Material Constellations in Spatial Indexing

• In Event: Materiality and Sociomaterial Practices in Learning, Designing, and Making

Abstract

Purpose
This study examines the sociomaterial constellations that are enacted as youth and adults engage in designed walks during a summer Indigenous STEAM camp that was held in an urban forested park. The camp was designed to engage in land and water based education emergent from Indigenous knowledge systems. In this analysis, we examine the entanglement of cultural ways of knowing, place, designed material tools, and the epistemic actors and actions (including the role of both humans and more-than-humans) in moments of spatial indexing (Authors, 2019). Our research questions are: What are the forms and functions of sociomaterial constellations in moments of observations? And, how do these constellations mediate sense making about socioecological systems?
Perspectives
This study draws on sociocultural theories of learning to highlight the entanglements between place, social structures, culture and cognition (e.g. Authors, 2010). More specifically, this study extends the literature on observations as a deeply theoretical, culturally nuanced practice that can be mediating process in sense making about complex ecological systems (Eberbach & Crowley, 2009; Marin, 2013). We also recognize that the role of material tools is not only given meaning by humans, but in fact shape how humans understand the world (Kawagley & Barnhardt, 1998; Lemke, 2000).
Methods and data sources
The data corpus consists of audio and video recordings during a series of designed walks during a summer ISTEAM camp that was part of a larger NSF-funded community-engaged design research project. We employ interaction and conversation analysis (Jordan & Henderson, 1995; Goodwin, 2000) to examine the interactions between cultural ways of knowing, place, tools and people. We leaned on Goodwin’s (2017) substrates framework to develop a coding scheme that attended to the indexical operations in initiating and subsequent epistemic actions (IEA and SEA respectively). We present findings along two dimensions: (1) the form of initiating and subsequent epistemic actions (IEAs and SEAs), and (2) the conceptual constellations that emerged from each IEA.
Results and substantiated conclusions
Findings show initiating epistemic actions played a critical role in the forms of subsequent epistemic actions as well as the function of sense making. First, place emergence accounted for the most initiating and subsequent epistemic actions, indicating that EAs tended to stay grounded in place, regardless of the initiating substrate that opened the semiotic sequence. Second, when tools were the initiating epistemic action, there was an increase in sense making on multiple temporal, spatial, and relational scales, suggesting that designed tools (e.g. plant information cards) were in fact able to scaffold attention towards dynamic and relational forms of reasoning. Finally, when place or tools opened the initiating semiotic sequence, more-than-humans were more likely to be epistemic actors within the sequence.
Scholarly significance
Findings from this study suggest that through intentional scaffolds, designed material tools can foster dynamic forms of sense making that are place-driven and allow for withness-thinking (Shotter, 2010). Additionally, processes of reading the land reflect a key pedagogical commitment both for Native American youth, as well as for deeper understanding of socio-ecological phenomena (Cajete, 2000; Marin, 2013).

Authors

• Priya Pugh, IslandWood

• Megan Bang, Northwestern University School of Education and Social Policy Learning Sciences