Predicating from an early age: edusemiotics and the potential of children’s preconceptions

This paper aims to explain how semiotics and constructivism can collaborate in an educational epistemology by developing a joint approach to prescientific conceptions. Empirical data and findings of constructivist research are interpreted in the light of Peirce’s semiotics. Peirce’s semiotics is an anti-psychologistic logic (CP 2.252; CP 4.551; W 8:15; Pietarinen in Signs of logic, Springer, Dordrecht, 2006; Stjernfelt in Diagrammatology. An investigation on the borderlines of phenomenology, ontology and semiotics, Springer, Dordrecht, 2007) and relational logic. Constructivism was traditionally developed within psychology and sociology and, therefore, some incompatibilities can be expected between these two schools. While acknowledging the differences, we explain that constructivism and semiotics share the assumption of realism that knowledge can only be developed upon knowledge and, therefore, an epistemological collaboration is possible. The semiotic analysis performed confirms the constructivist results and provides a further insight into the teacher-student relation. Like the constructivist approach, Peirce’s doctrine of agapism infers that the personal dimension of teaching must not be ignored. Thus, we argue for the importance of genuine sympathy in teaching attitudes. More broadly, the article also contributes to the development of postmodern humanities. At the end of the modern age, the humanities are passing through a critical period of transformation. There is a growing interest in semiotics and semiotic philosophy in many areas of the humanities. Such a case, on which we draw, is the development of a theoretical semiotic approach to education, namely edusemiotics (Stables and Semetsky, Pedagogy and edusemiotics: theoretical challenge/practical opportunities, Sense Publishers, Rotterdam, 2015)

Group Virtues: No Great Leap Forward with Collectivism

A body of work in ethics and epistemology has advanced a collectivist view of virtues. Collectivism holds that some social groups can be subjects in themselves which can possess attributes such as agency or responsibility. Collectivism about virtues holds that virtues (and vices) are among those attributes. By focusing on two different accounts, I argue that the collectivist virtue project has limited prospects. On one such interpretation of institutional virtues, virtue-like features of the social collective are explained by particular group-oriented features of individual role-bearers that are elicited by institutional structures or goals. On another account of groups as moral agents unbound by formal institutional constraints, to the extent that group characteristics meet the collectivist requirement, they fail to stand up as virtues in the substantive sense of a character trait. These two positions’ respective drawbacks and insights support a non-collectivist conclusion: Where there is a substantive virtue of some social group, it consists only in certain group-specific attitudes and motives of individuals qua members of that group. I end by outlining some risks in adopting collectivism about virtues as an explanatory or normative doctrine, and suggesting that we can abandon it without embracing an equally undesirable individualism in virtue theory

Enseñanza de las ciencias : revista de investigación y experiencias didácticas

Resumen basado en el de la publicaciónResumen en inglésEn primer lugar se presenta una visión general de la investigación que ha sido emprendida en base a las concepciones de los estudiantes relacionadas con la mecánica. Una característica central de la "mecánica intuitiva" de los estudiantes es la asociación entre sus nociones de fuerza y ​​movimiento. Se describen las consecuencias de tales ideas en el razonamiento de los estudiantes sobre varios sistemas estáticos y dinámicos. A continuación, se describen una serie de características generales de las concepciones alternativas de los estudiantes. posteriormente se describen las perspectivas actuales sobre el aprendizaje con particular énfasis en la perspectiva constructivista; una perspectiva que enfatiza el rol activo de los estudiantes en la construcción de su conocimiento. Finalmente se describen las consecuencias pedagógicas de adoptar esta perspectiva.ES

Enseñanza de las ciencias : revista de investigación y experiencias didácticas

Resumen basado en el de la publicaciónResumen en inglésLas diferencias entre las ideas de los niños y el pensamiento científico nos dan alguna indicación de los tipos de cambios y la magnitud de estos que se intentan promover en la comprensión de los jóvenes durante los años escolares. Se revisa cómo se pueden promover dichos cambios y se considera las implicaciones para la planificación curricular.ES