ABSTRACT
The comprehensive educational policy agenda of the twenty-first century (Simons et al., 2009) calls for “critical attitude or ethos [as] a way of relating to the present” (p. vii, italics in original) while also glimpsing the future in terms of constructing “edutopias” (Peters and Freeman-Moir, 2006). Edutopias belong to the emerging field called educational futures that focuses on creating new coordinates for theory and practice and problematises the current status of the knowledge economy While this book does not claim an exclusively utopian vision, we contend that edusemiotics, as having laid down a new direction in the philosophy of education, is an important element in such futures thinking. Edusemiotics exceeds the conventional boundaries of critical thinking by developing an alternative epistemology as embodied inquiry. Perhaps especially in the context of educational policy making, any new theory is quite often viewed “as both a new problem and panacea for our times” (Robertson, 2009: 235). While semiotics does not offer an easy solution to education's many challenges, it importantly creates a new theoretical foundation for education that is noticeably missing in the discourse on knowledge economy or educational policy even if the pragmatic use of ideas, on which knowledge-based economy relies, has been acknowledged by such influential organisations as the World Bank (Robertson, 2009). In the chapters comprising this book we have synthesised the perspectives of different philosophers, semioticians and cultural theorists in a variety of educational contexts and problematics. In the spirit of edusemiotics, the original concepts of philosophers from Peirce to Wittgenstein, Deleuze, Dewey, Kristeva and Derrida have been subject to development and evolution, thus demonstrating the grounding principle ofedusemiotics as an open-ended inquiry that does not aim to attain finite and certain knowledge.
