Caring, Culling, and Pedagogy: The Entangled Lives of Teaching, Inquiry, and Gardening

• In Event: 66.021 - New Materialist Education 2: Toward Active Objects in Research Methodologies

Abstract

This paper reflects on the current stage of an ongoing project emerging at the intersection of ethnomethodology, theory, bodies, materiality, and pedagogy. This project began as an Educational Ethnography independent study that took place over the Summer of 2013. We agreed on the course as a form of pragmatism, a praxis enacted in service to an upcoming study that author two would undertake on behalf of Purdue’s college of education. Jointly, we decided that some the curriculum should involve reading general ethnographic texts, writing ethnographic field notes, conducting and transcribing interviews, and analyzing and restructuring these data in the form of an academic report. In short, the course was constructed under the aegis of traditional ethnography, if such a thing can be articulated within the complicated history of anthropological research, with the research taking place at collection of open-use garden plots located outside of an on-campus family housing complex. Author two’s initial questions centered on how the site operated as an “anomalous place of learning,” (Ellsworth, 2005), a site that, while not structured via the institutional discourses associated with education, might still be said to possess a pedagogical quality.
However, through our work, first in the relationship of student/professor, then as collaborators in the interpretation of data and production of writing and thinking, the piece began to overgrow its rigid structure. Our conversations became excessive (Miller, 2005) of the data, of the subject positions we occupy, and of the species of qualitative inquiry that presume a certain stability and knowledge of space and time. The discussion revealed itself as an entanglement (Barad, 2007) that blurred the notions of epistemology and ontology; we came to find the garden site and the actors therein coproducing a materiality that was, at once, inside and outside of our text, our conversations, and our bodies-in-relation. We became unable to diminish our affective differences in the face of the data and came to see our own sensate beings as radically common, radically fragile, radically raw.
Bennett (2011), working through the vitalist theories forwarded by Driesch, notes, “…some analogue of knowing and willing exists in all organic processes: ‘Indeed, as far as morphogenesis and physical adaptation and instinctive reactions are concerned, there must be a something comparable metaphorically with specified knowing and willing’” (p. 53). Accordingly, the vitality of gardenspace, of organisms both nurtured and suppressed, became analogic to our own pedagogical experiences of opening and closing to knowledge and sense. It is from within this entanglement that we write this piece, an attempt to work through New Materialist theory as a means of describing the uncultivated nature of pedagogy, a nature that cannot adequately be articulated via methodological lenses that bound, delimit, or plot in the particular (Barad, 2007). Our purpose in this piece, as such, is to describe how the education of inquiry became an inquiry of education itself, with the ethnographic work on the garden becoming a sort of ontography of pedagogy, illustrating pedagogy’s ontological vocation and embeddedness.

Authors

• Jake Burdick, Purdue University

• Hannah Dockrill, Purdue University