ABSTRACT
Having explored some of the key concepts in ANT in the first two chapters, we now move on to focus on particular educational issues and how they have been explored through ANT. At the heart of discussions of education is the question of pedagogy – those educative practices through which people teach and learn. How does ANT help us to understand pedagogy? What particular insights does it provide us with? These are the questions to be addressed in this chapter. What could be more taken for granted than that education is about teaching and learning? Yet, at the very start of the chapter, we need to note again the importance of what we take to be a priori in our representations of, and enactments in, the world, for we have already introduced three different categorizations upon which we could build this chapter. ‘Teaching and learning’, ‘pedagogy’ and ‘educative practices’ are not necessarily equivalent, and indeed specific work is necessary to enact an equivalence between them. Thus, in writing about teaching and learning, we are not only interested in the practices enacted through this particular categorization and the black-boxing it attempts, but also the ways this categorization is itself enacted. In education, there is no shortage of discussion of teaching and learning, or, as is the case in many discourses, learning and teaching. There is also no shortage of theories attempting to understand and explain these practices. Behaviourism, cognitivism, constructionism, etc. have all been deployed to explain the ways in which changes in human doing, knowing and feeling are possible. Here, we need to contrast the concern with knowledge practices in studies of organizations and workplace learning that we explored in the previous chapter with the more specific focus on the teaching of individuals and subjects and the learning of individuals in the study of education. This marks a distinction between educational and organizational studies, a boundary we wish to trouble through our uptake of ANT in this book. In recent years, many have drawn upon Sfard’s (1998) discussion of two overgeneralized metaphors of learning as a way of providing umbrellas for a wide range of learning theories. The metaphor of acquisition is used to embrace those understandings of learning, which are about having, such as gaining knowledge and understanding. These tend to be individualist theories. By contrast, the
metaphor of participation embraces theories which are identified as more social in focus, based upon doing. Each of these metaphors continues to enact an anterior distinction between the social and the individual, which, as we have outlined, is an effect from an ANT analysis. The material is often invisible in such theories. For example, situated and practice-based learning theory, communities of practice, cultural historical activity theory and ANT can all be positioned as primarily about participation, although how that is understood varies significantly. However, ANT is not a theory of learning as such, but an attempt to explore how the social is enacted. There has been a tendency to see the metaphors of acquisition and participation as contrasting and distinct, when one can of course also accept and explore their interrelationship. Does one acquire learning through doing? Is what one does based upon what one has? These diverse theories have been utilized and technologized as pedagogic practices in different ways in the disciplining technologies that we call schools, colleges and universities. The institutionalizing of such practices has been extended also through the discourses of lifelong learning to include workplaces, community venues and the home. Here, living and learning become positioned as almost inseparable. All of this takes work, for how else can life be enrolled to learning. It is such work that ANT can be used to trace. Most of the discourses surrounding teaching and learning have tended to focus on changes in humans and human-human interactions. However, this has shifted with the rise in interest in more social and practice focused theories of learning. While having very different genealogies – situated learning theory in symbolic interactionism and anthropology, activity theory in Marxist-informed psychology – both have given more attention to the material artefacts in the learning process. However, they still also situate learning, intention and action primarily within the human domain. As we have written, ANT has developed as an alternative view of enacting practices. However, because of the principle of symmetry, things are not secondary to the human, but it is through their being together that actions, including those identified as learning, become possible. Learning is, therefore, an effect of the networks of 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 as separate from the networks through which they are enacted. They are not independent entities or processes, but assemblages. An early illustration of this was provided by Verran (1999, 2001), who drew upon ANT conceptions in her analysis of the multiple ways of knowing and being that were enacted in Nigerian students’ engagement with science. Learning in school curriculum, Verran notes, is expected to unfold usually within a single metaphysical frame. In her work with Yoruba children she shows that, while these children worked from Yoruba metaphysical logic, they were expected in
the school curricula to think in Western metaphysics. For instance, Western assumptions about what numbers represent and how they can be manipulated (in terms of measuring volume, quantities, distance, calculating changes in matter, and so forth) are very different to Yoruba approaches to generalizing matter. Yoruba understandings begin with the particular sort of matter, and generate a unit appropriate to quantify that matter in the here and now. What surprised Verran was finding that Yoruba children not only learned to work within these two noncoherent and profoundly different worlds of working and thinking with the same objects, but that they could work across both accounts of realness: choosing one or the other, or juggling both simultaneously. They were literally juggling different ontologies, a form of enactment that Verran (2007: 34-35) calls ‘being-ontics’:
Recognizing and being open and explicit about the possibility and nature of interrupting and connecting at a level of cognition that very few people are aware of, we are working at the level of entities’ existence or being-ontics. It is about learning to manage knowing along with doubt; weaning oneself from certainty that is allowed by working within just one metaphysical frame. It implies recognizing that reality can be done in this way or that, through this series of gestures, words, and material arrangements, or an alternative set.
