Science Education as a Material Issue

• In Event: Innovations and New Directions in Methods and Frameworks for Learning

Abstract

In what ways can human-matter intra-action as a teaching lens frame science teaching and
learning in the classroom? This is the question that frames our presentation for this session. Applying Karen Barad's feminist theory (2007), we explore how techno-scientific and material discursive practices allow us to investigate the rich context of education in the making. Accepting culture as material social practice (Sewell, 1999) helps us to explore questions about the nature of science and making inclusive decisions about the practices of science education. As fields of material social practice and worlds of meaning, cultures are contradictory, contested, and weakly bounded. The notion of culture as material discursive practices leads us to accept that material practice is as important as conceptual development (social practice) in the process of coming to know science.
Such perspectives lead us to argue for a focus on how material-discursive practice emerge
through the intra-activity between human and matter agents as a source of locally intelligible
phenomena. Traditional humanist models of teaching and learning locate agential responsibility
in a specific human agent, which serves to separate the world of education into dichotomies: the
teacher from the taught, the knower from the known, the self from other, and the object from the
subject. Baradian feminist theory challenges us to focus instead on what Barad calls, intra-actions, which do not assume pre-existing object agents but accepts that it is through specific
intra-actions that phenomena in all their complexity emerge and become agentic. We must work
from the perspective that agential responsibility, which constitutes responsibly embodied
engagement in a material world, involves human and material agents and recognize that there are
consequences, possibilities, and responsibilities for intra-actions.
Additionally, in education and science education there is a tendency to ignore the material and to
focus on social practice with language as the arbiter of such practice. Often the material, such as
that located as part of scientific apparatus, is ignored with apparatus understood as "inscription
devices", conduits for language rather than sources of material culture in which scientists share
“material other than words” (Baird, 2004, p. 7) when they communicate new knowledge and
realities. While we do not ignore the role of language in science, we agree with Barad (2003) that
perhaps language has too much power and with that power there seems a concomitant loss of
interest in exploring how matter contributes to both ontology and epistemology in science and
science education. Drawing on examples from co-teaching, self-assessment and emergent classroom practice we use Barad's feminist theory, specifically her notions of agential realism, diffraction and
entanglement, to propose models of practice that make intra-actions the focus with the goal of
making learning more ethical, affective and inclusive.

Authors

• Catherine E. Milne, New York University

• Shruti Krishnamoorthy, New York University

• Colin Hennessy Elliott, New York University