The behavior of human beings is not caused mechanically by given circumstances. In other words, human beings act according to meanings. We are only able to do what we do taking account of what things mean to us. So meanings are a fundamental precondition of education and learning, of enlightenment and emancipation.

Meanings are much more than what intended verbal statements are able to evoke explicitly. Meanings also emerge from the state and movement of our bodies, from the shape and function of our tools and commodities, from our organization in time and space, from the way clothes, vehicles and architectures envelop our bodies, from our rituals and hierarchies, from our arts and epistemological concepts. Meanings emerge from every part and detail of the meaningful culturally mediated world we live in. All these phenomena are of crucial influence to the becoming and unfolding of a reflective, autonomous and responsible subject as it is aimed at by civilized and liberal education.

Most of the meanings that lead us through our daily lives remain inconspicuous or even opaque to our conscious perceiving, thinking and reasoning, and so are most of the influences of and on educational processes. This diagnosis gains exceeding significance in a historical period where education through obvious force and oppression is no longer acceptable for the majority of the educators and the educated. Under these conditions, oppressive 'dark pedagogies' could be expected to run into crisis, but they are nevertheless about to find a way of survival. And this way is a fallback to unrecognized structures and implications of situations and actions. Mental, intellectual or emotional domination still continues in silent habituations, hidden manipulations or the enigmatic 'invisible hand' of self-regulating constraints.

Several scientific approaches have been developed to shed light on the whole spectrum of meaningful phenomena within educational settings and procedures.Just to mention a few of them: Phenomenological studies have lined out the role of corporality, semiotic research contributed to analyses of all sorts of symbolicallymediated artifacts, the hidden-curriculum-approach exhibited the silent impact of school-education, attempts of critical discourse-analysis gained insightintothe different and momentous premises of thinking and acting, practice- and actor-network-theories have shown the meaningful dimension of practical interaction between human actors and even between human and artificial ones.

These approaches have been developed within different scientific disciplines and sometimes at a distance to educational questions but they have already been adopted by educational theories and research. In this symposium researchers affiliated to different traditions will explicate their conceptual arguments and demonstrate on the basis of case studies how they access the emergence and function of meaning within educational processes. The presentations shall exemplify the effects of meanings within pedagogical contexts and their (possible) impacts on learning and teaching.