DEBORAH L.

SMITH-SHANK

SEMIOTIC PEDAGOGY AND VISUAL CULTURE

CURRICULUM

INTRODUCTION

Visual signifiers are powerful vehicles for learning, transmitting, maintaining,

modifying, and envisioning cultures. Studying the multiple and intersecting visual
sign systems within a cultural groups artworks and artifacts helps make the
contents of a culture more explicit, facilitates critical responses, and can be used to
assist learners in their quests to understand the multiple ways cultures are
organized, developed, and communicated. Contemporary art education uses many
tools of semiotics in an interdisciplinary context to explore how visual signification
influences our lives. Peirces ideas of education, pragmatism, plays of musement,
and especially his notion of the importance of a community of inquiry influence
this approach to art education.
AN IMAGINED HISTORY

Once upon a time, on a chilly evening in the late 1800s, Charles Sanders Peirce is
sitting alone in his library, hunched over a simple wooden desk, pen and inkwell at
hand, as he thinks about a definition of the University. All day long, he had
struggled to find a reasonable definition of the University to send to the Century
Dictionary editors. This was a pragmatic as well as an intellectual job because he
was struggling financially and an important source of income at this time was
writing definitions. He needed a good, thoughtful, and saleable response. He was
content with his final edit as he defined the university as:
An association of men for the purpose of study, which confers degrees which
are acknowledged as valid throughout Christendom, is endowed, and is privileged
by the state in order that the people may receive intellectual guidance, and that the
theoretical problems which present themselves in the development of civilization
may be resolved. (Houser 1987: 255)
Peirce sat up, reached for his drink, and smiled, carefully folding the paper and
inserting it into an envelope for quick delivery to The Century Dictionary editors.
Unfortunately, just as swiftly as it was sent, it was returned for revisions. Peirce is
instructed to edit his definition to include "instruction." The editors felt that
without instruction learning cannot take place.
-[Peirce] wrote back that if they had any such notion they were
grievously mistaken, that a university had not and never had
anything to do with instruction and that until we got over this idea

DEBORAH SMITH-SHANK

we should not have any university in this country. (John J. Chapman

[1892] in Houser: 255)
In this Peircean story, we find a man far ahead of his time in thinking about
education; a champion for 21st century pedagogy with intellectual guidance and
theoretical problem solving as the keys to education. While Charles Sanders Peirce
has gone to his well-deserved rest, the Century Dictionary is alive and well,
adapting to the times as an on-line site: http://global-language.com/CENTURY/.
Unfortunately readers cannot enter the site without specific software, so I went to
Dictionary.com, a free online dictionary to see how the University is now defined.
The third entry seems the most relevant to this discussion:
3. An institution organized and incorporated for the purpose of imparting
instruction, examining students,
and otherwise promoting education in the
higher branches of
literature, science, art, etc., empowered to confer
degrees in the several arts and faculties, as in theology, law, medicine, music, etc.
A university may exist without having any college connected with it, or it may
consist of but one college, or it may comprise
an assemblage of colleges
established in any place, with professors for instructing students in the sciences
and
other
branches
of
learning.
(http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/university, retrieved 5/26/09)
I suspect that Peirce would be disheartened if he could come back from the
grave and read this 21st century definition. It does not allow for privileging either
guidance or theory. It continues to privilege instruction rather than guidance and
testing rather than solving theoretical problems.
Like the Century Dictionary that requires special software, we have become
comfortably habituated to the technical complexities of the postmodern condition.
Like the online free Dictionary.com, many educational practices continue to avoid
what really matters in teaching and learning, and continue to reflect modernist,
behavioral, and information processing cognitive models that are not adequate or
appropriate for effective learning to take place (Cunningham: 1987). The implicit
assumptions in these models are that there is a concrete and correct body of
knowledge within discrete disciplines that is knowable, transferable, and should be
assessed by testing. It appears that even within postmodern technological global
culture, modernist notions of instruction and testing continue to privilege antiintellectual practices.
The paradigmatic move away from modernist hierarchical models of content
and pedagogy exemplified by Peirces early definition of the University can
encourage reconsideration of the roles of learners, teachers, and the parameters of
disciplinary subject matter. Because of semiotics' emphasis on codes, signs, and
their interactions, it is especially appropriate for those of us involved in the study
of visual art and artifacts, but I suspect that reconsideration of all disciplinary
boundaries and methods of pedagogy is timely and essential.

SEMIOTIC PEDAGOGY

THE SEMIOTIC CONTEXT

Semiotics is a broad approach to understanding the nature of meaning and a

number of semiotic theories have been developed over the past century. Therefore,
any attempt to characterize semiotics inevitably involves choices. This paper
represents a view of semiotics that places emphasis on ideas gleaned from Charles
Sanders Peirce who steadfastly and methodically, built his theory of signs upon the
philosophic foundations of teachers and philosophers including the Stoics, Plato,
the Scholastic Realists, Locke, Kant, and others (Corrington: 1993). A sign,
according to Peirce, is "something which stands to somebody for something in
some respect or capacity" (Buchler 1955: 99). A sign can be verbal, visual,
gestural, musical, etc. A sign stands for something which Peirce called the "object"
by creating an "interpretant" which is an additional sign that stands for some aspect
of the object. The interpretant may be a thought or a notion that represents an
object, but it is never the object itself. What this means is that our experience of the
world is always mediated through signs and we can never directly and fully know
an object. We can only know it partially, and only through interpretants (signs of
the object) which allow us a glimpse at "some respect or capacity" of that object.
Peirce grounded his theory of signs on several assumptions about thinking and
logic that form a foundation for a contemporary semiotic pedagogy. 1) We reason
by using triadic relations (the sign, object, and interpretant relation). 2) Reasoning
always builds on previous reasoning. 3) All reasoning is from external signs. 4)
There is no thinking without signs. And finally, 5) all cognition is inference. Not
only did Peirce develop a theory of semiotics, he is also credited with developing
the ideas of Pragmatism. Pragmatism joins with Peirce's theory of signs to form the
basis of semiotic pedagogy. Peirce's basic principles of pragmatism are, according
to Corrington (1993):
an emphasis on the future, on practical bearings, on experimental
method, on communal forms of inquiry, on habit, and on self control
[and] that all of reality moves toward forms of connectedness that
give evidence to general laws and principles within an evolving
universe [...] it starts and ends with a recognition of continuity.
(1993: 51)
Pragmatism is a way of reasoning from sign to sign in order to understand
something that results in a practical experience. As Sebeok explained (Cunningham
& Smith-Shank: 1992):
Essentially you're spinning interpretants forever and ever. You take a
concept, sign, object, and endlessly interpret it and every time you
interpret it you add new knowledge (which may be false) but at all
times you expand. (1992: 66)

DEBORAH SMITH-SHANK

Reasoning from sign to sign is semiosis, and semiosis is the subject matter of
semiotics. Semiotic pedagogy is purposeful nurturing of semiosis; purposeful
nurturing of reasoning from sign to sign within an unlimited arena of signs and
unlimited semiosis is the process of lifelong learning, and is built upon intellectual
guidance.
Semiotics and Peircean pragmatism can play an important role in rethinking the
learning and teaching processes. Three ideas derived from the concept of unlimited
semiosis are: 1) collateral experience makes learning possible; 2) historically
determined disciplinary boundaries constrain learning; and 3) the consequences of
learning and teaching change when the notion of environment is understood
broadly as evolving and interconnected to creatures which share space, rather than
as simple surroundings for human beings. This reconceived environment, named
Umwelt by von Uexkull (1982) has been elaborated by Deely (1993). Each of these
three areas will be addressed in turn, with a focus on visual culture practices.
COLLATERAL EXPERIENCE AND THE LEARNING PROCESS

Lets imagine that from extensive experience looking at diseased cells, a scientist
knows that when the cells change to a particular color, a specific disease has taken
hold of that cell. The specific color serves as a clue to identifying the disease. The
scientist who knows to look for the colored markings is more likely to find
diseased cells than a novice who has not learned to associate color changes with
disease. Like the scientific novice, we cannot find meanings for any signs that we
do not notice. "Collateral experience" is previous experience, which makes a novel
situation accessible. Houser (Cunningham & Smith-Shank: 1992) reminds us:
As Peirce would say, only where there is collateral experience of an
object can we learn anything else about it. As a result, it is essential
that the teacher use signs that resonate in such a way with what the
student already knows that the student will have some ground to
stand on. (67)
Collateral experience is the stuff of our experience and memory. It is essential
for semiosis and a key to understanding how semiotic pedagogy works. By helping
students connect new experiences to the vast network of their own past
experiences, teachers nurture semiosis, or learning. When collateral experience is
granted an essential role in the learning process, students come to an educational
encounter with acknowledged resources. Information is not imparted and then
tested; rather students are guided to use their collateral experience as a context
from which they can make reasoned connections. In this way, the subject matter
and the students' histories are essential partners in the learning process.
Collateral experience is often used unconsciously to make novel situations seem
familiar. When we enter unfamiliar rooms and come upon an object that has four
legs, two arms, a back, and is upholstered, we can be pretty certain that it is a
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SEMIOTIC PEDAGOGY

chair. We have experienced chair-ness" before and have made a habit of using
objects of this style as seats. Now, just suppose though, that when we sit on this
object (which due to habit, we assume is a chair) it feels wet and cold, it starts
melting, we hear what seemed to be the chirping of hundreds of birds, and we
distinctly smell the odor of ammonia. Then we would have to reassess the
situation. Our reassessment is forced because of the incongruity of the signs we
experienced. In this case, the contexts of past sensory experiences of sight, hearing,
smell, and touch are revisited so that the episode can be understood as a coherent
whole within our bank of collateral experience. When these are not adequate clues
to explain the event, new cognitive models must be hypothesized to make sense of
the situation. It is only when our habits are disrupted to the point that we are
uncomfortable with the status quo, that we are motivated to reassess our previous
beliefs and habits.
HISTORICALLY CONSTRAINED DISCIPLINARY BOUNDARIES

A young teacher, wearing a new and fluffy purple fur coat, ran into the second
grade classroom just as the starting bell rang. She quickly unzipped the coat and
threw it over the institutional gray coat rack behind her desk as she smoothed her
hair and announced breathlessly to the class, "Good Morning! Please take out your
art box!" One little girl in the front row raised her hand and asked in the style of
second graders, "Is that a new coat? Did you get it for your birthday? What kind of
animal did it come from? Why is it purple? Did it come from a purple animal? Is it
from an endangered animal? Did it come from a purple cow like in the poem?" The
teacher interrupted gently, but firmly, "I'm sorry Tonya, it is Art Time now."
How we think is directly related to how we learn. When learning is
understood as inquiry or semiosis, it is a process and not a product. It becomes a
lifelong process that cannot be defined by the limits of subject matter
parameters. The little girl, Tonya, was spinning interpretants. She was bringing her
collateral experience into the conversation as a direct result of her encounter with
aspects of the object: the teacher's coat. Tonya had contexts with which to
understand the coat as a gift, an animal skin, evidence of an ecological problem,
and as poetry. Like most second graders, she was spinning for more interpretants in
order to expand her understanding - not her thinking about social studies, art,
science, math, or even coats. She was attempting to know the world in which she
lives more thoroughly. Her reasoning will subsequently inform her encounters with
all subjects across the curriculum. Unfortunately, many educational endeavors are
unreasonable and context-barren and are unhelpful to people who are trying to
make sense of their worlds. As Houser (1987) pointed out:
We simply do not learn anything at all by merely coming into
contact with the world. We may get hurt, but we don't learn anything
-- not by mere contact alone. We must transcend mere dyadic

DEBORAH SMITH-SHANK

contact, which we might regard as empty experience, and achieve

semiosis in order to learn from our experience. (270)
Learning and inquiry are inherently interdisciplinary and there is no nonartificial way to isolate one subject from another. Charles Suhor (Cunningham &
Smith-Shank: 1992) pointed out: Anyone who approaches teaching from a
semiotic frame of reference will do less compartmentalizing. Since subject matter
areas are organized as they are due to a historical accident, a semiotic viewpoint
looks at a particular area as useful but ultimately arbitrary roping off the process of
semiosis (p. 66).
ENVIRONMENT IS NOT UMWELT

A modernist notion of environment is a physical setting that can be conceived of

independently of by any particular organism and in fact, is usually said to exist for
all organisms. Semiotic pedagogy questions this universal notion. Umwelten (von
Uexkull: 1982) is a semiotic replacement for the conception of a modernist
environment. An environment is usually thought of as being "outside" our selves,
while Umwelten exist only as relational with organisms (some who might be
human). Umwelten are not static, but are in constant states of flux both at the
species and individual level. (see Anderson, Deely, Kramden, Ransdell, Sebeok, &
von Uexkull: 1984). They can be understood as related, and at the same time,
relating-spaces that shift and flow with the activities of all creatures and features
within it. According to Deely (1993), "The environment selectively reconstituted
and organized according to the specific needs and interests of the individual
organism constitutes an Umwelt (42)."
Content and pedagogical practice change when education is situated within a
community of enquiry, when the sites of learning shift from environment (which is
outside an individual) to Umwelt (which is part and parcel with an individual), and
when the content of our overloaded curriculum is used to help students know and
develop new ideas unrestrained by disciplinary boundaries. When these shifts
occur, pedagogy becomes a process of nurturing and directing ongoing processes
of semiosis. Education changes from an activity of transmission of knowledge to
students, to an activity in which teachers actively help students become aware of
ways in which cultures code knowledge. Teachers can help students develop the
confidence and power to explore and deconstruct these codes as they become
aware of them. Art students, through careful nurturing of semiosis move toward the
practices of consciously de-coding artifacts and en-coding (through their artwork)
their contemporary multicultural, multinational, and juxtaposed cultures.
Von Uexkull (1982) described the various Umwelten created by a tree: a rough
textured and convoluted terrain for a bug, a scary shape to a young child, a home
for a nesting bird and her family, and a wonderful place to hide for a ten-year-old
adventurer, among others. In all of these cases, the environment of the tree was the
same; that is, the bark, the height, and the branches were available to all the
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SEMIOTIC PEDAGOGY

organisms using the tree for their own purposes. Their experiences of the tree,
however, were quite different; their understandings of the tree overlapped, but were
not the same. By understanding the world in terms of Umwelten, it is possible to
imagine differently than is possible when persons are conceived of as being locked
in environments. Signs can be created which go beyond immediate experience; we
can imagine the impossible. Just as in the example involving the melting and
chirping "chair," sensory clues as well as words, pictures, bodily movements can
serve as signs that generate interpretants for objects and ideas that may have no
basis in the "real" world but yet can be manipulated.
VISUAL CULTURE EDUCATION

The field of art education, with considerable resistance, has moved beyond
modernist, formalist and structuralist ways of looking at forms, contents, and
methods. Umberto Eco, in his preface to Yuri Lotmans (2000) book, Universe of
the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture articulates the limitations of a formalist
understanding of art:
According to the teachings of the Formalists, a work of art was a semiotic
device which could be analyzed
as a set of rules and inventions, of pre-fixed
effects and conscious modifications of socialized codes [.] Formalists had at
most brought to light individual devices or systems of rules which were valid only
within the confines of one specific genre. (Lotman 2000: xiii)
What the formalists failed to acknowledge was that all semiotic systems use
cultural signifiers as building blocks for a societys knowledge bases, and also
serve as catalysts for new ideas that exist outside comfortable habitual cultural
codes.
Every system which fulfils the entire range of semiotic possibilities not only
transmits ready made
messages but also serves as a generator of new ones
[.] A visual sign holds within it the history of itself and the relationship with
cultural memory (tradition) already formed in the consciousness of the audience
[.] One might expect a text as it lives through the centuries to become faded and
to lose the information
contained in it. Yet texts that preserve their cultural
activity reveal a capacity to accumulate information. (Lotman 2000: 18)
That is, an artifact continues to accumulate more and more cultural
information as it intersects with different times and cultures. A good example of
the transcendence and added cultural accumulation of signifiers is Leonardos
Mona Lisa. Mona Lisa in Leonardos time, held (necessarily partial) meanings for
viewers that 21st century viewers can never totally understand because no matter
how much we research, contemporary people can never be part of that unique
socially constructed signifying system. However, we can react to the painting in
different and possibly more complex ways because of the multiple signifiers this
cultural artifact has gathered to itself over the centuries. By associating the Mona
Lisa with action films, advertising, and conceptual spaces such as the Louvre,
bullet-proof Plexiglas, enigmatic smiles, Duchamps machinations, and Leonardos
possible transgender practices, she transcends, complicates, and exponentially
7

DEBORAH SMITH-SHANK

modifies her original significance. These types of re- visioning practices are
significant areas of study within contemporary visual cultural studies.
Through signs, people create culture and the institutions of culture, including
religion, patriotism, government, armies, schools, (Deely: 1982) and curricula.
Culture, in turn, impacts our lives by determining what is important and what is
not; what makes sense and what doesn't. Cohabiting with others within one's own
culture becomes habit and the arbitrary nature of our very own cultural sign
systems is not apparent unless we are challenged by the logic of cultural systems
different from our own. This challenge is especially clear in our Post-911 global
culture as beliefs and armies collide.
Semiotic pedagogy purposefully calls into conversation routinely unexamined
cultural signs and explicitly confronts their arbitrary natures. We are immersed in
an age of "difference" and as a consequence we find ourselves in the shadow of the
"other" (Foucault: 1980) or multiple others. By understanding cultures as evidence
of arbitrary sign systems, hegemony can be explored, values can be questioned,
habits can be challenged, and visual culture becomes a broad arena in which to
explore, visually, multi-culturally, and historically, what it means to be sensual and
sentient creatures coexisting within constantly changing Umwelten.
This semiotic approach to art education represents a significant change in art
education in the last two decades. The field has shifted from a discipline-based
approach that focused on teaching art history, aesthetics, art criticism, and related
art production, toward an inclusive interdisciplinary conception of the field
involving teaching, learning, and understanding the coding and de-coding of visual
culture. The study of visual culture from a semiotic point of view transcends
disciplines and blurs the boundaries between what has been traditionally called art
and the plethora of historic and contemporary visual artifacts. History, criticism,
aesthetics and art production are still important to the field, but in this permutation
of art education, they are always understood as being culturally constructed and
considered within a particular time period and social situation. Rather than reduce
these signs of social and cultural phenomena to underlying factors, they are studied
as complex, mediational, and meaningful artifacts that are always juxtaposed with
human experience(s).
Danesi (1993) explained that semiotics studies virtually anything we do and
use to represent the world around us and to make messages about it (p. 1). It is the
job of artists, craftspersons, artisans, and designers to represent their worlds
visually. Whether intentional or not, the results of their labors carry significance
and become the substance of art educations study: words, gestures, objects,
clothing, traditional arts, crafts, and industrial artifacts -- anything that stands for
something to someone. Signs are not stagnant and the meanings we attribute to
them change over time as the contexts and our own understandings change. This is
not to say that our understanding of signs is idiosyncratic. Because humans share
some common knowledge, collateral experience, and languages, our multiple
meanings overlap, and we can communicate about a sign system within a
community possessing some shared knowledge. However, we will never know
exactly what a specific sign means for another person because their experiences,
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interests, and habits will not be the same as ours. We come to know all signs and
sign systems more thoroughly through the process of community dialogue. As
language educator, Francois Tochon (2001) explains:
Knowledge comes from engaging in communication with a cultural
community. In this frame, it may no longer be adequate to speak of
"teaching" and "training." Education is not conceived of
independently of those educated. At the very most, one may speak of
a pedagogy of sharing, which is cooperative in nature. (p. 10)
Interrogating objects is an important part of the community dialogue. For
example, we may encounter an ancient Greek vase in a museum today, but it is
important to remember that it was not created with our use, or our understanding in
the mind of its creator. We therefore consider the Greek vase from multiple points
of view, knowing that no matter how much research we do, it is not possible to
know the whole context and story of the object. This vase, at this time in history
resting in its socially privileged space is an elite object, but where was it, who used
it, and what was its purpose a month, year, or a decade after it was made? These
questions can lead toward a critical classroom dialogue that leads toward complex
knowing and understanding of our own as well as speculation about its initial
cultural significance.
For the purposes of contemporary art education, this vase is no more
sophisticated semiotically than a tattoo on the sailor sitting in the park or on the
arm of our server at lunch. The important learning activity is the nature of our
engagement with the artifact and the contexts within which they engage us. The
artifacts and our interest in them reflect our habits of viewing as they reflect
culture. We learn through, about, and from our engagement with visual signifiers
as they reflect and teach us about our individual and collective selves and cultures.
Overlapping meanings of visual signs, within the context of a social and
cultural aesthetic are often cause for cognitive dissonance. When multiple
meanings exist side-by-side, how are we to make sense of community celebrations,
shopping malls and theme parks, television, movies, the Internet, or films that echo
our fears and desires? Unfortunately, according to Giroux (1996), "The current
assault on youths increasingly takes place through a media culture whose
pedagogical functions are often ignored (p. 17)." If we passively interact with
images, then just as passively, we accept their messages. Perceptions grow and
develop without conscious attention to content and context, and responses to visual
input are often thought-less reflexes. Although the richness of the postmodern
plethora of images is a rich cornucopia, filled with wonders, it is also filled with
rigid stereotypes. Systems of visual signs can be catalysts for intolerance, racism,
sexism, among other undesirable -isms. For example, Makolkin (2001) conducted a
semiotic analysis of national, and other politically constructed flags and pointed to
the numbers of agendas and passions, including violence, that come as a result of
flag waving, or as she calls it, "flagomania."
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DEBORAH SMITH-SHANK

Visual culture is a real and virtual enterprise. Although visual culture may
contain aspects of material culture, it transcends the limitations of the senses, to
include imagination. Mental images are the substances of cognition. Harry Broudy
(1987), a philosopher of education who was specifically interested in the realm of
the visual, explained that as we spend time in the world, we build up an "imagic
store," a cache of almost instantly accessible mental images that can serve as
metaphors for understanding. This store of images also facilitates imagination.
Video games, the Internet, and a bevy of interactive virtual arenas complicate our
sense of reality. Just as reality is often problematic, so are our traditional
conceptions of youth. jagodzinski (2004) argues that there is a newly emerging
conception of youth, that is often conflated with previous eras understandings of
the space between childhood and adulthood, but which is actually radically
different. The infusion of media into the lives of youth have created an increasing
loss of authority and trust in the symbolic order, while increasingly demanding
fulfilled enjoyment/pleasure which oftentimes includes violence and obsession.
These new conceptions of youth within 21st century cultures beg re-examination of
traditional educational practices and consideration of the hidden curriculum of
virtual worlds. Ads and other commercially motivated stimuli juxtapose multiple
sign systems impacting the ways children think, learn, remember, and participate in
life experiences. Danesi (1995) points to the important roles of advertising:
At one level, the advertiser's implicit messages, styles of
presentation, and visual images are surreptitiously shaping the
thoughts, personalities, and lifestyle behaviors of countless
individuals as well as covertly suggesting how we might best satisfy
our innermost urges and aspirations. But at another level advertising
has evolved into a fin du siecle medium of artistic expression that
distinguishes the human species from all others -- the capacity and
urgent propensity to make meaning through symbolism. (p. 7)
At the edges and borders where virtual and real disciplinary and conceptual
boarders meet are notions of power. Contemporary art education teaches students
to deconstruct advertisements and virtual visual sites and strategies for creating
them. This pedagogy is in response to cultural need. Where art education fits into
realms of curricular power has been a constant part of the disciplinary discourse
since art was considered relevant enough to human intellectual and technical
growth to include it in formal schooling. Even with general acknowledgement of
the importance of art to commerce, history, culture, and literacy, art educators have
understood the precarious position it holds. Therefore, consistently through its
educational history, art education has adapted content and pedagogy to reflect the
needs of culture. The paradigm shift toward integration of high tech, virtual and
real, socially motivated and redesigned education is evident. When art class stops
being the place for making objects that teach art making through design elements
without personal reflective content and becomes a site for responding to and
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SEMIOTIC PEDAGOGY

creating complex and meaningful visual culture artifacts, it becomes the contextual
nucleus of an overall interdisciplinary curriculum based upon the need to
deconstruct and construct meaning(s).
Semiotic pedagogy informs visual culture pedagogy. Signifying systems
ground the ways people think, learn, remember, and participate in life experiences.
Contemporary postmodern culture juxtaposes sign systems from various cultures,
eras, and genres, immersing youth in sensory impressions. Students learn about
themselves and cultures through participation in a myriad of systems of signs that
reflect their experiences of them. Peirce pointed out (Houser & Kloesel, 1992) that
the intersection with sign systems create humans as much as humans create sign
systems. Because most sign systems in Western societies continue to perpetuate
modernist and generally Eurocentric and patriarchal structures, it is critical that we
take a close look at the ways that teachers and children participate in communities
of learning.
CONTINUING MUSEMENT

Semiotic pedagogy is about expanding the boundaries of educational content and

practices. It fits snugly within the context of art educations move toward a multidisciplinary interrogation of visual culture. It is cooperative, active, experiential,
and non-predictive in the sense that there are no limits to the amounts or types of
inquiries that might be necessary to bring a task to closure after spinning
interpretants. Methods and direction of inquiry must vary according to the
contextual constraints of individual situations. Ambiguity is not only tolerated, but
also embraced and nurtured. The key to semiotic pedagogy is engagement. When
students are empowered to tap their own store of collateral experiences to use as a
starting point for understanding new information, they do not find themselves in
alien territory. Rather, they take in the unexpected, unclear, and unknown,
juxtaposing the strange with the familiar. Through this process they build
thoughtful connections that are unpredictable, but meaningful. Semiotically astute
teachers tell stories and spin interpretants that guide their students to further
exploration. They are comfortable with the play of musement, which Peirce
considered particularly important for all forms of investigation. (Petrilli & Ponzio
2001: 50).
Teachers who play with ideas meet their classes quite literally bearing
evidence of their own reflections, interests, and collateral experiences. They invite
exploration and motivate the interest of their students through the stories, artifacts,
and cultural clues they have found from their own investigations. Understanding,
thinking, and making connections are goals of contemporary semiotic pedagogy,
and it is a lifelong process. Semiotic pedagogy is not a prescribed teaching method,
but one way of acting with and in an Umwelt that accepts the semiotic nature of the
learning process. Semiotic pedagogy should be as natural as breathing for art
teachers because of the focus on interrelating signs and notions of understanding as
anti-hierarchical and impossible to parcel out into discrete disciplines. Unlike the
art teacher with the purple coat, they would have seen Tonya's curiosity as an asset
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DEBORAH SMITH-SHANK

to the art lesson, as a chance to spin interpretants, and not as an off-task intrusion
that resulted in insights that might not be appropriate for a multiple-choice test.
Semiotic pedagogy acknowledges the human urge to make order, to play with
ideas, and to make pragmatic sense. It also emphasizes that the various orders and
categories we create are human constructs that necessarily evolve as cultures and
habits change and collide. Semiotic pedagogy encourages multiple networks of
collateral experiences and semiosis. As Peirce pointed out to the editors of the
Century Dictionary, in an ideal world, teachers are intellectual guides. As such,
they spend their efforts helping learners reason from sign to sign, and plan
educational encounters which widen the scope of their students' collateral
experiences, introducing new situations in order to explore the possible, and
opening avenues to the impossible. Semiosis is not an exercise for the University,
or for schools, or for education. It is an over-arching, life-long process of learning
and understanding which has the potential to redefine the roles of teachers,
students, and curriculum.
Just as the Mona Lisa has moved from understandings that were only possible
within the contexts of Leonardos time, to a broader multi-variant plethora of
possible meanings in ours, Peirces ideas have morphed in ways that can inform
our practices and our understandings of what contemporary learning and teaching
are all about. His intuitions and cognitions continue to transform contemporary
thought, through our reflections and semiosis into further intuitions and cognitions.
REFERENCES/BIBLIOGRAPHY
Anderson, M., Deely, J., Kramden, M., Ransdell, J., Sebeok, T..A., & Uexkull, T. von, (1984). A
semiotic perspective on the sciences: Steps toward a new paradigm. Semiotica, 51(1-2), 7-47.
Broudy, H.S. (1987). The role of imagery in learning. Los Angeles: The Getty Center for Education in
the Arts.
Buchler, J. (Ed.), (1955). Philosophical Writings of Peirce. New York: Dover.
Cobley, P. & Jansz, L. (1999). Introducing semiotics. Cambridge, UK: Icon Books.
Corrington, R.S. (1993). An introduction to C.S. Peirce: Philosopher, Semiotician, and Ecstatic
Naturalist. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Cunningham, D. J. (1987). Outline of an education semiotic. The American Journal of Semiotic, 5(2),
201-216.
Cunningham, D. J. and Smith-Shank, D. L. (1992). Semiotic pedagogy. In Semiotics 1990, T. Prewitt, J.
Deely, & K. Haworth (eds.), 64-70. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 64-70.
Danesi, M. (1993). Messages and meanings; an introduction to semiotics. Toronto: Canadian Scholars
Press.
Danesi, M. (1995). Interpreting advertisements: A semiotic guide. New York: Legas.
Deely, John (1982). Introducing semiotic. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Deely, John (1993). The human use of signs or elements of anthroposemiosis. Lanham, MD: Rowan &
Littlefield.
Foucault, Michel. (1980). Power/knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings, 1972-1977. C.
Gordon, (ed.), New York: Panthon Books.
Giroux, H.A. (1996). What comes between kids and their Calvins: Youthful bodies, pedagogy, and
directions for art education. New Art Examiner, February, 1996, 16-21.
Houser, N. (1987). Toward a Peircean semiotic theory of learning. The American Journal of Semiotics,
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Houser, N. & Kloesel, C.J.W. (Eds.), (1992). The essential Peirce: Selected philosophical writings,
volume 1, 1967-1893. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

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SEMIOTIC PEDAGOGY
jagodzinski, j. (2004). Youth fantasies: The perverse landscape of the media. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Lotman, Yuri M. (2000). Universe of the mind: A semiotic theory of culture. Bloomington, IN: Indiana
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the twentieth century. The American Journal of Semiotics 17(3), 133-156.
Petrilli, S. and Ponzio, A. (2001). Postmodern encounters: Thomas Sebeok and the signs of life.
Cambridge, UK: Icon Books Ltd.
Tochon, F. V. (2001). Education Research: New avenues for video pedagogy and feedback in teacher
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Uexkull, J. von (1982). The theory of meaning. Semiotica, 42, 25-82.

Deborah L. Smith-Shank
School of Art
Northern Illinois University

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