Out of the Box: Behaviorism and the Mangle of Practice

• In Event: 28.022 - How the Sciences of Curriculum Became Reasonable: Their Emergence in Postwar Years and Its (Dis)Continuity

Abstract

Contemporary theories of learning in education and psychology attribute a negative connotation to behaviorism as a theory of learning and its applications in managing instruction. Behaviorism is often relegated to the bestiary of ethically- and epistemologically-dubious theories of the mid-twentieth century. Yet behaviorism was also a precursor to many material and technological features of later research on learning and its applications in education; it paved the way for the hegemony of the ‘learning sciences’ in Anglophone education, and for forms of ICT and the design of ‘learning environments.’

This paper is not a defence of behaviourism as a theory of learning or human agency, nor is it another rebuttal, but rather an examination of how experimental research, i.e. the manipulation and systematic observation of variables in a controlled environment to explain the causes of their interaction, was made relevant for post-World War Two era’s governmental problematizations of education.

As data, I use research reports, textbooks and popular articles by B.F. Skinner and his colleagues from 1950s to 1970s. I focus on texts that deal explicitly with experimental designs of learning research, but also applications in the form of constructing teaching machines and textbooks on programmed instruction.
I analyze behaviourist research and its applications in American education as a ‘mangle of practice’ (Pickering, 1995). In Andrew Pickering’s theory of science and technology, the mangle refers to the way conceptual, social and material aspects of research are made to operate together as a machinic whole. This underscores the performative aspect of experimental research. Rather than mere passive representation, experimental research is understood as an intervention in and construction of the human and non-human world (Pickering, 1995, pp. 5–9).

My analysis of Skinnerian experimental research highlights two prominent topics in the sociological study of scientific research. First is the focus on the socio-material conditions of ‘making facts travel’ (Howlett & Morgan, 2010) beyond their immediate site of production. Making educational research relevant in spaces of education policies and classrooms does not involve just the simple application of research findings as facts. Instead, it requires the design and management of conceptual as well as material relations (Gorur, 2015; Fenwick & Edwards, 2010).

The second relevant topic is the crucial role of non-human agency in science, technology and society (Haraway, 2009). In education, social media, textbooks, assessments and tests, as well as classroom walls assume agency by translating, resisting and enabling pedagogical practices, while enhancing, inhibiting and/or reconfiguring human agency (see e.g. Christie &
Bloustien, 2010; Waltz, 2004).

Through focusing on these topics, I address two research questions. First, how are conceptual and non-human forms of agency distributed and controlled in Skinnerian experimental research on learning? Second, how does the ‘tuning’ of agency make experimental research relevant to governmental problematizations of post-World War Two American education?

Author

• Antti Saari, University of Tampere