This paper investigates the concepts of hope, despair and the radical imagination, driven by the following questions: Can we exist beyond the binaries of hope and despair, two key concepts that drive educational practices? What is the radical imagination and what are the conditions for it to be put to work in educational spaces? First, education…

How does a picture teach a viewer to look at it, understand it, and make meaning? (The theoretical basis of this article and elements of its expression have been drawn from Peter Pericles Trifonas. (1998). "Cross-mediality and narrative textual form: A semiotic snalysis of the lexical and visual signs and codes of the picture bnook."…

We propose a new relational direction in higher education that acknowledges external and internal images as integrated in thinking and learning. We expand educational theory and practice that commonly rely on discrete conceptual developments that exclude images. Our argument epistemologically relies on certain semiotic views that consider the role…

My article is a rejoinder to Gert Biesta's, '"This is My Truth, Tell Me Yours". Deconstructive pragmatism as a philosophy of education.' Biesta attempts to place Jacques Derrida's deconstruction in 'the very heart' of John Dewey's pragmatism (710). My article strives to impress Deweyan pragmatism in the heart of Derridian deconstruction.…

Lesson observation is frequently used in teacher induction programmes to support newly-qualified teachers in their reflection and classroom enquiry. This article uses an elaboration of Peirce's abduction to illustrate how the post-observation conversation supports a teacher's reflection on her teaching, and in particular, her teaching of language…

Semiotics is the study of signs addressing their action, usage, communication and signification (meaning). Edusemiotics--educational semiotics--is a recently developed direction in educational theory that takes semiotics as its foundational philosophy and explores the philosophical specifics of semiotics in educational contexts. As a novel…

The zone of proximal development (ZPD) is defined as an overarching concept that integrates the main tenets of Vygotsky's theory of human development. The conceptualization of the ZPD begins with its social, cultural, and historical context and traces its development as a spatial and temporal metaphor that reflects the sociogenetic root of all…

We need to keep experimenting with writing to meet the challenges of Deleuze and Guattari's flattened ontology in the humanities. The paper reports on a small, experimental research project at a university in the north-west of England. The findings are written in an experimental mode, inspired by the Deleuze and Guattarian concept, 'assemblage'.…

There are two focal points to this article. One is to address Julia Kristeva's theoretical corpus in the context of philosophy of education. Kristeva's notion of subject in process problematises education with its habitual emphasis on "product". Another is to consider her impact from the perspective of edusemiotics. Edusemiotics is a new…

This article proffers a critical reading of multiliteracy pedagogy and a materialism of the multimodal and machinic. A critical stance is taken against the mesmerising modes of representation that run rampant across our ocular territories. The article assesses the dangers of fetishizing technologies. To this end, Multiple Literacies Theory (MLT)…

In this article, I attempt to describe how certain theoretical constructions of semiotics could be applied in educational theoretical work. First I introduce meaning as a basic concept of semiotics, thus also touching on concepts such as action, competence and causality. I am then able to define learning as a change of competences, and also refer…

My aim in this paper is to show the relevance of an "effective semiotics"; that is, a field study based upon Peirce's semiotics. The general context of this investigation is educational semiotics rather than semiotics of teaching: I am concerned with a general approach of educational processes, not with skills and curricula. My paper is…

The main aim of this article is to describe central elements of, and the relationships among, three interrelated domains of inquiry. The first domain is Charles Peirce's semiotic theory which offers five concepts of special relevance to the other two domains: (a) primary components of the triadic sign, including the object, representamen, and…

Based on the semiological pragmatics of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, this paper explores the possibility of rethinking pedagogic communication along lines that might help individuals to escape the grip of nihilism that has seized education today with its overriding concern for instrumentality, effectiveness, skills, competencies,…

The purpose of this paper is to address the concept of "intuition of education" from the pragmatic viewpoint so as to assert its place in the cognitive, that is inferential, learning process. The structure of the paper, consistent with the spirit of Charles Sanders Peirce's triadic semiotics, is threefold. As a point of departure, the author…