fenwick-2015#
Fenwick, T. (2015). Sociomateriality and Learning: A Critical Approach. In D. Scott & E. Hargreaves, The SAGE Handbook of Learning (pp. 83–93). SAGE Publications Ltd. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781473915213.n8
Annotations#
"The main premise they share is that there are no clear, inherent distinctions between social phenomena and materiality" (Fenwick, 2015, p. 1)
"Everyday practice is constituted through entangled social and material forces that continually assemble and reassemble. Objects, events, identities and knowledge are understood to be performed into being through these social and material relations. Effects such as capacity and 'skill' are understood to be distributed, not located as agency within human beings." (Fenwick, 2015, p. 1)
"One task for analysts is to trace just how these relations work: how human and more-than-human forces act upon one another in ways that mutually transform their characteristics and activity, how they produce assemblages that become stabilized, and sometimes become extended and powerful" (Fenwick, 2015, p. 1)
Note: The iron triangle work is to talk about how what we did works and is better than other less digital/epistemically fluent approaches. Also that through the ability to code we were able to stablise those assemblages and then also extend them to be more powerful. For others to be able to adopt and adapt them, especially if we focus on generativity.
"As many have argued throughout this volume, context is critical: learning cannot be considered effectively if the sole focus is upon individual cognitive processing" (Fenwick, 2015, p. 1)
"The community of practice approach has been critiqued not only for its conservatism, managerialism, and limited analysis of power relations in learning situations, but also for its romantic notions of 'community', and its vague analyses of practice and participation (Hughes, Jewso" (Fenwick, 2015, p. 1)
"Materials -- things that matter -- are often missing from accounts of learning and practice. Materials tend to be ignored as part of the backdrop for human action, dismissed in a preoccupation with consciousness and cognition, or relegated to brute tools subordinated to human intention and design" (Fenwick, 2015, p. 2)
"Sørensen argued in 2009 that there was a 'blindness toward the question of how educational practice is affected by materials' (p.2), a consequence of which was a general tendency to grossly underestimate materials as mere instruments to advance educational performance" (Fenwick, 2015, p. 2)
"Researchers have pressed for much more recognition of the ways that materials actively configure practice and knowing" (Fenwick, 2015, p. 2)
"Educators working from sociomaterial approaches are encouraging learners to attend to these quotidian material details that stitch together their practice, knowledge and environments -- not just to attune very closely to the connections, but also to tinker and improvise, to interrupt, and to seize emerging possibilities" (Fenwick, 2015, p. 2)
"They promote methods by which to recognise 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" (Fenwick, 2015, p. 2)
"Materials -- objects, bodies, technologies and settings -- permit some actions, and prevent others" (Fenwick, 2015, p. 3) affordances etc?
"hey convey particular knowledges, and can become powerful" (Fenwick, 2015, p. 3)
"The point is here that material things are performative. They act, together with other types of things and forces, to exclude, invite, and regulate particular forms of participation." (Fenwick, 2015, p. 3)
"A focus on things therefore helps us to untangle the heterogeneous relationships holding together these larger categories, tracing their durabilities as well as their weaknesses" (Fenwick, 2015, p. 3)
"hings matter, not as discrete and reified objects with properties, but as effects of dynamic materializing processes that cause them to emerge and act in indeterminate entanglements of local everyday practice." (Fenwick, 2015, p. 4)
"What all of these perspectives tend to share, first, is a focus on materials as dynamic, and enmeshed with human activity in everyday practices" (Fenwick, 2015, p. 5)
"'Material' refers to all the everyday stuff of our lives that is both organic and inorganic, technological and natural: flesh and blood, forms and checklists, electronic records and databases, furniture and passcodes, snowstorms and dead cell zones, and so forth. 'Social' refers to symbols and meanings, desires and fears, and cultural discourses" (Fenwick, 2015, p. 5)
"a second shared understanding: that all materials or, more accurately, all sociomaterial objects, are in fact heterogeneous assemblages." (Fenwick, 2015, p. 5)
"All objects and material settings embed a history of these gatherings in the negotiation of their design and accumulated uses, whether lecture halls, presentation software, testing instruments, essays, pedagogical protocols etc. In examining particular educational practices, researchers ask how and why particular elements became assembled, why some" (Fenwick, 2015, p. 5)
"Third, most sociomaterial perspectives -- in different ways -- accept the fundamental uncertainty of everyday life, as well as of the knowledge, tools, environments and identities that are continually produced in it." (Fenwick, 2015, p. 6)
"This may be a familiar notion, but sociomaterial theories offer specific analytic tools that can examine much more precisely just how these new webs or assemblages are emerging -- why they come together to produce and mobilise particular effects, and when they do not." (Fenwick, 2015, p. 6) It is the generativity of these tools and the presence of knowledge that helps these new better assemblages emerge (i.e. our practices). A focus on enabling epistemic fluency, rather than separation
"The focus is on the relations between things, how things influence and alter one another in ways that are continuously opening as well as foreclosing new possibilities" (Fenwick, 2015, p. 6)
"Fourth, a sociomaterial perspective tends to views all things -- human, and non-human, hybrids and parts, knowledge and systems -- as effects of connections and activity. Everything is performed into existence in webs of relations. Materials are enacted, not inert; they are matter and they matter. They act, together with other types of things and forces, to exclude, invite, and regulate activity. This is not arguing that objects have agency: an essay does not write itself." (Fenwick, 2015, p. 6)
"Any educational practice is a collective sociomaterial enactment, not a question solely of one individual's skills or agency." (Fenwick, 2015, p. 6)
"'Agency' is a problematic term for some sociomaterial researchers. Some refuse to use it altogether with its associations of human individuals' intention, initiative and exercises of power." (Fenwick, 2015, p. 6)
"Others like Orlikowski (2010) write about agency as relational and distributed capacity" (Fenwick, 2015, p. 6)
"Holifield (2009) points out that sociomaterial analyses register a range of competing accounts of agency, seeking to understand not what agency is but how certain accounts of it become stabilized" (Fenwick, 2015, p. 6)
"When agency is recognized as a distributed effect produced in material webs of human and nonhuman assemblages, Bennett suggests that a more responsible, ecological politics is possible." (Fenwick, 2015, p. 6) Enterprise systems fail to support this agency. To distribute the power.
"Those that appear most frequently in contemporary research of educational practice and learning include actor-network theory and 'after-ANT' approaches, complexity theory, new geographies, 'new materialisms', practice theory, and activity theory." (Fenwick, 2015, p. 7)
"Criticality is a key concern both for educational curricula and for research. A broadly shared aim is to stimulate critical learning that will recognise and interrupt patterns that control and limit: particularly when these assemblages produce injustice and inequities" (Fenwick, 2015, p. 8)
"He asks how, among these effects, do some practices and objects become stabilized and entrenched as powerful assemblages (such as standardised tests) while others go unnoticed?" (Fenwick, 2015, p. 8) My "how" question is a little different. More focused on how to help these be more useful/distributed to people. But also suffers the same challenges (e.g. hierarchies, lack of recognition of the need to code etc)
"Latour (2005) contends, most things accepted as settled facts of practice are really matters of concern whose debates have been foreclosed or obscured." (Fenwick, 2015, p. 8)
"Critical learning is often described in terms of developing a standpoint or emancipating ourselves from something" (Fenwick, 2015, p. 8)
"He argues that traditions of critical thinking promulgated by education and academia work from a logic of taking apart, separating, and unveiling - using categories that reify their own explanations. He urges educators to resist available explanatory categories and examine more closely the controversies and uncertainties about how resources and agency are distributed, the kinds of agencies that are enacted in different" (Fenwick, 2015, p. 8)
"sociomaterial formations, and the ways that actors contextualise one another." (Fenwick, 2015, p. 8)
"For Bennett, notions of generative materiality are critical for a politics of ecology that moves beyond blame and self-interest. The aim is towards learning how to construct sustainable alternative futures, and extending what Braidotti terms present 'horizons of hope' (Braidotti 2011). Braidotti eschews traditions of criticality that focus primarily on what the analyst identifies as the problem - negative critique. She argues instead for a 'critical creativity' that 'entails the creation of sustainable alternatives geared to the construction of social horizons of hope, while at the same time doing critical theory, which implies resistance to the present' (Braidotti 2011: 267)." (Fenwick, 2015, p. 9)
"Our continuing categories of critique, such as those driving educational notions of critical learning, emanate from what Law (2011) calls a 'quadruple lock' of interlocking institutions and technologies, metaphysics, particular descriptions and the things being described." (Fenwick, 2015, p. 9)
"To disregard or minimize the centrality of materials in enacting networks that exert powerful forces, combine and translate people and things into these networks, and configure these forces to exclude or include, is to overlook important levers for change as well as reproduction and the fact that changes will not come from human intentions and actions alone." (Fenwick, 2015, p. 9)
"To reiterate the central idea underpinning this chapter, learning and knowing in sociomaterial perspectives are enactments, not simply mental activity or received knowledge. Mind, after all, is a dynamic of continuous neurological connections with the myriad matter of environments. Sociomaterial perspectives join those who focus not on the individual learning subject but the larger sociomaterial collective." (Fenwick, 2015, p. 10)
"When we accept a view of the world full of agency, doing things, learning shifts from sole emphasis on preparing for this world by acquiring knowledge representations to participating wisely in situ" (Fenwick, 2015, p. 10)
"This suggests a turn from learning as preparation and acquisition of competency to learning as attunement, response and even interruption" (Fenwick, 2015, p. 10)
"Educators as well as students can look more closely at what material elements most influence their learning and teaching processes, how materials limit or enhance possibilities for learning, why particular educational or learning practices become stabilized and powerful and when these blackboxes create problems. This is not about stuffing more activities into crowded curricula, but about opening out ways of engaging students." (Fenwick, 2015, p. 10)
"Curricula might cultivate students' awareness of how their everyday performances, too, are provoked through dynamic and always-shifting sociomaterial configurations, and how multiple agencies act on these configurations. Coole and Frost (2010) suggest practices of 'critical materialism', which presents a useful provocation to educators"