The Material Object and Patterns of Attention in Science Learning

• In Event: 73.041 - Material Practice and Materiality: Too Long Ignored in Science Education Research and Practice?

Abstract

Patterns of attention (Schostak, 2002) are constrained by public conventions, demands and measures. Thinking about different sites of learning, these patterns differ in terms of what learners’ attention is drawn to (and therefore what aspects of a situation are ignored/downplayed) and in terms of the expectations, skills and understandings that learners bring to the learning situation themselves; these will affect what learners may notice.

An interesting question is how patterns of attention are mediated through objects and how this manifests itself in the emergence of different disciplines that the learner encounters in moving through their educational experience. Research into children’s relations with objects in early years learning (Jones et al 2012) offers interesting possibilities for a continuation of this focus; to better understand how objects mediate experience and determine patterns of attention in science pedagogy. When the learner is presented with recognisably science objects such as a test tube and Bunsen burner for example, the objects themselves can shape the patterns of attention affecting what learners notice in unanticipated ways; a condition in which the objects themselves literally ‘become science’. But how do such objects, to draw on Dewey’s (2001) philosophy, contribute towards children’s understanding of themselves within the real world? Alternatively, are such objects, because of their very nature alienating? That these objects increasingly present themselves as discrete disciplines emerge in educational transition presents an opportunity to explore the notion of object in increasingly abstract terms. It might be more readily seen that the object being referred to in respect of ‘bringing in’ as discursively privileging notions of the pre-existing by seeking to include the other into a refabricated, naturalised space. However, what happens when the object is increasingly obscure, not ‘bringing in’, but shutting out?

Extending this notion of ‘object’ affords opportunity to challenge current orthodoxy in science education discourse, particularly in regard to how we see science learning and teaching. Moving from and between the ‘learning object’ (Zuckerman 2006) and the object of learning brings into play the knowing subject and the nature of knowledge. Patterns of attention could relate to what learners notice (about objects), but it could also relate to the object of learning. This paper draws on empirical data from pre-service teachers learning about light and shadow, with the shadow as object to explore this relationship. The research is less about how people learn, that is taken as a given, and more focused on a querying of the object in and of learning.

It deconstructs ‘the inseparability of the object and the measuring agencies’ (Barad 2007 p 139) and asks:

How do people pay attention to scientific phenomena in different learning contexts?
How is this attention mediated through the objects encountered?
Is there the possibility of developing a theoretical framework that draws on the ‘object’ using Barad’s (2007 p 31) notion of the interaction between the ‘objects of investigation’ and the ‘agencies of observation’
How do they notice, what do they notice, what do they bring to their noticing (their hands, bodies, artefacts etc.)

Author

• David Stewart Heywood, Manchester Metropolitan University