Subject in Ecology, Ecology in the Subject: Challenges for Sociocultural Theory

• In Event: Learning in Tech Ecologies: Coming Clean About the Ecological Consequences of "Educational Innovation"

Abstract

In this paper, I contribute to the conversation on learning in technology ecologies by interrogating the assumptions of sociocultural learning theories. I argue that the learning sciences needs to direct sustained attention to building new theoretical approaches that are up to the challenge of supporting learning in the face of ecological crisis.
I draw on recent work in biological, humanistic, and social scientific scholarship. The combination of biological and social perspectives underscores the fundamental interrelationships between human and more-than-human worlds, as illustrated by a recent UN report that links extinction threats to 1 million nonhuman species to the survivability of humans around the globe (IPBES, 2019). It also reflects common understandings held by learning researchers, that human learning and development is driven by a complex of biological and cultural processes (Lee, 2010).
Human exceptionalism poses a key challenge to learning theory in our current ecological crisis. Bang (2017) has pointed out the human exceptionalism built into sociocultural theory since Vygotsky, and has connected this to the anti-Indigenous racism Vygotsky exhibited in his writings. Vygotsky’s interest in tools involves how ideas and materials can be made to submit to human volition. In characterizations of human thinking that drew out its relation to action and the social, he simultaneously presented development in terms of a growing human mastery over diverse phenomena. Cole and Scribner (1978) note Vygotsky’s inheritance from Engels regarding “man’s” mastery over nature, transforming it for “his” own ends (p. 7). Bang (2017) finds this subject-object orientation limiting and suggests that “Indigenous ways of knowing would construct some of these mediational means as subjects, and understand the relation between person and mediator as subject-subject relations” (p. 131).
Here I ask, what could be gained by taking this challenge a few steps further down the forest path? The feminist theorist Kristeva (1982) questioned the stability of subjectivity by examining the processes of the human body. She identified the disgust we feel when we push away the contents of our bodily flows—urine, feces, blood, sweat—as part of a “defensive position” we take to secure the perimeter of our rational selves. These flows bring into question what belongs to the self and what is “other.” Current estimates show that only about 43 percent of the cells in a human body are genetically human (Gallagher, 2018). The rest include bacteria, viruses, fungi, and archaea. Trillions of viruses, carried by atmospheric currents, fall to the surface of the planet every day (Reche, D’Orta, Mladenov, Winget, & Suttle, 2018). Scientists believe that a snippet of genetic code called ARC—which plays a role in nervous system function, memory, and thinking—was introduced to vertebrate species, including humans, long ago by way of an animal-virus assemblage (Pastuzyn et al., 2018).
Rather than simply elevate some nonhuman elements as “subjects,” I want to interrogate whether the subject is really the right figure for taking on the challenges we face. This paper imagines other figures of learning that could prove useful for understanding learning in technological, social, and biological ecologies.

Author

• Tanner Vea, The Pennsylvania State University