scholarly journals Exploring a Vygotskian Theory of Education and Its Evolutionary Foundations

2021 ◽  
Vol 71 (3) ◽  
pp. 331-352
Author(s):  
Aline Nardo
Author(s):  
Peggy J. Miller ◽  
Grace E. Cho

Chapter 7, “Child-Affirming Artifacts,” uses ideas from Vygotskian theory to describe the child-affirming artifacts that populated children’s homes. Some artifacts were widely distributed consumer products. Children interacted with toys and electronic games that dispensed praise. Children’s books and TV shows, marketed as promoting children’s self-esteem, featured characters who were celebrated for their achievements, individuality, inherent worth, and potential. Several children loved Blue’s Clues, a show whose star constantly praised its characters and audience. These consumer products instantiated the same self-enhancing practices that parents believed fostered children’s self-esteem, thereby amplifying the social imaginary. This chapter also describes personalized, handmade artifacts designed by the families to celebrate their children. Photos of the children and artwork by children were on display in every household, and some adults created original homages to their children, which prompted commentary and stories that extolled the children’s achievements and reminded them how much they were loved and cherished.


2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 163-174 ◽  
Author(s):  
Winfried Nöth

Abstract The paper is a precis of C. S. Peirce’s semiotic theory of education. It presents this theory of learning and teaching from the perspective of Peirce’s phenomenological categories of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness. In the domain of Thirdness, learning is mediation between ignorance and knowledge, new information and old knowledge. Teaching has its focus on laws, symbols, legisigns, and reasoning. In the domain of Secondness, learners acquire new knowledge from the “hard realities” of real-life experience, from obstacles, and from the resistance caused by error and doubt. Teaching takes place by means of sinsigns (singular signs) and indexical signs. In the domain of Firstness, the learner acquires familiarity with the sensory qualities of objects of experience and learns from free associations, imagination, and acts of creativity. The instruments of teaching are qualisigns, icons, and abductive reasoning. The paper concludes that Peirce’s philosophy of education is holistic insofar as it states that most efficient signs are those signs in which “the iconic, indicative, and symbolic characters are blended as equally as possible.”


Semiotica ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 2016 (212) ◽  
pp. 81-96
Author(s):  
Peter Pericles Trifonas

AbstractThe theme of pedagogy and more generally education as supplementarity has been all but ignored in critical discussions engaging Jacques Derrida’s of grammatology. By and large, the sustained emphasis of inquiry has instead been on evaluating the epistemological and methodological parameters of deconstruction as a theory of reading and writing and not as a treatise on the ethics of pedagogical praxis. The essay rereads “... That Dangerous Supplement...,” the chapter on Rousseau on writing, while keeping the theme of pedagogy at the forefront of the analysis of supplementarity. Derrida presents for the “science of a new writing” in the “gram” that flourishes within the codic play of differences. But it is as différance that the grammatological conversion of semiology takes place via deconstruction. Such a focus provides new insights into deconstruction that could allow us to effectively gauge the edusemiotic potential of its influence on educational theory, not only as a theoretical departure from classical modes of reading and writing, but as the inaugural steps toward and beyond a theory of education that could ground an ethical praxis.


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