Edusemiotics – A Handbook

Book excerpt: Edusemiotics is a pioneering area of study that connects semiotics – the science of signs – with educational theory and the philosophy of education. This volume reflects cutting-edge research by scholars in education and in semiotics worldwide, bridging the two discourses to present the state of the art in this new transdisciplinary field. The book’s emphasis is on educational theory as based on semiotic philosophy: as such, it challenges the current conception of semiotics in education as merely a sub-branch of applied semiotics. It presents edusemiotics as a novel unified conceptual framework at the interface of theoretical semiotics and educational philosophy, based on both theoretical and empirical studies from around the world. The chapters in this handbook also bring to the fore the intellectual legacy of Charles S. Peirce, John Dewey, Gilles Deleuze, Umberto Eco, Julia Kristeva, Mikhail Bakhtin, Paul Ricoeur, Martin Heidegger and other thinkers, pointing out the implications of edusemiotics for meaningful pedagogy and experiential learning in diverse contexts.