04/30/2000

Icon or Symbol: A Teacher's Moral Dilemma by  Kimberly J. Sloan

This articles talks about a teacher's classroom experience. The author works at a juvenile prison for all male offenders. One day, while teaching Hamlet, she drew a picture of a crown  to represent Prince Hamlet of Denmark, and the crown was interpreted as a gang symbol by the members of my class. The rest was chaos in the classroom.

After talking to students and counselors after this incident, she discovered that the students thought she had somehow affiliated with the Ghetto Boys of Indianapolis. This angered her students who consider themselves members of a rival gang.

The real question is what we think about such a situation and how we define our roles in the classroom. Peirce's theory of signs and his classification from the point of view of the object of the sign (representant) is helpful in understanding this classroom incident. Peirce defined a sign as "anything which is so determined by something else, called its object, and so determines an effect upon a person, which effect I call its interpretant". 

In this view, educators use signs all of the time, to interact with students. Teachers use signs (representants) in hopes of helping students to understand information. Sometimes lessons revolve around coming to some sort of "consensus" and understanding of a meaning of a sign such as the literary use of theme. Often, lessons simply use representants to help relate other ideas or signs, as in the case of using the drawing of the crown to represent Hamlet's royal status.

Peirce's classification of signs from the point of view of the object is helpful in understanding the incident in the classroom. Peirce classified the relation of a sign to its object in one of three ways: as an icon, index, or symbol. An icon has some "quality" that is shared with the object. An index has a "cause and effect link" such as a weathervane predicts wind direction. A symbol "denotes its object by virtue of a habit, law, or convention". A symbol is an abstract representation of the object.

In order to illustrate the power structure of Shakespeare's play Hamlet, the teacher used the drawing of the crown on the board to be interpreted as an icon. A drawn crown (representant) looks like the "real" crown (object).  The idea  was to "map" the character names on the board to show their relationships in the play. Yet some of the students did not accept the drawn crown as an icon, but instead perceived it as a symbol. To them, the crown was a gang symbol that demonstrated their "law" of affiliation with that particular gang. It was as if they could see no other interpretation for the crown. The author never had the opportunity to explain that the crown was to represent Hamlet's royalty.

By understanding Peirce's classification, that representants can be perceived in different ways. What is icon to somebody may be symbol to others. The question for a teacher is to find out what to do. Learn all symbols and icons (all signs) that the students know, or use this new knowledge as a path and method for instruction. Since the former is impossible in that we will never be able to fully know our students' sign systems, the author intends to focus on the latter.

This miscommunication could have been avoided had she known more about gang script and chosen not to use a picture that could be perceived as a "choosing sides". She prefers to use what the students do know and understand as the basis for more learning. Perhaps the drawing of the crown could be a good starting point for discussing the ideas we associate with it both as teacher and student and some common ideas about the crown that relate to power, respect, and leadership. It could be a path for a discussion of how people interpret things differently which could even lead into a discussion about how different people view the so-called power of gangs. 

By reflecting back on this whole situation in the classroom, the author sees that the "misinterpretation," or rather, different interpretations of signs can be used a "teachable moment," a starting place to talk about people's various perceptions of all things in the world (the sign process). Learning must be a complex interplay of ideas and experience. 

As in Eco's metaphor of the rhizome, the structure which "may be characterized as potentially infinite in that every point of the rhizome can and must be connected with every other point" makes the realm of learning sound very exciting! Eco believed our minds have the "possibility of an infinite juxtapositions". For both students and teacher this model "represents the unlimited potential for meaning making or knowledge construction". How amazing that we can and do create our world and the understanding of it in this way! Yet this "inconceivable globality" makes us "construct personal structures . . . that help us 'localize' our experience". 

In other words, this infiniteness makes us create our own "umwelts" which results in not always understanding others' points of view and sign systems. Our students' experiences are often different from our own: they are incarcerated, they may have witnessed or performed violent acts, and many have know the pain of hunger, poverty, and abuse. Often, this lack of collective experience serves to create misunderstanding and boundaries to learning as it did in the case of this drawing. It is important for teachers to try to understand the students' umwelts and how these umwelts "define (their) world for (them), what they believe, and what they take to be true". We may not often agree with what we find, but the knowledge may help us at least create a safer environment and possibly a more productive learning environment in the classroom.