Visualization of Culture: Educational Implications

Abstract

The authors of the article focus on changes related to education. Education is considered as a communicative construct arising from the process of symbolic interaction between individuals who establish meanings when coordinating their statements. The communicative generation of situations and orders of knowledge is interpreted as educational semiosis. Analyzed is the discourse of modern humanities which are competing with each other in determining the current socio-cultural situation. Highlighted is the research tendency, asserting the point of changing the cultural morphogenesis by means of its visualization processes. Based on this, the hypothesis of a gap between culture and education is put forward. According to this hypothesis, cultural relations are increasingly mediated by figurative participation, while educational practices appeal to verbal and textual forms of the situational mediation. Within the relations between actors in education, this is reflected in the dominance of legitimate (metanarrative) samples, the transmission model of educational knowledge, the communicative preference for orderliness, the desire for unambiguity, the clarity and completeness of logocentric forms of thinking, and so on. The change of the mediation form in the organization of educational interaction and the transition from the verbocentric order to the ocular-centric one, is suggested as a step in the development of modern education. It must affect the way educational relations (educational communication) function, the way words (speech) and images (vision) are inter-related, the principles of students’ orientation in their attitudes to the sign-symbolic world, their partners in interaction, and to themselves. In the first case, the point is to organize educational communication based on the principles of paradoxicality, paralogicality, and disproportionality of statements and images of the situation. Here the most important educational objective is to make the participants of the educational interaction consider their differences in their interpretations of the world, their styles of utterance, and their discursive positioning. In the second case, the educational objective is the liberalization of vision, which emerges in the course of perceptual work emancipated from the primary procedures of interpretation and comprehension of the visible and relying on the action of the image as the context of the statement. The third case is about worldview constants, radical changes in the position of the educational subject, acquiring the experience of self-detachment in learning. In the final analysis, this provides an opportunity for differentiation and diversification of the worlds of human presence.