Analyzing Educational Practices from New Materialist Perspective

Agency of Material and Human

Abstract

 In this article, I discuss the potential for adopting the new materialist perspective in educational research.  In social science and the humanities, agency has been regarded as a property of humans who are capable of reflexivity.  The material has been separated from the human because only the latter has causality.  In recent years, social constructionism has focused on the micro processes of children’s learning about the complicated relationship between the material and the human.  In this approach, the material is connected with human the only in so far as it represents meaningful tools for the user.  This approach thus emphasizes only discursive interactions.  The new materialism, based on postconstructivism, aims to overcome the dichotomy between the material and the human.  New materialists view the material and the human symmetrically and recognize additional actors in social communication by including nonhuman agents.  They understand associations consisting of multimodal agents as assemblages in which all agents engage in intra-action.  Their focus is on becoming, apart from typical development.  The researchers cut off data from practices and produce new knowledge by entangling themselves with data.  The flattened plane of the new materialism allows researchers to understand positive aspects of learning among children who were negatively assessed before, and to produce knowledge which was previously overlooked.  This draws the line of flight from the normalized educational theory.