Yep – that heading kind of sums it all up. I’m just not certain as to what ‘it’ is getting summed up! None the less, this will be my attempt to summarise the article from a learner agency perspective.
You may know what this sign is for:
Do you know what this is for?
The meaning can be abducted by virtue of the context of this post. Yes, it is Chinese for toilet.
The point is that students need to be inducted into the skilful use of artefacts in their learning ecology. A sign is always something that it is not! It points to the thing being signified – without actually being the thing being signified.
If we expect our learners to have the power to shape their world – then they had better become experts on using signs. Being skilful at pointing to stuff and tuning into the stuff that is being pointed to is central to understanding the process by which meaning is made and communicated.
Like Orthography in the previous post, semiosis is all about the action of meaning making / meaning made. It takes from the past and points to future and/or present action. Semiotic Consciousness is the term used for paying attention to what is being signed. A bit like a movie critic picking up on the subtle cues to previous movies or directors styles.
From a learner agency perspective – we are talking about attunement and perception. Now we could start a lengthy conversation about direct perception or a subject / object dichotomy and end up down some rabbit hole. The fact is that kids pick up on stuff – they see an opportunity to use what is in their environment to get what they want. They are attuned to the affordances of a particular object in their ecology.
This is what makes Orthography such a crucial means by which the English writing system is learned. It treats learners with the dignity that is worthy of their agency. Orthography does not see children as blank slates that need computing algorithms embedded into neural pathways to decode decontextualised (and therefore meaningless) signs such as digraphs and trigraphs in order to make meaning (note the irony). It starts with dignity – seeing children as people who use signs to extract and layer meaning.
From this perspective, affordances are the product of the space connecting the teacher to the learner – the relationship. This mutually co-constructed social artefact is a real thing in a learning ecology. It is the locus of semiosis.
The learner is nested in a community of relationships affording epistemological, ontological and ethical phenomena.
‘Logic is the ethics of thinking – ethics is the logic of action’
Right thinking, leads to the right actions. It sounds a little Aristotelian but it is better than viewing learners as units for potential economic activity. The dominant philosophy of education – that ‘schools produce data’ would fit this model – ‘data’ being a value laden input unit for economic systems.
As the author summarised:
it is … ‘semiotic consciousness that constructs an expanding field of meanings informed by lived experiences.’
In other words – it takes a village to raise a child. Ways of being, ways of knowing