Emerging Approaches to Educational Research

Tracing the Socio-Material

Tara Fenwick, Richard Edwards, Peter Sawchuk

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780415570923
• eBook ISBN: 9781136730177
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Adult Education

The last fifteen years have seen much conceptual and methodological innovation in research on education and learning across the lifecourse, bringing both fresh insights and new dilemmas. This innovation was initially fuelled by the growing influence of conceptual framings often named as either post-structural or postmodern. The works of Foucault, Derrida and Lyotard have variously found their way into the canons of educational research, and in more recent years, the influence of the work of Deleuze and Guattari has also grown. This work has proved controversial both in the challenges it has raised for the purposes and practices of education and training but also over the assumptions underpinning such work.

As part of and also in response to the influence of post-structuralism and postmodernism in the social sciences, there have emerged and developed a further range of conceptual and methodological framings which are more relational, system and practice-focussed. Several of these framings work with a non-linear understanding of causality and embrace unpredictability in the world and undecidability in our understanding of it. They also challenge any notion of a strong boundary between the social and natural sciences.

This book explores the most significant four of these framings, how they are being taken up in research in education and learning across the lifecourse, as well as their possibilities and limitations:

• complexity science
• cultural historical activity theory (CHAT)
• actor-network theory (ANT)
• spatiality theories.

Illustrated throughout with examples drawn from educational contexts across the life courses, including schooling, post-compulsory education and training, educational policy, workplace and community-based education in North America, the UK, and Australia this vital guide to understanding fresh ways of conducting and understanding educational research will prove essential reading for everyone undertaking educational research in the modern world.

Chapter I Why sociomateriality in education?

An introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9780203817582-1

There is a long-established tradition of researching the material aspects of education, from the design of school desks to the built environment of schools (Lawn and Grosvenor 2005). Indeed, Dewey’s (1938) influential conception of learning emerging through transactions between an inquiring learner and objects of the environment could be argued to have inaugurated a sociomaterial view of education. And as we note in later chapters, Piaget, Dewey and Vygotsky each could be said to have theorized humans learning as active agents in the world. Practice – that is, doing – is not ontologically separable from learning and human development, but is the very substance of it. However, what is material is often taken to be the background context against which educational practice takes place or within which it sits, and material artefacts are often taken to be simply tools that humans use or objects they investigate. While giving a focus to the materiality of education, therefore, these approaches still tend to privilege the intentional human subject, which is assumed to be different or separate from the material; the material is the non-human. In educational research, therefore, Sørensen (2009: 2) argues that there is a ‘blindness toward the question of how educational practice is affected by materials’, and suggests that its consequence is to treat materials as mere instruments to advance educational performance. In her study of the materiality of learning, she shows how everyday educational activity and knowing are critically shaped through the material. She argues that the materiality is not consolidated within artefacts, but is distributed, such that social as well as physical processes can be understood as material. For her, things matter not as discrete and reified objects with properties, but as effects of dynamic materializing processes that cause them to emerge through gatherings and to act in indeterminate entanglements of local everyday practice. It is this relational materiality that is often overlooked in educational research.

To address this issue, in recent years a number of educational researchers have engaged with sociomaterial approaches to reclaim and rethink the material practices of education in different ways. In this book, we have chosen four different arenas within which such studies are situated: complexity theory, actor-network theory (ANT), cultural historical activity theory (CHAT), and spatiality theories. We prefer to discuss them as ‘arenas’ because these can be considered sites of contestation and performance of ideas. Each one represents a heterogeneous multiplicity of theories, or at least widely divergent uptakes of similar theoretical resources, so referring to each as a singular theory is problematic. Although each is called a ‘theory’ by its own users, most have featured debates criticizing this representation. Also problematic is the ocularcentric term of ‘perspective’, or ‘view’, to represent these explorations. Researchers in these arenas tend to emphasize knowing as enactment rather than as ‘seeing’ or as representation. In fact, they work to reveal the practices through which things become visible, conceptualizing knowledge, capabilities and subjectivities as emerging simultaneously in webs of interconnections among heterogeneous entities: human and non-human, social discourses, activities and meanings, as well as material forces, assemblages and transformations. In the hands of educational analysts, a rich body of literature has arisen that suggests useful interventions related to education, such as how sociomaterializing processes configure educational actors, subjectivities, knowledge and activities. Working within these arenas, educationists have shown possibilities for alternative imaginings of curriculum, learning and knowledge, and different ways to approach pedagogical interventions.

This chapter begins to examine the educational understandings offered by sociomaterial approaches such as those featured in this book. In the first section, we discuss in more detail what we believe to be the important contributions of these approaches, including how and why matter matters in constituting the actors, knowledge and activities of education. The second section offers a brief introduction to the four arenas, which are developed in detail in subsequent chapters in terms of their central principles and approaches. The third section introduces general themes that are taken up throughout the book. Here we outline educational issues and how they become approached through sociomaterial sensibilities, as well as issues of research and knowledge that emerge in sociomaterial studies. Overall, this chapter attempts to set the stage for the remaining text, which examines the different entanglings and possibilities for educational research offered by these intriguing arenas.

Sociomateriality as an approach to educational research

What sociomaterial approaches offer to educational research are resources to consider systematically both the patterns and the unpredictability that make educational activity possible. They promote methods by which to recognize and trace the multifarious struggles, negotiations and accommodations whose effects constitute the ‘things’ in education: students, teachers, learning activities and spaces, knowledge representations such as texts, pedagogy, curriculum content, and so forth. Rather than take such concepts as foundational categories, or objects with properties, they become explored as themselves effects of heterogeneous relations. In all four arenas discussed in this book, researchers focus on the relations and forms of connections/disconnections among things, where things are taken to be gatherings rather than existing as foundational objects with properties. They challenge assumptions that a subject is separable from an object, or a knower from the thing that is known, and in some instances that a learner is necessarily human. They interrupt understandings of knowledge, learning and education as solely social or personal processes, and insist upon attending to the material that is enmeshed with the social, technical and human. In the most radical expression of this view, which is not shared to the same extent across all the arenas discussed in this volume, things are performed into existence in webs of relations. All things – human and non-human, hybrids and parts, knowledge and systems – emerge as effects of connections and activity. There are no received categories. The shift here is what Jensen (2010: 7) characterizes as ‘from epistemology and representation to practical ontology and performativity’. The question of producing knowledge and learning shifts from a representational idiom, mapping and understanding a world that is out there, to a view that the world is doing things, full of agency. Not only humans act, because non-humans act on and with humans.

Bennett (2010: 1) describes this as the ‘force of things’, ‘the agency of assemblages’ and ‘the vitality of materiality’, drawing from Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) vital materialism of energies coursing through matter. In her treatise on why materiality is critical to reformulating a politics of ecology that moves beyond oppositions, blame and self-interest, Bennett shows how public life is dramatically acted upon by matter such as food and fat, stem cells, metal and electricity. The North American electricity blackout of 2003 that affected 50 million people, for example, was enacted through a heterogeneous assemblage including electricity, power plants (with overprotective mechanisms and understaffing), transmission wires (with limits on their heat capacity), a regulatory commission and policy act (that privatized electricity and separated transmission of electricity from distribution), energy-trading corporations (profiting from the grid at the expense of maintaining infrastructure), consumers (with growing demand for electricity), and a brush fire in Ohio. The point is not that individual objects have agency, but that force is exercised through these sociomaterial assemblages. Non-human materiality, Bennett argues, is interpenetrated with human intensities in these assemblages in ways that must be treated symmetrically. Human agency is simply the effect of particular distributions and accumulations enacted through such assemblages. This view

multiplies the potentially relevant actors and forces attention on their differences and relations. The aspiration is to thereby facilitate more nuanced analyses of how humans and things (broadly construed) together create, stabilize and change worlds. Analyses, in other words, that are sensitive to human and nonhuman activities as practical ontology: efforts to concretely shape and interrelate the components that make up the worlds they inhabit.

(Jensen 2010: 5)

In education, voices like Sørensen (2009) are increasingly arguing not just for greater attention to materiality, but for this more symmetrical approach. Waltz (2006) claims that in educational analyses, material things too often are denied their vitality. Materiality is subsumed by human intention, design and drive, and treated merely as things representative of human ends. This hides the qualities and contributions of material entities themselves, particularly the ways they act within educational processes. Textbooks, for example, exert force. Depending on their form, they can enact certain pedagogical activities and sequences, align curricula across space and time, limit the teacher’s academic freedom, and affect student funds. They generally function as ‘co-conspirators, law-enforcement officers, administrators, racists, quality control agents, seducers, and investment advisors’ (Waltz 2006: 57).

The point is that material things are performative and not inert; they are matter and they matter. They act together with other types of things and forces to exclude, invite and regulate particular forms of participation in enactments, some of which we term education. What then is produced can appear to be policy, or gender identity, or expertise, or a social structure such as racism. A focus on the sociomaterial therefore helps us to untangle the heterogeneous relationships holding together these larger categories, tracing their durability as well as their weaknesses. From this approach, no anterior distinctions, such as human beings or social structures, are presupposed. Everything is performed into existence:‘the agents, their dimensions and what they are and do, all depend on the morphology of the relations in which they are involved’ (Callon 1998: 8).

These relations are conceptualized very differently in different arenas. In some complexity accounts, these connections are co-specifications between elements that are immediately adjacent to one another, that interact and begin actually to affect each other’s movements. They even participate in each other’s emerging movements – in ways that reconfigure the whole, sometimes dramatically, as a multifarious system self-organizes into a new pattern. For instance, a flock of geese resting on the water will suddenly rise and sweep upwards in a single curve, if a bystander perturbs those closest to the path. Or a new pedagogical idea such as ‘cooperative learning’ appears to sweep an entire region with neither a policy mandate nor evidence for success.

Actor-network theory calls the micro-connections that create such assemblages ‘translation’, and understands them to be negotiations between elements. A thing, a text or a person may try to reconfigure something else, but that something can resist despite persuasion or incentives, or compromise. At the moment when one thing encounters another, they can perform something new, or something familiar. Cultural historical activity theory shows how people and processes become transformed through particular ways of participating in complex and interpenetrating artefact-mediated spheres or systems of activity. These systems are understood to contain contradictions and to be organized around particular objects/motives shaping unselfconscious operations and goal-directed actions. Spatiality orientations are concerned with how space is shaped, altered, coloured, refracted by the human activity within it, and how space arrangements alter human movement, identifications and meanings: what Massey (2005: 24) calls the ‘dimension of multiple trajectories, the simultaneity of stories-so-far’. Most important, all these links are precarious. Links can be co-configured, dissolved, translations refused, and mediation attempts transformed into unanticipated directions. Importantly, there is no all-powerful system preexisting these many negotiations between the different entities. For example, what may appear to be an immutable system of performance measurement is in fact held together very provisionally by myriad connections that can be identified and reopened. Here, and across the arenas we examine, we thus find a shared appreciation for the fundamental importance of the local understood as the actual instances of ‘translation’, or ‘mediation’, and so on.

Sociomaterial analysis also steps outside conceptions of local–global scalar distinctions in considering educational activity. To view educational instruction, curricula, texts, standards, etc. as developed in hierarchical levels and implemented locally, or to conceptualize ‘globalized’ knowledge as distinct from local knowledge and practices, is to accept an ontological distinction between the scalar levels of the local, regional, national and global. Neither complexity, CHAT, ANT nor spatiality approaches conceptualize distinctions in this way. In complexity, for example, layers of activity are understood to be nested within each other. Micro-interactions comprising the system of classroom practice are nested within the institutional system, which is nested within community systems, curriculum systems, biosphere, and so forth. In ANT, what appear to be macro entities, or social structures, or even global spheres of activity, are simply far-flung, numerous networks or assemblages consisting of a plethora of mundane materials all held together by a series of connections, which are often mighty precarious. The question is not what occurs at local and global levels and how they influence one another, as it is so often framed in the explanation of education practices. It is rather how systems and practices and knowledge become more or less connected, performing comparable (if often distinctly different) activities across space–time. What appears to be difference in size and scale is simply the end product of network extension actions. There are not hierarchal levels, but different spacings and timings through the connections. There is no all-powerful system pre-existing these many negotiations between the different materials. Whatever may be manifested as powerful educational activity, whether in explicit systems such as state-mandated curricula, teaching standards and high-stakes testing, or as social structures of institutionalized racism and class exclusion, is in fact held together very provisionally by myriad connections – as well as spaces between them – that can be identified and reopened.

Consider the concept of learning, central in educational discussions and extremely slippery in meaning. It is by now a commonplace in educational theory to understand learning as more than the purely individual, cognitive and acquisitive process that has driven some educational approaches. Conceptions of learning have long acknowledged the importance of transactions among concepts, language, cultural mediation and experimentation with environmental objects. Notions of learning as socio-cultural participation, embedded in particular joint activity, tools and routines, have become ubiquitous in educational writings that suggest less instruction and more scaffolding of active processes as a pedagogical approach. However, such conceptions still tend to focus on individual learning subjects, and on their particular development through the processes of mediation and participation. What is placed in the background is how the entities, knowledge, other actors, and relations of mediation and activity – all the forces directly engaged in learning activities – are also being brought forth in practices as learning. As the material is not secondary, but integral to the human, it is through the being-together of things that actions, including those identified as learning, become possible. Learning is an effect of the networks of the material, humans and non-humans, that identify certain practices as learning, which also entails a value judgement about learning something worthwhile. Thus teaching is not simply about the relationships between humans, but is about the networks of humans and things through which teaching and learning are translated and enacted. Teaching and learning do not exist, and cannot be identified, separately from the networks through which they are themselves enacted. They are not independent transcendental entities or processes, but immanent assemblages.

Four research arenas that we call ‘sociomaterial'

All four arenas – complexity theory, cultural historical activity theory, actor-network theory and spatiality theories – while deriving from very different theoretical roots and premises, bear some important resemblances. First, all four take whole systems into account, regardless of what small slice of material or activity has been chosen as a primary focus for study. All four explore the webs of entangled human/non-human action and knowledge that give rise to systems, and acknowledge the processes of boundary-making and exclusion that establish what we take to be systems and their internal elements. Second, they all focus on closely tracing the formations and stabilization of elements – all bodies, including bodies of knowledge – that are produced, reinforced or transformed by subjects that emerge with/in a particular activity. That is, they all trace interactions among non-human a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1 Why sociomateriality in education? An introduction
• 2 Emergence and perturbation: understanding complexity theory
• 3 Complexity theory in educational research
• 4 Contradiction and expansion: understanding cultural historical activity theory
• 5 Cultural historical activity theory in educational research
• 6 Translation and network effects: understanding actor-network theory
• 7 Actor-network theory in educational research
• 8 Spatiality and temporality: understanding cultural geography
• 9 Spatial theory in educational research
• 10 Sociomaterial approaches: contributions and issues for educational research
• Bibliography
• Index