ABSTRACT
This chapter presents edusemiotics – educational semiotics – as a novel conceptual framework for education and counseling. Semiotics in education has long tended to remain within the confines of behavioral and social sciences, while often ignoring the foundational assumption of semiotics being a distinctive philosophy. Sign as a minimal unit of description in edusemiotics is a relational, rather than substantial, entity that is engaged in a series of transformations and as such leads to reformulating the notion of subjectivity. Subjectivity is a function of the relational process: the action of signs traverses the boundary between human subjects and the rest of the world, both social and natural. Semiotic subjectivity is produced in the transformative learning process that includes our becoming aware of the unconscious dimension of experience. The chapter revisits Lev Vygotsky’s dialectical psychology and his mediated approach to cognition. Vygotsky asserted that psychology must develop its philosophy. Significantly, the chapter also presents some of the latest scholarship in edusemiotics.
