What is "edusemiotics"

Edusemiotics is a new branch of theoretical semiotics in its intersection with educational theory and philosophy of education. It studies signs’ structure and function in the context of education, learning and teaching and aims to lay down an innovative theoretical foundation for education. As a novel field of inquiry, it was initiated by Inna Semetsky and Andrew Stables. The term "edusemiotics" was coined in 2010 by Marcel Danesi in his Foreword to the volume Semiotics Education Experience. Edusemiotics was formally launched at the 12th World Congress of the International Association for Semiotic Studies in Sofia, Bulgaria, 16–20 September 2014. Research in semiotics as a philosophy for education was conducted by several members of the International Semiotics & Education Network. The Institute for Edusemiotic Studies (IES; pronounce "yes") was recently established in Australia. In December 2014 a symposium on the subject of edusemiotics was held at the annual meeting of the Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia in Hamilton, New Zealand. A special issue "On Edusemiotics" of the journal SEMIOTICA is forthcoming. Edusemiotics is an integrative conceptual framework that purports to overcome dualisms both in theory and practice. Its defining characteristics are process-ontology, the logic of the included middle, relational ethics, existential and posthuman dimensions, the role of practical experience, the emphasis on interpretation (and not merely facts or evidence), the conception of language understood broadly in terms of various semiotic structures exceeding analytic philosophy’s direct representation, embodied cognition, and the problematic of self-formation. As a philosophy of education, edusemiotics aims towards ultimately organizing a sense of the "relational self". Edusemiotics continues and re-interprets the intellectual legacy of major philosophers and critical theorists, crossing over from American Pragmatism (Peirce, Dewey) to Continental philosophy (Deleuze, Kristeva). It also brings the cutting-edge science of coordination dynamics (J. A. Scott Kelso) into discourse on education thus bridging the gap between sciences and humanities. Edusemiotics takes John Deely's words, "at the heart of semiotics is the realization that the whole of human experience, without exception, is an interpretive structure mediated and sustained by signs" (Deely, 1990, p. 5) very seriously. Learning by means of interpreting the signs of experience leads to the transformation of habits as one of the educational aims from the perspective of edusemiotics. Because habits are "mostly...unconscious" (Peirce, CP 5.417) it becomes necessary to understand "the language of the unconscious" as one of many challenges of edusemiotics.