Toward a "New" (Old) Materiality and Temporality of Education

• In Event: 33.052 - New Materialist Education 1: Cultural Studies and the Power of Things

Abstract

Inspired as much by the possibilities of the term as much as the emergent theoretical movement of “new materialisms” (Bennett, 2010), Simms and Potts (2012) have issued a pamphlet on the economics of “new materialism.” Pitched against “traditional materialism” as the pursuit of accumulation and revelry in commodities, the new materialism seeks the slow, the durable, the sustainable. The pamphlet, as a project of economists, emphasizes how the new materialism would reconfigure shopping, object use, and habituation (they suggest that all hobbies we learn should be practical and useful), and my paper aims to translate some of their axioms into a critique of contemporary education and educational research. For the purposes of this paper, I focus on three constellated forms of materiality: of educational spaces, of instructional objects, and of scholarly apparatus.
In terms of space, I turn to work on school gardens and community education in order to suggest that the school as a standalone institution needs to give way to situated sites of pedagogy distributed within and across communities, utilizing existing spaces both in and out of doors. I suggest that by taking up and creatively reoccupying an array of underutilized spaces within a community—and actively walking among these spaces in the course of day—a new materialist pedagogy can pragmatically undo the binary between schools and “real life.”
With respect to educational objects, I consider how the new materialist axiom of not purchasing any object that will not last a minimum of ten years requires us to seriously reconsider the disposability of curricular materials and instructional technologies. Without resorting to a kneejerk rejection of technology, I wonder how schools can embrace digital culture without contributing to the increasingly worrisome ecological consequences attending the planned obsolescence of gadgets. While the focus on “new” instructional objects may be most spectacular with regard to computers, I also examine the politics of science labs, textbooks, and athletic equipment with an eye toward undermining the assumption that “newer is better.”
Finally, I propose that educational studies (or at least curriculum studies) might shift away from APA style toward one, such as MLA, that does not presuppose the importance of the “new” (something fetishized in any author-date system). Rather that materially submit to the logic of progressive improvement structured into what Benjamin calls “homogeneous empty time,” I call for a curriculum studies committed to recursion, recovery, and a patient attention to what had previously appeared as “failed” ideas (Halberstam, 2011).
Across all three forms of materiality, my paper looks to how a new relation to the materiality of education can reveal forms of temporality that have been disavowed by modernism generally and at least two centuries of educational thought in particular (Grosz, 2004). This form of temporality—predicated on a new (old) attunement to things and materiality—may, in turn, provide powerful way of articulating new narratives at odds with globalized capitalism’s headlong rush into massive inequality and ecological catastrophe.

Author

• Nathan Snaza, University of Richmond