Knowledge In Motion

Space, Time And Curriculum In Undergraduate Physics And Management

Jan Nespor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9780750702706
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317827238
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Using an analysis of learning by a case study comparison of two undergraduate courses at a United States University, Nespor examines the way in which education and power merge in physics and management. Through this study of politics and practices of knowledge, he explains how students, once accepted on these courses, are facilitated on a path to power; physics and management being core disciplines in modern society. Taking strands from constructivist psychology, post-modern geography, actor-network theory and feminist sociology, this book develops a theoretical language for analysing the production and use of knowledge. He puts forward the idea that learning, usually viewed as a process of individual minds and groups in face-to-face interaction, is actually a process of activities organised across space and time and how organisations of space and time are produced in social practice.; Within this context educational courses are viewed as networks of a larger whole, and individual courses are points in the network which link a wider relationship by way of texts, tasks and social practices intersecting with them. The book shows how students enrolled on such courses automatically become part of a network of power and knowledge.

Chapter 1

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Knowledge in Space and Time

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Most forms of social theory have failed to take seriously enough not only the temporality of social conduct but also its spatial attributes. At first sight, nothing seems more banal and uninstructive than to assert that social activity occurs in time and space. But neither time nor space have been incorporated into the center of social theory, they are ordinarily treated more as ‘environments’ in which social conduct is enacted … rather than [as] integral to its occurence (Giddens, 1979, p. 202; quoted in Soja, 1985, p. 120).

My strategy in this chapter will be to dismantle a network of assumptions about ‘knowledge’ and ‘learning’ by depicting educational practice and research as revolving around a simple question: how is activity in one setting (such as a classroom) related to activity in settings distant in space and time (other classrooms or workplaces)? I want to suggest that all our notions of learning, development, teaching, curriculum and reproduction can be read as answers to this question about space-time relations, yet all suppress considerations of spatiality. At one extreme we have information processors and cognitive structures that roam unproblematically across space-time, at the other situated or distributed cognitions that don't move at all (and in between ideas that share the weaknesses of both). None of this will do. There are no disembodied heads about, but neither are there isolated social interactions or localized communities of practice. We live in a global world system and no analysis of knowledge and learning will suffice that cannot take this into account: that my activity writing this and yours in reading it cannot be explicated without understanding how we're linked to one another, to those around us, to world economies and global flows of culture that shape and provide resources for everyday practice.

The tactic of this work is to foreground the production and organization of space and time and look at schooling as a web of movements spun from multiple flows of material resources and representations. The focus is under-graduate education in the fields of physics and management. The topic is the production of actors for the spatial and temporal networks of power that we call disciplines.

In this chapter I construct a language for talking about how educational programs define trajectories¹ through material spaces — buildings, classrooms and laboratories — to bring students into contact with representations of other spaces and times — textbooks, equations, lectures, lab equipment, and so on — that make those ‘absent’ spaces ‘present’ in textual form. It is in these organizations of space and time that we will find the key to understanding how students ‘learn’ in fields of ‘knowledge’ such as undergraduate physics and management.

The substantive material of the book, then, focuses on students' academic encounters with the powerful disciplines they aspire to belong to, but the thread that ties the material together is the issue of how education is accomplished as a space-time process. The best place to begin addressing that issue is an arena from which space and time have usually been thoroughly excluded: the ‘individual mind’, the processes of cognition and learning.

From Individual ‘Learners’ to Networks of Knowledge Builders

Over the past quarter of a century ‘learning’ has commonly been conceived as a process taking place within individuals. People were said to gradually build up integrated capacities — composed of ‘attitudes’, ‘rules’, ‘schemata’, ‘domain knowledge’, ‘contextual modules’, or whatever — that could be carried around, called up, and deployed as needed in specific contexts (LCHC, 1982, p. 651). Contexts themselves were usually conceptualized in terms of decontextualized ‘problems’ or ‘tasks’ (e.g., Lesgold, 1988; cf. McDermott, 1990; Larkin, 1985, for physics; Isenberg, 1987, for management). Since the focus was usually on the individual's mental representations of the tasks, the effect, as Lave (1988) points out in her powerful critique of cognitive science, was a reduction of the social world to representations in individual minds.

This focus on discrete, independent individuals has been shared by approaches as dissimilar as the social psychological accounts that focused on individuals' attitudes and orientations (Perry, 1970; Katchadorian and Boli, 1985), and the cognitive psychologies that formulated ‘learning theory’ in terms of the internal architecture of ‘the learner’ (e.g., ‘Conspicuous in the basic equipment of the learner is a memory system of virtually unlimited capacity…’ etc., Estes, 1989, p. 42). In all of these approaches considerations of space and time were suppressed: the ‘individuals’ studied were not situated in specific social-historical fields of practice, and the ‘tasks’ the individuals engaged in were considered as bounded, homogeneous events rather than intersections of multiple on-going activities.²

To begin re-inserting space and time into accounts of educational practice we have to let go of ‘the individual’ and look for units of analysis that can be spatially and temporally situated. As Butler (1988) and Kondo (1990) argue, the preoccupation with ‘individuals’ is grounded in a ‘metaphysics of substance’ that creates a rigid division between the ‘psychological’ and the ‘social’.

Identities are, in this view, fixed, bounded entities containing some essence or substance that is expressed in distinctive attributes. This conventional trope opposes ‘the self’ as bounded essence, filled with ‘real feelings’ and identity to a ‘world’ or to a ‘society’ which is spatially and ontologically distinct from the self (Butler, 1988). Indeed, the academic division of labor recapitulates this distinction in its separation of the disciplines, distinguishing ‘psychology’ from ‘sociology’ (Kondo, 1990, pp. 33–34).

Getting around these dichotomies to a vision of actors as something more than mere sociological or psychological entities (or some additive combination of the two) is enormously difficult. Consider work in the tradition of Vygotsky (1978; 1986), where psychological processes are seen as inextricably linked to social activity. Newman (1990), for example, defines cognition as a property not of individual students but of the ‘interactional systems’ in which students engage (cf. also LCHC, 1982; 1983; Moll, 1990; Newman, Griffin and Cole, 1989; Wertsch, 1985):

What is outside the head is just as much a part of the cognitive system as what is inside the head. … Tasks and understanding are observed first in interaction before being internalized as an individual's capacity. … Meaning is actively constructed in interaction (Newman, 1990, p. 188).

Instead of mere carriers of mental ‘substances’, people — at least at certain points of time — are viewed as components of social-cognitive configurations. Instead of solving externally imposed tasks and problems they actively construct and resolve practical dilemmas. Their ‘knowing’ (although it ultimately takes the form of decontextualized, ‘internal’ essences) is the product of activities contextualized in space and time.

Consider how these ideas might reshape the way we talk about knowledge and learning: the way I make meaning when I'm sitting in the local bar arguing with someone about knowledge is different from how I make it right now as I'm writing this. In the bar meaning is constructed in conversation and it varies according to whom I'm talking, our level of sobriety and so forth. In my office I can consult books, articles, fieldnotes, interview transcripts and earlier drafts of this text. The difference between what I ‘know’ in the two settings isn't in my ability to articulate some head-knowledge that remains constant across settings, nor do the books, people, or other elements of the contexts simply ‘add to’ some knowledge that already exists in my head. Rather, in the two settings I'm part of different cognitive systems (I'm a different ‘I’). My ‘psychological’ state is integrally connected to, indeed is a product of, my ‘social’ situation (which includes inanimate ‘tools’ as well as other people). Finally, my experiences in each setting alter me, my individual mind, in some durable way (I internalize something) that shapes future activity.

The problem with this approach is that it depicts the social distribution of knowledge and ‘cognition’ as a transitory or intermediary stage on the route to ‘internalized’ — that is, despatialized and detemporalized — knowledge (cf. Lave and Wenger, 1991). In this sense, Vygotskian work moves ‘cognition’ back and forth from one side of the social-psychological divide to the other but fails to challenge the system of representation that creates ‘the social’ and ‘the psychological’ as opposed categories in the first place.³ More importantly, even on their own terms, Vygotskian approaches succeed in integrating the social and the psychological only by embracing an extremely narrow conception of ‘the social’. In practice they focus on face-to-face interactions taking place in small, circumscribed settings. Absent are considerations of social structural or systemic properties, of interactions between people and things that are distant from one another.⁴ What makes this neglect so problematic is that social organization itself, at least since the development of the modern world system, has expanded beyond immediate, face-to-face interactions to link the activities of individuals who may never be physically co-present or engaged in direct interaction with one another (Giddens, 1981). As Gregory (1988) puts it:

Insofar as routinized social practices are recognizably the same over varying spans of time and space … they flow from and fold back into structural relations which reach beyond the ‘here and now’ to define interactions with others who are absent in time or space. This is what ‘society’ came to mean after the eighteenth century: the larger world stretching away from the human body and the human being (pp. 80– 82; emphasis added).

Making sense of knowledge practice as ‘interaction’ with others distant in time and space — a form of interaction pervasive in modern society — is the key problem I'm working with in this book. People don't participate as ‘individuals’ in pristine or local small-scale ‘communities of practice’ (Lave and Wenger, 1991), nor do they take on stable ‘indentities’ by becoming ‘full participants’ in such communities. Such views ignore the fact that ‘communities’ aren't just situated in space and time, they are ways of producing and organizing space and time and setting up patterns of movement across space-time: they are networks of power. People don't simply move into these networks in an apprenticeship mode, they are defined, enrolled and mobilized along particular trajectories that move them across places in a network and allow them to move other parts of the world into that network. A ‘community’, if we still wanted to use the term, would have to be seen as composed of extremely heterogeneous and dispersed elements linked together in what, following Callon (1986), I will call ‘actor-networks’: fluid and contested definitions of identities and alliances that are simultaneously frameworks of power.

I will discuss these notions in the next section, but here let me try to give you a sense of what I'm talking about by reworking that account I gave above about my own ‘cognitive system’. Before, I was worried about whether ‘I’ had the same mind in the office as in the bar. But where am T right now?⁵ You and I, as reader and writer, are separated from each other in time and space, and move together now only through the medium of this text. The text describes people, places, and events — undergraduate programs of education in physics and management — that are spatially and temporally distant from both of us. Our relationship to them is different. You were never in the space-times of these programs, I was. Unlike the faculty and students who lived through the programs, however, I intersected with them only briefly — on the trajectory of a social science career — and now, instead of moving through them, I move them across time and distance and into your field of vision. I mobilize compressed, stabilized representations of them — fieldnotes and interview transcripts — and link them with other mobile representations (‘the literature’) to formulate this even more compressed and mobile account, a book. Times and spaces long gone now appear before your eyes. Read the text and there ‘they’ are. Does the text ‘describe’ them? It creates them, constitutes them (and me), not as fixed essences — the students or professors could create accounts to contest mine, or you could attack my technology for building and moving representations (my methodology) — but as the ‘contestable and constrained stories’ (Haraway, 1989) of a ‘positioned subject’ (Rosaldo, 1989). The fate of the stories is in the hands of others. To move them I need access to technologies and organizational means for circulating representations (publishers, distributors), and ultimately I need people like you to use my representations in your representations, in other times and spaces. To get access to these sorts of things, to spread myself out over space-time, I need a disciplinary apparatus.⁶

The ‘knowledge’ in this example isn't the property of a ‘cognitive system’ (whether conceived as intra- or inter-psychological in nature). Rather, to borrow language from Callon (1986) and Latour (1987), it's the property of a network that produces space and time by mobilizing and accumulating distant settings in central positions: not just my own mobilizations of the programs, but the other mobilizations (the published theories and related studies in the literature) that I attach them to, the networks that connect us, and so forth. As Latour (1987) puts it:

What is called ‘knowledge’ cannot be defined without understanding what gaining knowledge means.… ‘Knowledge’ is not something that could be described by itself or by opposition to ‘ignorance’ or to ‘belief’, but only by considering a whole cycle of accumulation: how to bring things back to a place for someone to see it for the first time so that others might be sent again to bring other things back. How to be familiar with things, people and events, which are distant (1987, p. 220).⁷

‘Disciplines’ such as physics and management are constituted by cycles of accumulation within networks that organize flows of people and things through space and time. I will treat education in physics and management as similarly being network/networking phenomena: as spatializing and temporalizing the activity of students to connect them to disciplinary practice. ‘Learning’ (in) a discipline isn't a matter of transforming one's psychological make-up (whether we see this as a function of developing internal ‘equipment’ or as the outcome of social activity). Instead, ‘learning’ should refer to changes in the spatial and temporal organization of the distributed actors/networks that we're always part of. It isn't, contrary to Vygotskian interpretations, that we move from social to ‘internalized’ knowing, from inter- to intra-psychological experiences: knowing is always distributed (Lave, 1988). Rather, we move through different spatio-temporal distributions of knowing. Students enter into disciplinary practices when they begin to move along trajectories that keep them within the narrow range of space-times and distributions that constitute the discipline: when...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Knowledge, Identity and School Life Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Knowledge in Space and Time
• Chapter 2 Producing Material Space-Time and Constructing Students in Physics
• Chapter 3 Connecting Students to Practice: Mobilization in Physics
• Chapter 4 Constructing and Isolating Academic Space in Management
• Chapter 5 Mobilizing Bodies for Management
• Chapter 6 Knowledge in Motion
• Appendix 1: The Place of the Major
• Appendix 2: Making Knowledge about Knowledge in Motion
• References
• Index