Researching ‘messy objects’: how can boundary objects strengthen the analytical pursuit of an actor-network theory study?

ABSTRACT

This paper offers a detailed consideration of how the theoretical scope of the boundary object concept fits within an actor-network theory (ANT) sensibility when researching ‘messy objects’. Messy objects are artefacts whose relational effects are inherently slippery and complex. As the aim of ANT is to show how non-human and human actors are co-constitutive in performing social activity, the uptake of boundary objects in ANT studies may appear to be an expedient analytical endeavour. However, scholars have raised concerns that the boundary object concept has lost some of its original analytical bearing, and that it is theoretically incompatible with ANT. This paper argues that a more careful reading of boundary objects’ conceptual origins can provide useful insights for an ANT study. To illustrate this argument, findings are presented from an ethnographic study of engineers’ knowledge practices in an emerging industry. Specifically, it shows that when a messy object – a signature on a contract – is foregrounded as a boundary object, particular knowledge practices are made visible. However, due to the complexity and messiness of the signature’s performance, this paper contends that a pluralist theoretical approach to analysing messy objects may be more helpful to address issues of professional practice and knowledge.     

Wanting to be ‘known’: Redefining self‐awareness through an understanding of self‐narration processes in educational transitions

The aim of this article is to initiate discussion about the pursuit of self‐awareness—a concept embedded in recent policy—as an educational goal. The authors argue that complex theoretical questions need to be addressed if improvements in policy and practice relating to personal, social and emotional education are to ensue. Such questions relate to possible interpretations of ‘self‐awareness’, a term that may be linked to outdated theories, implying a ‘self’ to be discovered and the possibility that people can sustain a ‘sense of self’ across time and place. From this perspective, self‐awareness may seem overly individualistic, obscuring more pro‐social goals (e.g. empathy, compassion, citizenship). Drawing on sociological and social psychological literature, as well as data from an empirical study of identity construction, it is hoped to contribute to the provision of firm foundations for personal, social and emotional education through a stronger theoretical exposition of ‘self‐awareness’. The authors' reconceptualised version highlights the importance of an expanded and flexible story of self, which they view as an invaluable tool for learning, fostering an openness to change.     

Diffractive pedagogies: dancing across new materialist imaginaries

ABSTRACT

We theorise an interdisciplinary arts practice university course and consider the forms of educational imaginary challenged by our curriculum. We argue for the disruptive and generative potential of what we call diffractive pedagogy as an example of the type of learning that can take place when materiality and entanglement are considered as vital constituents. Through self-expression and interweaving across disciplinary boundaries, the potential to produce, embody and theorise simultaneously can be realised. Student bodies do not exist in isolation from one another, or from the environment. It is indeed impossible to separate the dancer from the dance, the teacher from the student, and the bodies from the environments and objects to which they relate. This being true, our student body reproduced our teaching bodies as abject, as messy and peripheral to their imaginings of university education. Materially, student bodies remade the limits to which their consciousness was imaginatively drawn. Through our embodied work, unconscious change began the processes of affecting students’ imaginaries of university education.     

Conceptualizing Debates in Learning and Educational Research: Toward a Complex Systems Conceptual Framework of Learning

This article proposes a conceptual framework of learning based on perspectives and methodologies being employed in the study of complex physical and social systems to inform educational research. We argue that the contexts in which learning occurs are complex systems with elements or agents at different levels—including neuronal, cognitive, intrapersonal, interpersonal, cultural—in which there are feedback interactions within and across levels of the systems so that collective properties arise (i.e., emerge) from the behaviors of the parts, often with properties that are not individually exhibited by those parts. We analyze the long-running cognitive versus situative learning debate and propose that a complex systems conceptual framework of learning (CSCFL) provides a principled way to achieve a theoretical rapprochement. We conclude with a consideration of more general implications of the CSCFL for educational research.     

Pasts and futures that keep the possible alive: Reflections on time,space, education and governing

Abstract

Over the last years, the European Commission has heavily promoted various forms of digital education. In this article, we draw upon two recent European policy documents as key articulations of Europe’s contemporary governing apparatus: Opening Up Education and the Digital Education Action Plan. The article more particularly conceives of both policy documents as offering a point of departure to analyze how this apparatus is presently seeking to enact a specific mode of existence of the contemporary learner. We argue that this educational mode of existence is being enacted by the fabrication of highly specific sorts of time and space. In order to highlight the particularity of the enacted sorts of time and space exemplified in the policy documents, we start this article with a discussion of how a traditional, modern governing apparatus aims to fabricate linear time and institutional space. The article proceeds by arguing that the present-day European governing apparatus that is concerned with digital education fabricates different sorts of times and spaces, namely potential (rather than linear) temporalities and ecological/networked (rather than institutional) spatialities. Likewise, the concrete instruments (such as platforms, portals, credits and certificates) presently adopted in order to do so largely differ from modern instruments. Conclusively, we argue that the presence of these newly emerging (often digital) instruments, and the times and spaces that are fabricated through these instruments, call for an opportunistic mode of existing as a contemporary learner.     

Short Cuts and Extended Techniques: Rethinking relations between technology and educational theory

Building upon a recent call to renew actor-network theory (ANT) for educational research, this article reconsiders relations between technology and educational theory. Taking cues from actor-network theorists, this discussion considers the technologically-mediated networks in which learning actors are situated, acted upon, and acting, and traces the novel positions of creative capacity and participation that emerging media may enable. Whereas traditional theories of educational technology tend to focus on the harmonization of new technologies with extant curricular goals and educational practices, an educational theory of technology looks to novel forms of technologically-mediated learning experience—from production pedagogies to role play in the virtual—to make visible the surprising relations, techniques, and opportunities that emerging media, and their attendant social contexts, may offer educational research.     

Theory Matters: Representation and experimentation in education

This article provides a material enactment of educational theory to explore how we might do educational theory differently by defamiliarising the familiar. Theory is often assumed to be abstract, located solely in the realm of ideas and separate from practice. However, this view of theory emerges from a set of ontological and epistemological assumptions of separating meaning from matter that are taken to be foundational, when this need not be the case. Drawing upon what variously might be termed materialist, performative or post‐human positions, the article suggests that it is possible to re‐enact theory as a matter‐ing practice—of matter and meaning. The assumption of a separation that divides theory from practice is challenged in this article, which suggests that theory matters by being entangled with the material and that a separation of matter from meaning is an effect. This approach enacts things as matters of concern by contrast with the representation of objects as matters of fact. In this way, educational theory becomes a form of responsible experimentation rather than simply a representation of others. Some implications for education are outlined.     

Scientific research in education: A critical perspective1

This article reviews the debate in the USA about quality in educational research which has underpinned particular approaches to educational research being mandated in federal legislation. It argues that the movement towards ‘evidence‐based policy and practice’ oversimplifies complex problems and is being used to warrant governmental incursion into legislating scientific method. It calls for critical readings of current policy and direct engagement in policy forums—putting critical theory to work.     

Unfortunate or scrounger? Ambivalence,stereotype and the adult unemployed

This paper uses Bhabha's concept of colonial discourse to explore how the subject of the educational discourse concerned with the education of the adult unemployed is constituted by a variety of stereotypical representations. The paper examines in some detail a key policy text which appeared at a critical moment in the establishment of REPLAN, a UK policy initiative for the education of unemployed adults, in 1984. It explores how the problem of education for the unemployed adult was made visible, the first arena for analysis in Scheurich's ‘policy archaeology’. A number of ‘regularities’—race, gender, sexuality, pro‐fessionalization, class and governmentality—serve to constitute that problem and, to a lesser extent, its solution. Educational policy is seen as a highly problematic play of fantasy and materiality, where policy texts produce and perpetuate inequalities. This critical reading attempts to subvert official discourse on education and unemployment.

there is no reason at all why people should wander about in a loafing and idle manner; if they are not earning their living they ought to be put under some control. (Winston Churchill, 1909).     

DEGREES OF DISENCHANTMENT: A REVIEW ESSAY

In this review essay, Mark Brenneman and Frank Margonis address three recent book‐length contributions to the ongoing discussion around cosmopolitanism and educational thought: Mark Olssen's Liberalism, Neoliberalism, Social Democracy: Thin Communitarian Perspectives on Political Philosophy and Education, Sharon Todd's Toward an Imperfect Education: Facing Humanity, Rethinking Cosmopolitanism, and Ilan Gur‐Ze’ev's Beyond the Modern‐Postmodern Struggle in Education: Toward Counter‐Education and Enduring Improvisation. Brenneman and Margonis argue that these contributions exhibit a marked disenchantment with Enlightenment conceptions of human possibilities as these inform concrete recommendations in the field of the philosophy of education. All three books call for a rethinking of modernist categories in educational thought, a call that is supported by the authors' respective distrust and ultimate disenchantment with the residual presence of ideas of human perfectibility harbored in the philosophical categories that animate discussions in multicultural, liberal, neoliberal, and postmodern educational discussion. Brenneman and Margonis argue that each of these books theorizes from its own respective regionally specific circumstances, and they therefore prove valuable to philosophers of education who struggle toward their own local responses to human difference and the pedagogical possibilities of educational relations.     

Anticipating education: governing habits,memories and policy-futures

ABSTRACT

The use of data to govern education is increasingly supported by the use of knowledge-based technologies, including algorithms, artificial intelligence (AI), and tracking technologies [Fenwick, T., E. Mangez, and J. Ozga. 2014. Governing Knowledge: Comparison, Knowledge-Based Technologies and Expertise in the Regulation of Education. New York, NY: Routledge]. New forms of datafication and automation enable governments and other powerful stakeholders to draw from the past to construct images of educational futures in order to steer the present. This paper examines the competing conceptions of time and temporality that AI posits for policy and practice when used to anticipate educational futures. We argue that most educational futures are already delineated, and machinic expressions of time are the chronologies, habits, and memories that the educated subject inhabits rather than produces. If resetting educational habits and memories can be an alternative to algorithmic anticipations of education then we believe, paradoxically, that machines may help to reset them by accelerating them.     

Power and representation: A postcolonial reading of global partnerships and teacher development through North—South study visits

This paper critically analyses the neo‐liberal discourse informing global education policy and practice. We use postcolonial theory to deconstruct the contexts for global educational partnerships, highlighting how issues of power and representation are central to their development and the learning that takes place within them. Teacher development through North—South study visits is one way of challenging teachers’ worldviews, but these are not always effective. We argue that study visit courses, where learning is facilitated by differently knowledgeable others, have the potential to be more effective, but only if the courses are underpinned by postcolonial theory and informed by socio‐cultural pedagogy.     

Recovering the Lost Métier of Philosophy of Education? Reflections on Educational Thought,Policy and Practice in the UK and Farther Afield

A Special Issue of the Journal of Philosophy of Education in November 2012 explored key aspects of the relationship between philosophy of education and educational policy in the UK. The contributions were generally critical of policy developments in recent decades, highlighting important shortcomings and arguing for more philosophically coherent approaches to educational policy‐making. This article begins by focusing on what the contributions to the Special Issue—particularly two of them—have to say about the relationship between philosophy of education and educational policymaking. It then goes on to argue that this relationship can best be understood through an exploration of education as a practice in its own right (as distinct from a subordinate practice). Such an exploration seeks to shed light on the proper métier of philosophy of education. In the course of the exploration the kind of thinking predominant in recent international patterns in educational policy is contrasted with a different kind of thinking which has yielded rich gains in Finland. Important distinctions are drawn between the inherent and extrinsic benefits of educational practice and between the internal and external politics of practice. These contribute to the articulation of philosophy of education as a distinctive discipline of thought and action which is necessary to the work of practitioners and policymakers alike.     

Critique and Politics: A sociomaterialist intervention

Sociomaterial theories, including actor–network theory (ANT), materialist feminism and posthumanism, are sometimes argued to not be addressing or unable to address sufficiently the political and are therefore dismissed as irrelevant to educational research. Through an extended discussion of writers across the social sciences, this article seeks to counter such a view. Drawing specifically on the work of Latour on the nature of critique and on examples of political analysis from writers such as Barad, Bennett, Braidotti, Marres and Whatmore, we suggest that sociomaterialist approaches to the more-than-human open up extended understandings and productive alternative practices of politics. While recognising that this is a work in progress and not without difficulties and challenges, we argue that there is much to be gained for educational researchers from engaging with such approaches.     

Feats of Strength for Weak Utopianism: Giorgio Agamben,Educational Potentiality and the Studious Spatiality of the Active Learning Classroom

One outcome of the increasing interest from philosophy of education circles in the work of Giorgio Agamben has been the possibility of apparently small alterations to enact a radical emancipatory change. This ‘weak utopianism’ (Lewis, 2013) found in Agamben's work means that traditionally radical changes are viewed with skepticism, as grand alternative designs often merely result in the operationalisation and actualisation of new ordering rather emancipation. In a recent commentary on Agamben's philosophy of education, Igor Jasinski (2018) argues that the theory of weak utopianism means that innovative classroom designs ‘should not be considered’ examples of Agambenian philosophy of education at work. In this article, I respond through an analysis of the case of active learning classrooms. Despite existing as a form of innovative classroom design, I argue that they nevertheless abide Agambenian principles in the philosophy of education as spaces open to—without demanding—study. The active learning classroom is not the ideal‐type studious space but a paradigm, the case that stands outside of (while standing in for) the rest of the set. Situated in‐between inspiration and implementation, I argue that active learning classrooms are the paradoxically strongest form of weak utopianism, leaving educational potentiality open while also representing a significant rethinking of the spatiality of the classroom. Active learning classrooms thus pose significant questions both for Agambenian philosophy of education in particular and critical pedagogy in general.     

In Search of Museum Professional Knowledge Base: Mapping the professional knowledge debate onto museum work

Museum professionalism remains an unexplored area in museum studies, particularly with regard to what is arguably the core generic question of a sui generis professional knowledge base, and its necessary and sufficient conditions. The need to examine this question becomes all the more important with the increasing expansion of the museum’s roles and functions. This paper starts by mapping out the policy and organizational context within which the roles of museums have expanded in the UK. It then situates the discussion of museum professional knowledge within a cross-disciplinary matrix bearing on the question of what is professional about occupations classified—or classifiable—as professions. Against the backdrop of the current organizational context of the museum as well as theories of professional knowledge, it highlights the ways in which museum work, more specifically museography, poses a distinctive set of questions compared to other ‘professional’ fields; the paper thus homes in on the question of what it is that constitutes the uniqueness of museum professional knowledge in relation to museographic practice and the type of professional knowledge and expertise that can sustain it and enact its creative and educational potentials and affordances.     

The May Center for Early Childhood Education: description of a continuum of services model for children with autism

Children with autism have complex learning and behavioural challenges which typically require comprehensive educational and therapeutic services. In recent years there have been many developments in the philosophy, methodology, and scope of intervention for this population. Factors such as early intervention, criterion‐referenced assessment, the combination of applied behaviour analysis and developmentally appropriate practices (DAP), parent training, and public school inclusive education have been noteworthy. This article describes a comprehensive continuum of services model for children with autism developed by a human services agency in Massachusetts which incorporates these and additional empirically‐based approaches. Service components, methodologies, and program objectives are described including representative summary data. The article concludes with a discussion of educational, therapeutic, and research issues which address “best practice” approaches toward children with autism.     

Towards productive critique of large-scale comparisons in education

ABSTRACT

International large-scale assessments and comparisons (ILSAs) in education have become significant policy phenomena. How a country fares in these assessments has come to signify not only how a nation’s education system is performing, but also its future prospects in a global economic ‘race’. These assessments provoke passionate arguments at specialist conferences and in scholarly journals and they are just as passionately debated in the media. Within academe, ILSAs are researched by sociologists and psychometricians, policy experts and statisticians. This multidisciplinary, multi-voice discussion has not always served to highlight the complexity of the issues involved. Instead, discussions across various groups of actors have often led to a polarisation of views and a hardening of stances. Large-scale comparisons have deeply divided academic opinion with regard to their validity, usefulness and use. The divergence in ontological commitments, methodologies and paradigms of research makes discussions among one set of scholars almost incomprehensible to another. New theories, concepts and vocabularies are urgently required to engage productively with this important phenomenon. Borrowing concepts from Science and Technology Studies (STS) and the history and sociology of numbers, I argue that understanding such comparative exercises as socio-technical assemblages would move the critique of large-scale comparisons in education in more productive directions.     

Human performance modeling: A case study

Modeling critical performance elements can assist the human performance technology practitioner in better understanding the often complex, messy, and fuzzy real world of human performance. As illustrated in the embedded case study, generically developed models that, in turn, can be adapted to context‐specific applications often have the greatest practical value. The key in developing any good model is to first identify those key variables—the critical few—that truly account for the greatest variance in performance.