“Learning to interpret the signs of the times” – cultural semiotically oriented learning tasks in a controversial historical culture

Our contemporary world is filled with numerous historical-cultural objectifications, each with controversial attributions of meaning, which can also be perceived daily by students: history-related posts on social media, historical video games, history programs and films, "Stolpersteine" (commemorative plaques) remembering people deported and murdered during the Nazi era, historical exhibitions, political speeches, national and war memorials, memorial sites and places of remembrance, historical festivals and celebrations, historical novels and non-fiction books, medieval fairs, historically themed restaurants, and much more. The focus of the research project presented here is on the skills and abilities of learners to decode and interpret the aesthetic, cognitive, and political aspects of historical-cultural objectifications as symbols, signs, or conglomerates of signs (syntagms). According to the approach of cultural semiotics, such objectifications, as carriers of historical-cultural meaning, are both tools for objectifying (historical) experiences and instruments for communicative negotiation of (historical) significance. Whether material (artefacts) or immaterial (mentifacts), historical-cultural objectifications form a network of socially objectified and subjectively experienced meaningfulness. The diverse layers of meaning in historical-cultural signs are not inherent properties of the objectifications themselves; rather, they represent a relationship between the symbols or sign carriers on one side and the respective conceptions of reality of the recipients on the other. Therefore, dialogicality is the communicative modality in which the historical-cultural 'signs of the times' unfold their effects. In the sense of the semiotician Umberto Eco, this can be described as a dialogical shift in perspective as an iterative semiosis: when perspectives change in dialogue, the interpretant itself becomes a linguistic sign, which in turn generates a new object and a new interpretant. This results in a process of 'semiotic dialogicality.'

Such a culturally semiotic understanding of historical learning, in our opinion, justifies a subject-specific task culture that encourages learners to engage productively with the 'signs of different times' and their controversial interpretations, in order to relate these meaningfully to their own conceptual world, either through critical integration or even negation. The research project presented here aims, in the first step, to empirically explore the range of possibilities for specific communicative or discursive practices in the communal negotiation of historical-cultural meaning through group discussions with students, while also tracing exemplary performative structures. The second, also empirical step builds on the first, formulating different learning tasks based on the findings, which will then be tested in a qualitative experiment. These tasks are designed to particularly promote the development of abilities for the communal and communicative negotiation of historical-cultural meaning. The goal of the study is to gain insights into the essential question for historical learning: what connections exist between task formats and historical thinking operations, and what learning outcomes can students achieve when systematically guided toward a cultural-semiotic interpretation of historical-cultural objectifications through learning tasks explicitly designed to uncover historical-cultural meaning?