Umwelt building in creative education: exploring interdisciplinary pedagogies in the module AcrossRCA

The article presents reflections on how a range of concepts and postulates from biosemiotics, generative semiotics, and semiotics of culture can be reunited in the production and implementation of pedagogical practices. Written around the case study of an interdisciplinary module, AcrossRCA, the article describes the use of notions such as Umwelt, semiosphere, the generative trajectory, and criteria for the selection of the corpus as tools to support the dialogue between cultures, languages, disciplines, and professional practices. The sections outline the author’s previous work utilizing semiotics as a pedagogical tool in teaching theoretical subjects in UK creative higher education, and the expansion of the model to accommodate the teaching for AcrossRCA. One of the key insights from the case study relates to the role of the pedagogue and educator as a facilitator of translations, extrapolating the concept from linguistic translations to the translation of cultural practices, ideological positions, and professional and epistemological postulates. The experiment responds to the argument of integrating paradigms within semiotic theories, searching for points of dialogue between the Anglo-Saxon, French, and Russian–Estonian paradigms, in dialogue with critical pedagogy and writings from philosophy, anthropology, and sociology which support the argument for holistic practices across disciplines.