Semiosis, hybridity, and the mediated mind

Knowledge within the digital age is increasingly perceived as being connected, decentred and interactive; consequently, knowledge becomes less about ‘simple and durable “truths'’’ and more about our ability to ‘manage complex and rapidly changing environments (Downes 2012). This move from self-present understanding to dynamic rhizomatic knowledge production challenges established representational epistemologies, in which knowledge is restricted along convergent pathways increasingly incompatible within a globalized society. In contrast, emergentist pedagogies provide ‘singular processes of learning’ (Deleuze, 1994) that insist ‘knowledge is neither a representation of something more ‘real’ than itself, nor an ‘object’ that can be transferred from one place to the next’, rather it emerges during participation in the world (Osberg / Biesta 2008). This chapter highlights how the field of Edusemiotics offers an effective approach to learning within an emergent conception of knowledge; by perceiving learning as semiosis, a process whereby meaning is always already mediated by signs, it expands boundaries of cognition beyond dualistic cartesian schemas, generating an image of thought that allows us to realise new potential for education within the 21st Century (Deely & Semetsky 2017).