The Materiality of Learning: Technology and Knowledge in Educational Practice. Series: Learning in Doing: Social, Cognitive and Computational Perspectives

The modern practice of schooling is and always has been inextricably intertwined with its materials: from Froebel gifts, Montessori object boxes, and Waldorf architecture, to Madeline Hunter's lesson plan format, the Blackboard learning management system, and Smart Technologies' Interactive Whiteboard. The particular technologies teachers use in the classroom appreciably shape and "influence the formation of learning and affect thinking and theorizing about education in general" ([Estrid Sorensen], 2009, p. 7). Yet the formative significance of materiality to the social project of education has received surprisingly little theoretical attention. Waltz (2006) points out that "this is especially curious given the serious work that has gone into the development and use of things as educational tools" (p. 52). Even educational technology literature has remained relatively immune to the work of science and technology studies (STS) and Actor-Network Theory (ANT) scholars who, for example, observed early that technologies are often unfaithful to their creators and thus produce unanticipated effects beyond the (educational) aims intended. Estrid Sorensen's (2009) The Materiality of Learning: Technology and Knowledge in Educational Practice offers one corrective, methodological step toward addressing this theoretical deficiency, reframing "learning not as social but socio-material" (p. 5). The book is divided into six chapters, each homing in on a methodological insight or "lesson" emanating from Sorensen's ethnography. Chapter 1, "A Minimal Methodology," introduces Helen Varran's (1998) notion of imaginarles as a key heuristic for nudging participants' "performative or enacting mode of knowing" (p. 15) to the forefront of inquiry. "Minimal methodology" is Sorensen's first lesson, signaling her move from a humanist to a posthumanist position: the researcher turns away from the participants as individuals (teachers and pupils) and follows instead participation or performance, attending to how humans and nonhumans (blackboard, chairs, online environment, etc.) take part in educational practice. Sorensen then turns to analyze school technologies in terms of presence, that is, "the way in which humans are with materials, contrary to how humans make sense of materials-or how they make sense of themselves with the help of materials" (p. 138, my italics). By way of example, she unfolds the attentional draw and spatial imaginarles of the blackboard. Sorensen's descriptions