Book reviews: Approaching Education through Edusemiotics

Abstract

Everything is a sign and still nothing is a sign unless it is interpreted' (Semetsky 2017:8), is the stance taken by the editor of the book, in the first chapter of this book. I have always been fascinated by signs and their interpretation, by how signs transform or transmute into other signs and evolve -through time -into other signs or sign systems, or even revolve around an already existing sign system which is reproducing itself. A bird's eye view may direct an interested party to no correlation between education and semiotics, yet signs exist in textbooks, in pictorial presentations of objects and even in language itself as symbols, icons, etc., are all aids to learning, in the case of a foreign language, the learning of new words (see also Nöth 2014). A student may not remember a word, in the foreign language, if asked by the teacher, but given a picture, an icon, the student may be able to produce the word both phonemically and graphemically. But as the human race evolves so do signs. Nevertheless, it seems that we are 'born' with a predisposition to 'know', 'interpret' and 'use' signs as it comes natural for a student, from as early as primary school, to see a picture of a child with earphones, in his or her textbook and to realize that s/he will probably be doing a listening exercise within the next few minutes. Thus, it seems that we not only use signs, but as Semetsky ( 2017) puts it we, as humans, are signs too.Τhe gap between semiotics and education was first bridged in 2008, at the University of Oulu, in Finland, by officially giving a 'name' to two different disciplines, namely education and semiotics and thus coining the term edusemiotics as an autonomous transdisciplinary field. Semetsky and Cambell (2018) place this date a little later, in 2014 in the IASS congress in Sofia, Bulgaria, and more specifically in the New Bulgarian University in which 'theoretical semiotics' first appeared. This book, which consists of twenty chapters, focuses upon semiotics, educational theory and practice as well as educational philosophy.The second chapter which, in fact, follows the first, namely the introduction section previously discussed, probes into the academic culture, after the 17 th century, and the science of signs, and supports that human experience is filtered through a 'dynamic interaction', as