Teaching at the Margins: Semiotics, Power, and Meaning in the Lived Experience of an Island Teacher
Keywords:
island teaching, semiotics, marginality, critical pedagogy, teacher identityAbstract
Teaching on a remote island is rarely understood as a site of intellectual rigour, civic commitment, and quiet transformation. This study challenges that assumption by exploring the lived experience of one teacher navigating the entangled forces of semiotics, power, and marginality within an island setting in the central Philippines. Drawing on phenomenological, interpretivist, and critical paradigms and employing a casual interview alongside document analysis of teaching artefacts, this study examines how pedagogical signs, symbols, and practices reveal an island teacher’s deeper values about care, identity, civic-mindedness, and becoming. Theoretically anchored in semiotics, critical pedagogy, and postcolonial and island studies perspectives, the analysis surfaces three interconnected findings: that marginality is lived as adaptability, initiative, and resourcefulness in response to chronic scarcity; that teaching artefacts function as coherent sign systems illustrating civic responsibility, ethical formation, and community embeddedness; and that professional identity is continuously negotiated through the competing demands of institutional power, local culture, and environmental precarity. Crucially speaking, this study does not frame island teaching as deficit-driven. Instead, it foregrounds how a teacher at geographical, peripheral and epistemic margins converts structural constraints into meaningful, context-responsive pedagogy, thus repositioning the classroom as a critical space where local knowledge is legitimised, student voice is cultivated, human agency is pursued, and dominant educational hierarchies are quietly but persistently contested. The island, in this sense, is not merely a backdrop but an active semiotic landscape that shapes what teaching can mean, and what it can become.
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