VISUALIZATION OF THE SPECIFICITY OF THE PHILOSOPHICAL WORLDVIEW: DETECTION OF SEMIOTIC OPTIMUM IN THE SELECTION OF ILLUSTRATIVE MATERIAL FOR AN OPEN LECTURE

An explanation of two circumstances precedes the presentation of the main content of this article. The first relates to the fact that, with this article, the journal opens a new “Open Lecture” section. The second reveals both the meaning of the words in the section title and the primary purpose of the research, the first results of which are presented in this article. The phrase “open lecture” is the name of one of the procedures (established in the practice of domestic higher education), which is part of the preliminary selection of educators participating in the competition for a lecturer role. This procedure’s name defines the lecture as open to professional criticism: discussion of the content and its structure, the manner of communication between the lecturer and the audience and the likelihood of students achieving educational goals. The originality of the presented research lies in the fact that, firstly, all these components of the discussion are understood from the standpoint of semiotics, respectively, as semantic, syntactic and pragmatic translations. Secondly, these translations are understood as the interconnection of specific stages of the information process. It opens up the possibility of modelling the structure of the lecture content based on the characteristics of information (value, quantity, effectiveness). Thirdly, the stages of the information process are understood as mechanisms of self-organization, which makes it possible to interpret learning results from the standpoint of stimulating a transition (or lack thereof) of the students from simple reception to acceptance. Fourthly, the very formulation of the research problem is the problem of discovering the semiotic optimum in organizing the learning space. One can emphasize that, in this formulation, the problem within the pedagogical theory and practice framework is posed for the first time since the semiotic essence of education remains unnoticed in pedagogical science. The circumstance for implementing the semiotic optimum, assuming that this optimum is discovered, is the educator’s clear understanding of the student’s goals (spectrum and hierarchy of goals) in the classroom rather than the goals of the educator’s activity. Therefore, the subject of the study was chosen to be the first lecture on a subject that is extremely rarely taught at school in domestic education. Thereby, it is a lecture for which the audience may have minimal prejudice. More precisely, there can only be a premonition of the complexity of the subject, the isolation of its content from real life, which reduces the initial goals of students only to mastering ways to overcome this ‘disaster’ in their curriculum. It states the following need for the educator: (a) to have empathy; (b) maintain a balance between complexity of content and simplicity of explanation. Both necessities boil down to finding a measure, an optimal measure. The article justifies that illustrative material for a lecture should (1) serve not as proof but only as an explanation of the lecture statements. The choice of material should (2) be made from various visualizations that are events in intellectual history and also visually express the multi-layered context of known metaphors. In the case of our research, these are illustrations of works by artists from the Bruegel family; this intends (in addition to the mentioned) to demonstrate the metamorphoses of ideas within one philosophical school or tradition. Illustrations must (3) meet the requirement of end-to-end examples throughout the entire course of lectures. The material we have chosen illustrates the following. The contemplation of the world by a genius leads to the extraction of an essential detail unnoticed by others; expressing this detail in abstract form initiates a dialogue; expressing this detail in a relevant form creates grounds for interpretation among many people, which ultimately shapes the worldview of those people. The fact that there is a known case of erasing details from a painting and that the demonstrated artworks received different titles over time illustrates the change in topical emphases. The number of illustrations should (4) meet the condition: no more than one visual demonstration in a fifteen-minute lecture time interval. The article presents results obtained as of now only empirically. Experience shows that compliance with the above conditions ensures the stability of impressions among students and contributes to their understanding (and not just memorization) of the main messages of the lecture.

Peter Bruegel the Elder, information processes, effectiveness, education subjects’s goals