Sociotechnological Arrangements for Learning About Nature-Culture Relations

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

Abstract

In this theoretical paper, I use nature-culture perspectives to offer reflections on socio-technological arrangements for studying human learning and development (Author & Colleague, 2015). I explore what is lost and gained through the socio-technological relations that we create in order to pursue research activities. In particular, I am interested in how technology is being used to better understand nature-culture relations in a time when communities are concerned with the loss of both land-based knowledge and biodiversity (Bidwell & Winschiers-Theophilus, 2012; Whyte, 2017).

As a learning scientist, I investigate the role of embodiment, mobility, and place in organizing attention and observation for knowledge building. I also ask questions about how our (humans’) relationships with other-than-human agents influence learning and our imagined possibilities for the future. I argue that these questions are proximally aligned with Indigenous environmental education, land-based education, and climate justice (Simpson, 2017; Whyte, 2018). In other words, understanding cultural processes of knowledge building with/from/about the natural world may deepen future iterations of research questions and influence the actions we take to address climate crises.

Building with place-based and decolonial approaches to research (Tuck & McKenzie, 2015) as well as my own inquiries, I reflect upon the methodologies I use to pursue questions about human knowing from within a nature-culture framework. First, I will describe my use of wearable and digital technologies in order to create socio-technological arrangements for capturing and composing multi-perspectival records of parent-child learning-in-place and on-the-move. Then I describe two key affordances of these arrangements: 1) the ability to explore the multi-modal and place-based resources that people use to create contexts for learning and 2) the opportunity to explore the role of more-than-human actors in the co-construction of contexts for knowledge building.

Drawing on these insights, I then address the complex and powered dynamics of my relations with socio-technological arrangements. I argue that these relations have been important to answering basic developmental questions in a core domain of human knowing -- folk biology. Indeed, I have relied on these technologies to examine heterogeneity in ways of knowing and to build theory about the role of walking and land in learning. Moreover, recognizing the political dimensions of research, I intentionally work to build theory from the everyday experiences of Indigenous families -- socio-technological arrangements have been key in this endeavor. At the same time, I am troubled by the ways socio-technological arrangements mediate relationships. As Goeman (2013) reminds us, “human and land relationships” have transformed from “harvesting to a consumer society that unravels and abstracts those connections” (p. 28-29). How might presencing Indigenous experiences with place help us to better see the multiple ways settler colonialism has transformed land itself as well as relationships with land? Relatedly, I wonder how socio-technological arrangements might 1) constrain researchers’ opportunities for learning by doing alongside participants and 2) make us complicit in global systems of production that are linked to oppression and climate crises. Engaging these questions may support deeper understandings of nature-culture relations and new ways for producing socio-technological relations.

Author

• Ananda Marin, University of California - Los Angeles