Rethinking professional learning as sociomaterial: making visible what ‘matters’
Visiting Scholar
Tara Fenwick, Professor and Director of ProPEL (Professional Practice, Education and Learning), The Stirling School of Education: University of Stirling, Stirling, UK
will be presenting a CERI Colloquium
Rethinking professional learning as sociomaterial: making visible what ‘matters’
Date: Monday, September 9th, 2013
Time: 3:30 – 5:30 pm
Location: H101, Health Sciences Addition
RVSP: Holly.Ellinor@schulich.uwo.ca
LINK To talk: Please note, the camera was running for about 25 minutes before the talk started, so fast forward until you reach the 25:00 mark. My introduction was not audible as I didn’t have a michrophone, but you can hear Tara when she begins to speak:
http://www.livestream.com/westernu/video?clipId=pla_bfe1076d-6e01-478c-ae20-2cb2aa05999f&utm_source=lslibrary&utm_medium=ui-thumb
This presentation focuses on ‘practice-based learning’, what some call workplace or informal learning. A key dynamic to consider are the material as well as the social interactions in which different practices and learning emerge in these environments. Professional practice is intimately enmeshed with instruments, technologies, texts and forms, bodies and blood – all of which embed a history of politics and ethics. The material is often disregarded or dismissed as mere tools of human intention and action. However recent research in professional learning is now focusing on the materiality of practice – and not just the materials, but the entanglement of the material with the social, including language, cultural discourses, power relations, hierarchies and so forth.
In this colloquium, Dr. Fenwick will introduce these recent conceptions of practice-based learning that work from a fundamental re-thinking of what actually constitutes practice. Here, knowing and doing are understood to be inter-related, the social and material are enmeshed, human dynamics are not granted priority, and practice is situated between what the established and the emergent. The focus is upon ‘knowing-in-practice’ as enactments performed through assemblages or networks that are more-than-human. These concepts help us to trace how myriad networks and dynamics of translation are at work in students’ learning encounters with the objects and texts of practices. They highlight the material mediators and intermediaries holding together particular practices, and the politics through which they work. These concepts also illuminate the ways that standards of practice are actually performed (along with the inevitable work-arounds), and they raise questions about how humans become assembled with technologies and with what effects.
Overall, these approaches reveal workplace learning as a series of continuing learning struggles and as enactments – performed not by individual human actors but by sociomaterial collectives. One implication is a radical revisioning of issues of agency, politics and ontology in professional practice and education. Another is examining pedagogical implications for teaching that can support productive practice-based learning. Our aim in this colloquium is to open dialogue on these issues across the professions.