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VISUALIZATION OF CULTURE: EDUCATIONAL IMPLICATIONS. Education & Pedagogy Journal. 2021;2(2):18-35. DOI:

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.

Keywords: visualization of culture, orders of culture and education, sign-symbolic mediation of educational relations, educational semiosis, communicative design of educational interaction

PEDAGOGICAL EDUCATION AND SELF-DETERMINATION: REDEFINITION OF BOUNDARIES. Education & Pedagogy Journal. 2022;2(4):15-41. DOI:

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.

Keywords: educational semiosis, self-referentiality, plurality, counter-text