-to-be – of an organism presupposes that it is surrounded by an environment that is rich in terms of signs and meets its requirements. Only in a rich and suitable environment can an organism act by selecting what is meaningful to it, attribute meanings to environmental objects and develop its subjective world, its Umwelt.”

Nicholas Maxwell connects this to philosophy: "The proper task of philosophy is to keep alive critical thinking about our most fundamental problem of all: how can our human world, the world as it appears to us, the world we live in and see, touch, hear and smell, the world of living things, people, consciousness, meaning and value – how can all of this exist and best flourish embedded as it is in the physical Universe? This fundamental problem straddles all the problems of both thought and life. Our task is to explore this in the disciplines of the natural, social, and technological sciences, the humanities and education, and the particular contexts of personal, social, and global life."

Sources:
Nöth, Winfried, Signs as Educators: Peircean Insights in Semetsky, Inna and Andrew Stables (ed.), Pedagogy and Edusemiotics (2014)
Nöth, Winfried, The Semiotics of Teaching and the Teaching of Semiotics in Semetsky, Inna (ed.) Semiotics, Education, Experience (2010)
Semetsky, Inna, Semiotics and/as education (2017)
Olteanu, Alin, and Cary Campbell, A Short Introduction to Edusemiotics (2018)
Maxwell, Nicholas Natural philosophy redux (2019)