Semiotic Inquiry in Education

In this paper I present the view that inquiry in education can profit from insights from semiotics. Semiotics holds that cognition, or semiosis, is the building up of structures of signs from experience. We create a personal world, an Umwelt, that determines what we perceive and know. The environment also “affords” various structures and these affordances offer special ways to interact with the environment. In this model, inquiry is seen as the perception of affordance, a process whereby we come to read the environment as a system of signs. An example is offered.