Educational Philosophy and
Teaching Goals
The foundation of my philosophy of education is called semiotic pedagogy, and is derived from the work of the American Philosopher, Charles Sanders Peirce.
Most of the time, I learn as much from my students, as they learn from me and from each other. It isn’t possible to separate teaching and learning because they are two parts of the same lifelong adventure that relates prior experience to current events, and give us imaginative glimpses into future events. One of the most important parts of semiotic pedagogy is a concept that Peirce called “collateral experience.” Collateral experience is previous experience that makes novel situations accessible. Nathan Houser, director of the Pierce Project, pointed out:
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. 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 be mere contact alone. We must transcend mere dyadic contact, which we might regard as empty experience, and achieve semiosis in order to learn from our experience (Cunningham & Smith-Shank, 1992, p. 67)
Semiotic pedagogy expands the boundaries of educational practices. It is cooperative, active, experiential, and non‑predictive in the sense that there are no limits to the amount or types of inquiry that might be necessary to bring an educational objective to closure. Teaching methods vary according to the contextual constraints of individual situations. The key to good semiotic pedagogy is engagement. When students are empowered to tap their own store of collateral experience to use as a starting point for understanding new information, they are never in alien territory and it’s a great engagement tactic. Students encounter the unexpected, unclear, and unknown, and by juxtaposing it with their collateral experience, they build thoughtful connections and initiate hypotheses and share ideas with others.
Semiotic pedagogy acknowledges the human urge to make order while emphasizing that the various orders we create are human constructs, habitual, but not natural or given. There is no “correct” body of knowledge to communicate to students. There is no hierarchical architecture of facts and ideas that we can get to with higher forms of knowing built through some concatenation of simpler forms. It is my job to encourage habits of thinking that allow multiple understandings of any object or event to overlap and encourage future thinking.
When learning is understood as a process and not a product, it becomes an ongoing inquiry that cannot be defined by the limits of subject matter parameters. Many educational endeavors are context‑barren, and as such, are not helpful to people who are trying to make sense of their very complex worlds. Learning and inquiry are inherently interdisciplinary and there is no non‑artificial way to isolate one subject from another.
My Teaching Goals
Art education has been in the process of carving a niche for itself for the past hundred years. When budgets are tight, our profession quickly suffers the loss of its slice of the curriculum pie. I believe that thinking in and about art, purposeful visualization, and experimentation with ideas are some of the most important things we do in art education and that they are a necessary component in any education. Thinking and questioning via art allows us to understand the world and participate in the world in unique ways. Creativity is essential in our post-911 world cultures and while I would certainly acknowledge that one can be creative in widespread endeavors, it is in the art class that it is purposefully called into the conversation.
Through visualization of signs, people create culture and the institutions of culture, including religion, government, armies, schools, and art. Culture in turn, impacts our lives, by determining what is important and what is not, what makes sense and what doesn't. Interacting within one's own culture is a habit and the arbitrary nature of cultural sign systems is not readily apparent until people are exposed to systems that depart from their own. Semiotic pedagogy purposefully calls into conversation routinely unexamined cultural signs and explicitly confronts their arbitrary nature. By understanding culture as an arbitrary sign system, values can be questioned, habits can be explored, and art education becomes a broad arena in which to explore, visually and historically, what it means to be sensual and sentient creatures.
My primary teaching goal is for my students to develop the ability to teach art thoughtfully, to be actively reflective, to work within an educational system while questioning the status quo, and to find satisfaction in lifelong learning. I am richer for having known my students. It has everything to do with the cycle of teaching and learning: teaching a subject, the subject teaching you, the subject teaching the learner, and the learner teaching the teacher. The best I can do for my students is to get them to ask more questions. The answers are less critical because they are always partial anyway. What is important are the processes of questioning and imagining.
Buchler, J. (Ed.), (1955). Philosophical writings of Peirce. New York: Dover.
Cunningham, D., & Smith‑Shank, D. (1992). Semiotic pedagogy. In T. Prewitt, J. Deely, and K. Haworth (Eds.). Semiotics 1990. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 64‑70.
Houser, N. (1987). Toward a Peircian semiotic theory of learning. The American Journal of Semiotic, 5(2), 251‑274.
Peirce, C.S. (1886). Some consequences of four incapacities. Journal of Speculative Logic, 127(2), 140‑157.