What University signs might tell us about contemporary pedagogic practices

Abstract University teaching and learning spaces are saturated with signage that signals how we understand academic classroom activity, yet these artefacts remain unexamined within learning environments research. This paper positions such signage not as neutral directives but as artefacts that work to actively shape and narrate how teaching, learning, and bodies are governed in contemporary higher education. Drawing on photomapping, categorisation, and critical semiotic analysis of signage across teaching and learning spaces in an English and a Swedish university, the study demonstrates how these messages can construct classrooms as depersonalised, tightly controlled environments in which technological systems are privileged and embodied presence is framed as a potential disruption. By foregrounding signage as consequential, the paper advances theoretical understandings of how material-semiotic arrangements shape pedagogical discourse and practice. Suggestively, we need to reimagine campus environments that narrate and discursively support more relational, humane, and innovative forms of teaching and learning.