From Peirce’s Speculative Rhetoric to Educational Rhetoric

Abstract

My aim in this article is to examine ways of designing a new ‘educational rhetoric’ based on CS. Peirce’s speculative rhetoric, the ‘doctrine of the general conditions of the reference of Symbols and other Signs to the Interpretants which they aim to determine’ (CP 2.93). This analysis is based on a general idea that has been investigated by several educators, teachers and researchers mainly within the context of critical pedagogy and educational semiotics: school life is regulated by what may be called a classical dispositio, which is a certain way of organising speech in the classroom

My analysis of dispositio is based on the ‘rhetorical turn’ that Colapietro sees in Peirce’s later semiotics and pragmaticism and defines as an integrated analysis of signs’ effects.This ‘rhetorical turn’ offers educators resources that allow them to rethink how students’ epistemological activity, understood as a series of semiosic events, leads them to develop new knowledge and modes of conduct. In this paper, I will consider the way such an integrated analysis of signs’ effects may support the design of a new educational rhetoric.

First, I investigate ‘ordinary’ educational rhetoric (the way semiotic resources are chosen and used) and the dispositio (the way in which speech is organised) that expresses it. More precisely, I question the way teachers ‘arrange’ their own speech,which is not only a technical issue, but also an ethical one. By ‘educational rhetoric’, I am referring to the specific organisation of discourse and speech in educational contexts, in addition to questioning the strategies implemented by teachers and students when they produce speech acts and cultural forms within the classroom.

This perspective on classical educational rhetoric leads to the conclusion that a new educational rhetoric should be designed as a way of replacing ‘directive knowledge’ with a ‘dialectical mode of inquiry’ One goal of such self-reflexive rhetoric would be, among others, to developstudents’ critical skills and reflexivity.

In this context, Peirce’s rhetorical turn is a fundamental resource Indeed, Peirce may suggest a radically new conception of teaching by stressing the function of mediation performed by signs and by undermining the dualist conception of cognition; speculative rhetoric is a useful analytical tool when one is trying to instil semiotic consciousness in the classroom, because it makes the relationship between meaning-making and knowledge-making explicit.

Finally, I consider ‘Institutional Pedagogy’ to be an instance of this new dispositio, a pragmaticist one, which meets certain conditions, such as the following: the existence in the classroom of particular communication patterns; the use of multimodal semiotic resources; and a set of semiotic tools and functions, which are organised along the lines of a specific structure.

I emphasise the part played by such a dispositio in the semiotic life of a classroom on a macro level (organising experience, crisis and inquiry), on a meso level (referring to cultural forms, speech acts and rituals) and on a micro level (concerning the relations between teachers and students).

Keywords:

• educational semiotics
• pragmatism
• rhetoric
• critical pedagogy
• institutional pedagogy