The Theory of Objectification

• In Event: Dealing With Diverse Discourses (3D): Can We Build on Each Other’s Research Contributions?

Abstract

Theory
The theory of objectification (TO) is a teaching and learning theory inspired by dialectical materialism and Vygotsky’s school of thought. Moving away from subjectivist (e.g., empiricist and constructivist) accounts of learning, it conceives of teaching and learning as a single process involving both Knowing and Becoming.

Key words
• Learning: The TO conceptualizes learning in terms of processes that are at the same time processes of objectification and processes of subjectification.
• Processes of objectification: are the active, embodied, discursive, symbolic, and material processes through which the students encounter, notice, and become critically acquainted with culturally and historically constituted systems of thinking, reflection, and action.
• Processes of subjectification: are based on the idea that we, humans, are always unfinished projects of life, subjects perpetually in the making. Processes of subjectification are the processes of the incessant making of the subject, of the continuous creation of a unique historical and cultural subject.
• Mathematics: is simultaneously ideal and concrete: mathematics is visual, tactile, aural, material, artefactual, gestural, and kinesthetic—something produced by the joint labour of the teachers and the students.
• Joint Labour: is the common activity carried out by the teacher and the students, a form of energy embedding the flux of emotional, affective, ethical, intellectual, and material interrelated components out of which mathematics appears and objectification and subjectification occur.

Basic Tenets
• Educational settings do not merely produce knowledge but subjectivities too.
• As a result, education should involve both Knowing (the dimension of knowledge) and Becoming (the dimension of the subject).
• The TO considers Mathematics Education as a political, societal, historical, and cultural endeavour. Such an endeavour aims at the dialectic creation of ethical subjects who critically position themselves in historically and culturally constituted mathematical practices and ponder and deliberate on new possibilities of action and thinking.

Typical Methods or Methodology
Multi-semiotic analyses of videotaped classroom lessons.

Findings
The TO provides elements to design rich educational settings that promote the development of sophisticated classroom forms of knowledge production. Through the principles of a communitarian ethic that revolves around the ideas of solidarity, answerability, and the practice of empathy and the care of the other, the TO promotes non-alienating socio-culturally oriented forms of human cooperation. In such settings, young students start progressively inscribing themselves in the social world while making sense of historically constituted complex systems of mathematical thinking (e.g., arithmetic, algebraic) first through an agglomeration of visual, tactile, aural, material, gestural, and kinesthetic activity. Through lengthy processes of objectification and subjectification, the students engage in more and more elaborate forms of joint labour and increasingly complex structures of intersubjectivity (I-You; We-You, We-Them). Their multi-modal semiotic activity becomes re-organized and refined, giving rise to elaborated cultural forms of perceiving, imagining, languaging, symbolizing, and thinking.

Scholarly Significance
A better understanding of the emergence and development of young students’ early algebraic thinking and the pedagogical actions to promote it (Author, 2011).

Author

• Luis Radford, Laurentian University