Semiotising the student perception of learning outcomes in British higher education

ABSTRACT

This article presents a semiotic analysis of the student perception of learning outcomes in British higher education. It centres on three annotated images in Frank Furedi’s article “The Unhappiness Principles”, published in Times Higher Education in 2012. Drawing upon Peircean semiosis and iconicity, it provides a rhetoric-infused interpretation of the word–image complementarity exhibited in student participants’ written commentaries on the three images. This leads to a dialectical view of formative and summative assessment, in which process and product create each other through the same continuum of learning and teaching. In highlighting intellectualism as central to the ethnography of university life, this article argues that learner autonomy and the potential for transformation is deemed essential to the student experience in higher education.

KEYWORDS:

• Peircean semiotics
• word–image complementarity
• learning outcomes
• learner autonomy
• higher education

Acknowledgements

The author would like to dedicate this article to the memory of Bob Ballard for his insights into different modes of representation. His special thanks are due to Femke de Jong for granting him the permission to use her illustrations, and to the students involved for their time and cooperation.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

James Ma is a linguist. He received his PhD from the University of Bristol and undertook subsequent postdoctoral training at the University of Oxford. Over the past few years, his scholarship has centred on Peircean semiotics and its profundity for modern communication, resonating with his long-standing interests in Hallidayan linguistics, Vygotskian psychology, hermeneutic phenomenology and a priori methods. His recent publications include “The synergy of Peirce and Vygotsky as an analytical approach to the multimodality of semiotic mediation” in Mind, Culture, and Activity, Volume 21, Issue 4, 2014.

Notes

1. Within the UK, “post-1992 universities” is used to refer to former polytechnics, central institutions or colleges of higher education that were given university status in 1992 or thereafter. These institutions aim to widen participation for students from “non-traditional” backgrounds and often identify themselves as teaching-intensive universities.

2. I am indebted to Bob Ballard for this insight.