Pedagogical Education and Self-Determination: Redefinition of Boundaries

Abstract

The initial thesis of this article is to consider the contemporary cultural situation as hyperdynamic, transterritorial, and formed by a multiplicity of mutually disproportionate worlds specifying a person’s position in them, together with the totality of their inherent meanings, visions, relations, behavioral patterns and possibilities of self-determination. Such a situational definition is a challenge to established educational practice, prompting it to dynamize and diversify the connections and relationships at work within it and to reorganize the forms of educational semiosis and the sign-symbolic mediators that support them, including texts specifically designed to orient students. After a critical evaluation of mapping as a constructive basis for the formation of students’ orientation competence (leading to a discursive unification and homogenization of educational practices), the authors attempt to develop an instrument of orientation mediation that highlights the multidimensionality of pedagogical positions and is subject to several key requirements. These are as follows: Orientation to the qualitative differences in educational relations in the processes of pedagogical self-organization; abandonment of the position of an absolute subject with the ability to perceive the educational environment panoptically; the incorporation of the student’s self-organization techniques that allow him/her to build moving and transforming coordinate systems and actions relevant to them in the orientation process. The semiotic construction of the mediator, designed by the authors to ensure the variability of the configurations of educational reality, aims analytically, above all, to explain and differentiate the political images of the production of educational subjects in the minds of students. Therefore, each of these policies is considered a discursive construction aimed at establishing and reproducing a model of a certain anthropological type in the educational environment. This means that this environment is an area of symbolic struggle of different pedagogical forms, which necessarily involve the consciousness and self-consciousness of their bearers in their structure. Thus, their self-reference or self-referentiality becomes the basic condition for constructing and reorganizing orientation systems. The form of mediation support for students’ orientation proposed by the authors uses the fundamental distinction between humanistic (pedagogical, anti-pedagogical) and posthumanistic policies of the genealogy of educational subjects, emphasizing their ontological specificity and epistemological incommensurability. The design of the text is based on posthumanist (postmodernist) concepts in search of a positive educational project that “creates new possibilities for development” rather than on critical engagement with the dominant discourses in education. The authors’ textual experiment raises a number of new research and practice questions, including those of textual exposition of ontologically heterogeneous forms of education, overcoming the effects of sign-symbolic reification of educational statements due to educational reproduction, clarifying the self-referential psychological and pedagogical conditions of the pedagogical self-determination subject.