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Teaching Semiotics, from School to University
Enseigner la sémiotique, de l’école à l’université
Revue de recherches en littératie médiatique multimodale, 17
Published on Wednesday, November 02, 2022
Abstract
The volume 17 of Revue de recherches en littératie médiatique multimodale (R2LMM) proposes to question the way in which the teaching of semiotics is being renewed, from school to university, through the prism of such approaches that give a central place to the learners in semiosis. This issue wishes to draw up a state of the art in these “field semiotics” as they are deployed in school and university teaching contexts. It will question the theoretical stakes, explain the methodological handiworks in the face of the complexity of the field, and raise the ethical stakes that can be posed by the integration of singular subjectivity in educational and pedagogical context.
Announcement
Argument
Although semiotics is integrated into many university programs in humanities and social sciences, its introduction into primary and high schools has not taken place as a discipline in its own right, but rather under the impulse of programs of artistic and cultural education (education in images, cinema, audiovisuals) as well as media and information literacy. The acquisition of a semiotic culture favouring the understanding of media and information messages is thus often presented as the central element of citizenship learning. However, in a pedagogical context, this teaching has long remained centred on the learning of a “grammar” of sign decoding, aiming to uncover the strategies in cultural and media productions. Of course, the decoding tools developed in this context can help learners and students to sharpen their gaze and their critical thinking skills. It helps them to better perceive and verbalize the communicative issues that structure these productions. However, concerning pedagogical practices, the teacher is confronted with a great diversity of points of view emanating from the confrontation with cultural and media productions and must sometimes deal with virulent interpretative conflicts. Faced with the unknown of the students’ reactions, learning the codified grammar may then seem more reassuring than initiating a reflexive questioning of what constitutes interpretative variability.
As early as 1985, Geneviève Jacquinot evoked the risk of “cultural and social imperialism” linked to the pedagogical practices that impose “‘common sense’ in disregard to the complex processes of the appropriation of messages…”. More recently, Jacques Fontanille (2021) returns to the socio-educational issues of semiotics by pointing out the “ease of working without a corpus, outside of any field of investigation, and without any method of collecting and constructing analytical data.” Without a field, the pedagogue may be tempted to ascribe to themself the role of holder of truth of meaning, even though they are only “modelling their own representations” (Fontanille, 2021), based on their own experiences, their opinions, and their stereotypes.
For several years, many researchers, often from the interdisciplinary field of information and communication sciences, have been developing semiotic methodologies whose situated approaches propose to consider, in an empirical way, the central place of the subject in semiosis. These approaches are based on the hybridization of field surveys (interview, surveys, focus groups, co-interpretation workshop) and situated analysis of the formal structure of cultural and media productions (texts, images, movies, series, online newspapers, digital platforms, etc.). In some cases, the challenge is to put into perspective the results of the formal analysis carried out by the semiotician expert with those developed by producers and receivers. In other cases, the issue is to put in perspective the results of the formal analysis made by the semiotician expert with those developed by producers and receptors. In other cases, the objective of semiotic analysis shifts from the search for a final interpretative result to an in-depth analysis of the processes of meaning production. In both approaches, the aim is to engage, from the confrontation of interpretative hypothesis in the field, a reflection on the interpretative filters (Saemmer, Tréhondart, 2022), on the “situated knowledge” (Haraway, 2007) and on the “habits of thought” (in the sense of the “habitus of thought” [Lorusso, 2018; Darras, 2006]) which drives semiosis in the subject.
The volume 17 of Revue de recherches en littératie médiatique multimodale (R2LMM) proposes to question the way in which the teaching of semiotics is being renewed, from school to university, through the prism of such approaches that give a central place to the learners in semiosis. In the words of Bernard Darras (2020), it is to question the way in which “the gaze of a historian, a literary scholar, a linguist or a visual artist determines their gazes”, a gaze that is then transmitted to students who are encouraged to interpret according to the same filters. But it is also a question of asking whether it is possible to go beyond the claim of interpretative semiotics, which is to “decipher” or “decode” the meaning thanks to the expert gaze, and how this can consider the fact that this gaze is also situated. Surveys conducted in the school context (Tréhondart, 2022) show that there is indeed some resistance to the idea of creating, within the school space, places for reflection on the production of meaning, involving the sharing of one’s own convictions, values, or opinions.
This issue wishes to draw up a state of the art in these “field semiotics” as they are deployed in school and university teaching contexts. It will question the theoretical stakes, explain the methodological handiworks in the face of the complexity of the field, and raise the ethical stakes that can be posed by the integration of singular subjectivity in educational and pedagogical context.
Propositions may be guided by the following questions:
- How is meaning taught to children, teenagers, and students, and through what activities of reception and creation is it experienced?
- What are the developments in the teaching of semiotics in school and university (whatever the discipline)? On what foundations do the actors rely in terms of reception and production? What approaches (research-training, research-creation) are implemented in teacher training institutions?
- What relationship does semiotics have with critical education in images, media, and information, and with digital literacy practises (Lacelle, Boutin, Lebrun, 2017)? It may be interesting here to show the evolution of semiotics teaching methods in connection with the emergence of multimodal reading and writing practices, producing meaning-making processes more complex. For example, how can we help learners to better identify sociocultural and emotional filters that drive their relationship to digital texts, to still and moving images, and the sociodigital platforms and networks that surround media and education practises? The contribution of field semiotic approaches to the critical analysis of digital pedagogical devices, such as educational and school platforms, could also be explored (Tréhondart, Carton, 2020).
Submission guidelines
Calendar
-
Articles must be submitted by 16 January 2023
- Answers to authors by 1 February 2023
- Evaluation feedback for accepted articles by 15 March 2023
- Final article by 20 April 2023
- Publication in June 2023
Instructions for authors
- Length: 45,000 to 60,000 characters, including spaces (15–20 pages, excluding references and annexes)
- No pagination, header, and footer
- Space : 1.5
- No justification
- Accepted formats: Word (.doc, .docx) and OpenDocument (.odt)
The complete instructions for submitting an article are available on the journal’s website (https://litmedmod.ca/soumission-dun-article-la-revue-de-recherches-en-litteratie-mediatique-multimodale)
Proposals should be sent to: revue2lmm@gmail.com
References
Darras, B. (2020). Éducation à l’image, critique de l’artification et approche sémiotique. Dans M. Cervulle et A. Saemmer (dir.), Regard et Communication. MEI, (49), 115-131.
Fontanille, J. (2021). Sémiotique discursive et enseignement : l’éducation comme un défi politique et social. Entretien avec Jacques Fontanille. Acta Semiotica et linguistica.
Haraway, D. (2007). Manifeste cyborg et autres essais. Sciences – Fictions –Féminismes. Exils éditeurs.
Jacquinot, G. (1985). L’école devant les écrans. ESF Éditeur.
Lacelle, N., Boutin J.-F., Lebrun M. (2017). La littératie médiatique multimodale appliquée en contexte numérique – LMM@. Outils conceptuels et didactiques. Presses de l’université du Québec.
Landowski, É. (2015). Régimes de sens et formes d’éducation. Actes du colloque Sémiotique et sciences humaines et sociales : la sémiotique face aux défis sociétaux du XXIe siècle. Limoges.
Lorusso, A. M. (2019). Sémiotique et culture. Dans A. Biglari (dir.), La sémiotique et son autre (161-176). Éditions Kimé.
Odin, R. (2011). Les Espaces de communication. PUG.
Saemmer, A., Tréhondart, N. (avec Coquelin, L.) (2022, à paraître). Sur quoi se fondent nos interprétations ? Introduction à la sémiotique sociale appliquée aux images d’actualité, séries télé et sites web de média. Presses de l’Enssib.
Tréhondart, N. (2022). Sémiotique sociale et formation à l’esprit critique. Dans V. Julliard et A. Saemmer (dir.), Langage et pouvoir : approches critiques de l’interprétation, Communication & Langages, (212), 77-94.
Tréhondart, N., Carton, T. (2020). La plateformisation de l’éducation aux médias et à la citoyenneté. Regards critiques et enjeux d’émancipation. Dans Y. Maury et N. Hedjerassi (dir.), Empowerment, Pouvoir d’agir en éducation. À la croisée entre théorie(s), discours et pratique(s), Spirale - Revue de recherches en éducation 3(66), 77-94.
Verón, E. (1995). La Semiosis sociale : fragments d’une théorie de la discursivité. PUV.
Subjects
- Information (Main category)
Date(s)
- Monday, January 16, 2023
Attached files
Keywords
- Crem, sémiotique, revue, appel à articles, enseignement, école, université
Contact(s)
- Revue de recherches en littératie médiatique multimodale
courriel : revue2lmm [at] gmail [dot] com
Reference Urls
Information source
- Nathan Engelmann
courriel : nathan [dot] engelmann [at] univ-lorraine [dot] fr
License
This announcement is licensed under the terms of Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal.
To cite this announcement
« Teaching Semiotics, from School to University », Call for papers, Calenda, Published on Wednesday, November 02, 2022, https://doi.org/10.58079/19tk
