Activate or Evacuate? Roles of a Sensorium and the Problem of Materialism in Educational Truth Production

• In Event: 63.020 - Surveilling Toward Disembodiment: Technologies of Humanity

Abstract

This paper historicizes how alignment of a sensorium, materialism, and claims to educability were not so freely granted in western educational theories. It analyzes:

1) how roles attributed to a sensorium have been shaped by long-standing philosophical debates connected to education
2) how such debates have generated flashpoints in onto-epistemology
3) a specific example of such flashpoints that endure in disturbing ways: how the politics of the senses were tied to the politics of knowledge-production through claims to materialism in phrenological reasonings of the 19th century.

Instead of pitting learner-centered against teacher-centered or activation against evacuation, then, the analysis challenges the idea of multimodal versus rote instruction, as well as new materialist and allied approaches’ colonization of the real.

Author

• Bernadette Baker, University of Wisconsin - Madison