How are identities as cosmopolitan citizens realized in practice, and how can dialogue be fostered across differences in culture, language, ideology, and geography? More particularly, how might young people be positioned to develop effective and ethical responses, in our digital age, to local and global concerns? Such are the questions we…

Drawing on qualitative methodologies that integrate verbal and non-verbal texts, this study investigated novice teachers' attributions of their experiences of internship, as conveyed through a visual text. Novices were invited to design a visual text that represented their experience during internship, as part of a national call entitled…

This article deconstructs the online and offline experience to show its complexities and idiosyncratic nature. It proposes a theoretical framework designed to conceptualise aspects of meaning-making across on- and offline contexts. In arguing for the "(im)materiality" of literacy, it makes four propositions which highlight the complex…

Even though the existence and importance of inner forms of sign-making are acknowledged in social-semiotic educational research, their contours have, none the less, yet to be charted in a systematic way. This article uses a combination of social-semiotic and pragmatist approaches to bring into focus some characteristics of pupils' inner…

This year-long ethnographic case study examined high school teachers' participation in technology-focused professional development. By pairing a dialogical perspective on teacher identity with a micro-level analysis of narratives, findings indicate that teachers use language and other semiotic resources to express their own identity as well…

This article considers the impact of the increasing use of the visual mode in texts found in urban landscapes on two 3-year-olds' understanding of communication practices. The data discussed are taken from a study into a group of 3- to 6-year-olds' interaction with and emerging comprehension of the visual mode and its connection to…

In response to the limitations of the nation-state as a conceptual frame for the study of linguistic landscapes (LL), this article argues for a transnational approach that accounts for the material reconfigurations and symbolic reimaginations of space in the context of global flows and migrations (Appadurai, 1996). This approach enables one to…

Recent studies have advocated that mathematical meaning is mediated by gestures. This case study explores the gestures kindergarten children produce when learning spatial concepts in a mathematics classroom setting. Based on a video study of a mathematical lesson in a kindergarten class, we concentrated on the verbal and non-verbal behavior of one…

This two and a half year study examines how non-native English-speaking Burmese refugee students from first to third grades made meaning of scientific informational texts. The study is framed by sociocultural theory and transactional theory. Primary data were drawn from 160 student retellings of scientific informational texts. Secondary data…

The threshold concepts approach to student learning and curriculum design now informs an empirical research base comprising over 170 disciplinary and professional contexts. It draws extensively on the notion of troublesomeness in a "liminal" space of learning. The latter is a transformative state in the process of learning in which there…

Educational philosophy in English-speaking countries tends to be informed mainly by analytic philosophy common to Western thinking. A welcome alternative is provided by pragmatism in the tradition of Peirce, James and Dewey. Still, the habit of the so-called linguistic turn has a firm grip in terms of analytic philosophy based on the logic of…

Wim Wenders' film "Wings of Desire" tells the story of an angel who wishes to become mortal in order to know the simple joy of human life. Told from the angel's point of view, the film is shot in black and white. But at the very instant the angel perceives the realities of human experience, the film blossoms into colour. In…

When trying to help teachers cope with the critical situations they face in classrooms, public policies are mainly concerned with improving initial teacher training. I claim in this article that the role of lifelong learning should no longer be undermined and that the design of teachers' training should be supported by a thorough examination…

The recent development of biosemiotics has revealed the achievement of knowledge and the development of science to be the results of the semiosis of all life forms, including those commonly regarded as cultural constructs. Education is thus a semiosic structure to which evolution itself has adapted, while learning is the semiotic phenomenon that…

In several of his papers, Charles S. Peirce illustrates processes of interpreting and understanding signs by examples from second language vocabulary teaching and learning. The insights conveyed by means of these little pedagogical scenarios are not meant as contributions to the psychology of second language learning, but they aim at elucidating…