The topic of 'objects' in education seems rather abstruse. My point in this draft book chapter is that we've got so used to the "objects" of education we forget to notice the way they shape our educational thinking. Yet, educational thinking revolves around transforming objects whose nature and causal power are poorly understood. What is a textbook? What is a Learning Environment (Virtual, Real, Managed or whatever!). What is our relation to "tools" for learning? What about our objectification of institutional structures? Of courses? Of pedagogies? And so on.
Part of this chapter deals with evolution: the transformations of educations objects are aimed at their improvement - or the improvement of education through the improvement of the object. This translates into the evolution, recombination and development of objects in the educational infrastructure. Think of the electronic whiteboard, or tablets, or the VLE, or e-portfolios. The evolutionary metaphor is closely related to McLuhan's metaphor of 'extension'. The inspection of 'objects' in education has to grapple with Darwin and evolutionary metaphors of technological change.
The evolutionary picture needs to be situated against ways of characterising the nature of objects themselves. There's both a practical methodological aspect to this (a different view of objects entails a different approach to researching and improving them), and a deeper philosophical view. What is at stake is the status of 'matter': more precisely the distinction between 'matter' and 'mattering'. Here I compare 5 different characterisations drawing on cybernetics, constructivism, realism, Badiou's idealism and linguistic reductionism. Each takes a position about the nature of objects, and in the light of each position, different methodologies and approaches to educational development follow. These are worth spelling out because it challenges each of us to think "What am I trying to do in education? What ought to be done?"
Abstract
This chapter explores the way that objects are considered to be causal
in learning processes. Objects are important because much educational thinking
assumes that the manipulation and transformation of objects is the key variable
that can make the difference in the quality of learning, whether it is the
textbook, the VLE, the curriculum design, the communications tools or whether
it is the shift to different kinds of technology (mobile, tablet or pen and paper).
Clearly some object transformations and evolutions make a difference to the
ability of groups of users to negotiate them – screen readers help blind
learners, video subtitles help the deaf, and so on. However, the assertions of
instructional designers insisting upon the independent variables of learning
success to lie with the physical artefacts around which teaching and learning
takes place is questionable.
Educational
objects are seen to evolve in the light of new technologies. Arguments for
object evolution are difficult to defend, and whilst thinking about learning
and its causal relation to objects remains unclear, object transformations are
effected by management of institutions whose effects are often to manufacture
situations of increasing control. Beginning with the essential confusion
concerning objects and education, I focus on the evolutionary histories that
unite them. This exposition highlight the contrast in object thinking between "matter" and "mattering" and I present 5 different paradigms for exploring this. I argue that contrasting ontological pathways are more commensurable than they first appear. In particular, their relational focus opens the door to bigger questions about educational ecology.
Introduction
Most interventions in education involve transformation of
its objects. This can be as simple as writing a new textbook, or putting files
on the learning system, or making changes to the way things might be assessed. Each
transformation builds on a previous state, or recombines existing objects in
new ways. The driving purpose for these recombinations and evolutions is almost
always presented as being “to increase student learning”. Such developments
have tended to insist on causal relationships between human development and
educational resources, supported by cognitivist methodologies which identify in
those material interventions the independent variables upon which learning
develops. That the instructional designer’s books, webpages, online services or
learning designs all become independent variables is perhaps understandable:
the objects of education are 'there' - we can all see them, and we can't see
learning. Yet objects also constitute dependent variables: the work that
students do, for example. But the possibility that this kind of 'variable-ism'
might be deeply mistaken (as wiser heads in phenomenology like Merleau-Ponty
would have told us) and that nothing is independent, remains invisible: the
causal relationship between matter and the 'mattering' of education is
unthinkable to many psychologists. Even if the appetite for instructionalist
thinking with regard to learning resources and 'instructional design' has
dissipated slightly (in the wake of emerging socio-material insights like Actor
Network Theory or Orlikowski's work), attention shifts to new kinds of objects
in education such as those produced through 'learning analytics'. Once again,
it's the same problem: identifying the independent variables in the material
analysis and then inspecting causal relationships.
Critique of this position is nuanced by the fact that some
resources appear to be more successful in engaging learners than others, or
that some pedagogical approaches are more successful than others, or even that
data analytics are useful in speculating on what might be going on in learners'
heads. But can we separate the 'powerful objects' of the learning process from
the people involved in using those objects to teach? Surely, however wonderful
a resource might appear to be, in the hands of a poor teacher, the educational
results will be always be dreadful.
The problem of trying to identify the independent objects of
education in material resources is a problem of theorising of objects in
general. The question is about 'matter'. Objects are matter. But do objects
matter? Educational processes privilege matter as mattering. The failure to
produce the artefact that was stipulated in the assignment will cause the
learner to fail. The failure to deliver the tool, book, website or system that
was promised in the project bid will cause project funders to withdraw the funding. To
what extent does the matter of objects matter? Under the imperialism of the
object in education, everything becomes objectified: learners and teachers
become objects moving through metaphysically misconceived processes of learning
and attainment within the education system. As Karen Barad has pointed out, it is not just a semantic
trick that 'matter' and 'mattering' appear to be related: what
"matters" to us has a bearing on the way we think about
"matter". When we see calls for educational technology to be
‘evidence-driven’, the question we are faced with is the relationship between
the causal efficacy of "matter" (our interventions) and "what
matters".
Learning, Objects and
Relations
What is it that drives the process that accords to objects
the independent causal force that is responsible for learning? A process of 'evolution' is laid over
the narrative of the object in education. However, this
evolutionary narrative is frequently frustrated by those who point out the
obvious similarities between educational practice today and educational
practice over 100 years ago. On the one hand, the objects of education appear
to have changed: many classrooms now have ‘interactive whiteboards’, and the
internet has transformed the acquisition of resources including textbooks,
simulations, online quizzes. Yet structurally, the whiteboard remains at the
front of the class, students typically still sit in rows, and teachers’ mark
books are much the same as they ever were, even if now they use a spreadsheet
rather than paper. Objects evolve, but form and function remain constant, and
society appears not to “evolve”. This is not an educational utopia to give
assurance that our object evolutions are moving in the right direction. It is,
in many ways, more regressive: objects evolve to become more powerful; learners
and teachers have less autonomy to use them as they will; technologies as
“services” may provide useful instruments to users (teachers and learners) but
at the same time instrumentalises users to provide surveillance data to
managers. The modern world of online objects in education has become a
surveillance activity.
By what standards does this evolution of objects situate
itself as science? Evolutionary theory helps to found narratives which say
“once we had textbooks, now we will have e-textbooks which will transform the
accessibility of resources for students”, and that this transformation of the
object will be causal on the transformation of the learning of individuals. Darwinian
thinking itself has many parallels to thinking about learning. Evolution, like
learning, cannot be seen. Evolution is an explanatory principle which overlays
scientific observations of the diversity of species. What did Darwin actually
see? He saw relations between species and relations between evidence of
historical species and current situations. The explanatory principle of
evolution does not explain objects; it explains relations between objects
through a mechanism whereby objects have agency in determining their relations
to one another. Important, relations between objects are identified as being of
two types: homologies and analogies. But why is this important to education?
In education, the picture is a bit more complicated.
Teachers see relations of ability, and relations between different aspects of
human beings. They also see relations between past abilities and present
abilities, just as they see relations between the different things that are
done to learners. It is apparently easy to make connections between the
relations between the things that are done and the relations of past abilities
and present abilities, and the relations between abilities among a population. But
how is the connection between the adaptation and transformation of the objects
of education and the adaptation and transformation of learners then made?
The key to this is the identification of homology and
analogy in the identification of relation. The bird's wing is analogous to the
bat's wing, whilst the bird's wing is homologous to the shark's fin. In
education, patterns of homology and analogy are perhaps less obvious - partly
because the lens through which homology and analogies might be identified are
so contaminated with the paraphernalia of the education system. The curriculum
displays both: the music exam is homologous to the maths exam, for example,
whilst the art show (whilst being examined) is also analogous to the artist's
career (which involves putting on shows), in a way that the maths exam is not analogous
to the work of the professional mathematician. When we talk about the diversity
in performances of individual learners, and the ways in which their
performances might be improved, we tend to talk in terms of 'levels'. Our
learners are naturally ordered, and "get the basics right" is a
typical mantra. Levels exist in relation to one another, and a level in one
subject may be either (or both) homologous and analogous to a level in another
subject.
Analogies between levels in different subjects are as problematic
as the analogies across the curriculum. To convince ourselves that this isn't a
problem is to subject education to a kind of abstract Darwinism. The failure to
think critically about analogies is also a failure to think properly about
homologies. The relations between the basic and the "advanced
concepts" are extremely complex and varied across different fields, yet
our analogies wash over the subtleties. There is little that's
"basic" in music, for example - a single note can be as complex as Boulez's
1st piano sonata. Yet maths - certainly as we now regard it - is difficult
without knowing multiplication tables. And it is not unusual for some subjects
to effectively have to 'unlearn' their basic concepts in order to master the
more sophisticated ones.
Therefore, there is confused relational thinking in
education where objects are referred to rather than homologies and analogies.
What is less clear is that this confused thinking in education directly
affected Darwin’s evolutionary model in the first place. Richard Lewontin has
argued that whilst sociologists talk of the outgrowth of Darwinism in 'social
Darwinism', it was actually the other way round. Social Darwinism - or rather
the varieties of thinking that saw atomised entities selecting particular
favoured sets of properties in order to maximise chances of survival - was in
fact endemic in social life from the early 19th century. This is an important
point because it pulls the rug from those who criticise social Darwinism (for
example, Hodgson's work on Darwinism in economics) as some sort of
misrepresentation of Darwinian thinking: Darwinian thinking grew (evolved?!)
from the social conditions of the time. It was these ideas which effectively
drove the social, industrial, and political transformations of the period
within which Darwin grew up. Here is the link to learning: the early 19th
century was a time of remarkable transformation. Innovators, engineers,
scientists were making discoveries which transformed the relations between
themselves and the rest of the world in ways which hadn't been conceived
before; industrial transformations disrupted social and political structures;
the move from what Veblen calls 'handicraft' industries towards to the world of
the 'captain of industry' (and eventually 'absentee ownership') was something
that powerful families could see in their own personal histories. The question
about agency, technology, development as transformations of relations was
starkly present for the 19th century entrepreneur.
Darwinism as a contribution to natural history laid a
scientific veneer over a pre-existing narrative. The issue was that through
study and cataloguing of biological diversity, geography and natural history,
the 19th century ethos was stretched in a procrustean way over scientific
objectivity. Darwinism gave this old idea new content and scientific status
which made it more powerful. Yet unlike any scientific theory before, evolution
was never seen to act. The only process that could be seen to act were those
social transformations of the period.
The Darwinian scientisation of the process had a number of
effects, and one of them was in the direction of thinking about human
development. The folk-theories which surrounded the transformation of social
position could now become scientised. Piagetian theories of
adaptation-assimilation, genetic co-adaptation and so on owe much to Darwin,
not only in their application of systemic processual mechanisms that lead to
transformations in relations between things, but also in the fundamental
methodological move which starts with observed diversity and then seeks to
explain it with a historical mechanism.
The appreciation of the importance of educational thought on
Darwinian evolution presents an opportunity to rethink the causal significance
of objects in education. The arguments for the evolution of educational
objects, and the granting of causal power of independent variables to
educational objects looks insupportable. Educational objects evolve
in the light of a prevailing narrative about human development which isn’t
scientific, but which gained scientific credibility through Darwin’s
application of it to natural objects. Given this fundamental problem, we are
forced into identifying a deeper understanding of the nature of objects and a
richer characterisation of their causal power.
Is or isn’t there a material world outside us? What causes
it to change? Undecidable questions have plagued philosophy for centuries. Reasoned
sets of commitments one way or the other are grounded on the consequences (as
seen from the perspective of the person upholding it) of assuming that the
answer is yes or no. In other words, the existence or non-existance of matter
is predicated on “mattering”. Before inquiring into the relationship between
the material of education and social processes, there are different paths from matter (or non-matter) to mattering to consider. There are different ways in which we consider the nature of objects. Often these different views on objects are characterised in the different methodologies we use when interventions in education are researched. Among major characterisations of objects, we can list:
- Objects as mechanistic feedback process – the cybernetic view that objects arise as perceptual observer-oriented patterns
which maintain stabilities;
- Objects as aggregates of “powerful particulars”
– the realist view of objects as an independently existing thing whose
materiality relates to and underpins social forces;
- Objects as actors – the socio-material view of
objects as entwined entities with perceptual processes;
- Objects as multiplicities (rather than singularities) – the
view that objects are essentially contingent, and that their regularities and solidities emerge through the interaction of contingencies, ultimately resting on the perspective of the logic which forms around them; by this view, in the final analysis, matter manifests itself as mathematics;
- Objects as declaration – the view that objects
result from social declarations, and ultimately derive from speech acts.
Each of these positions requires some detailed elaboration which reflects back on previous arguments in the book. However, so as to not get too bogged-down in the different philosophical positions (each of which would require a book on its own!), it is important to make the point that the question to ask is always "Ok, so what should we do if we want to understand the object's relation to education?" Each position entails a different set of things that we might do, although no single position is entirely distinct from any other.
For example, for a cybernetic view, which fundamentally concerns itself with dynamic mechanisms, one of the obvious things to do is to create models. This has tended to underpin methodological approaches ranging from the instructional design model of Gange, to those of Pask and Von Foerster. Such models must account for the ways the objectness of the object perturbs the mechanisms of perception, or the mechanisms of expectation of an observer. In more recent years, Agent-Based modelling approaches have been used to explore some of the dynamic phenomena in education. However, in such a research program, we should ask as to how 'real' people are accounted for; how are emotions characterised in the process of engagement with objects?
To characterise objects as 'powerful particulars' with tendencies and powers, then the research program will avoid modelling (accusing it of idealism) and instead concentrate on observing behaviours between subjects and objects and identifying tendencies in different situations. This can address the cybernetician's idealism by at least trying to get at the root causes of emotional responses to objects. Mechanistic explanations accounting for the different things that might happen should gradually be able to pinpoint any more general causal mechanisms and tendencies exhibited by objects. Pawson and Tilley's "Realistic evaluation" is a popular technique which seeks to identify the powers and tendencies of an object in different circumstances. In particular it considers what kind of causal mechanisms relate to the object. Understanding the nature of a textbook is like understanding the nature of money, or the nature of a teacher. Here though we will face questions relating to the assumed facticity of the mechanisms identified: do not identified mechanisms then become part of the research fabric which they then transform thus undermining the conditions present when they were established? How do we situate meaning-making with the nature of the object? How does both the object's and subject's history affect any apparent tendencies?
If objects are understood as agents to be considered with equal status as that of human actors constituent of an Actor Network, our analysis might look at the inter-relationships between the functional transformations that each object makes. We might identify webs of human and non-human actors and deciding on the different things that different parts of the network do. Here, we might understand how certain attachment relations are established between objects and people, certain practices with objects become ritualised, and so on. We might understand how educational objects serve as substitutes for carers, and other important human figures. But it won't tell us how the objects got there in the first place, or the more general features of their tendencies in different situations. Nor will it separate the material being of an object and its relation to powerful mechanisms in societies which determine who is affected by that object. Objects do not act alone: there is always human agency behind them somewhere.
The view of objects as mathematical formalism requires a more detailed examination of the underpinning theory. Since this view sits awkwardly with the view of Actor Network Theory, the view of realists (powerful particulars) and the view of the cyberneticians, I will describe this in more detail below. A central question emerging from the tension between these positions is the role of language and power. Here, I draw attention to Searle's recent social ontology as a way of thinking about how it is the educational objects that we surround ourselves with actually get there, and the mechanisms by which their usage is established. Searle's method and theory has the advantage of being relatively easy to grasp, but whose implications are deep and which might provide a way of carving a sensible path through these different presentations of the object since each perspective has something valuable to offer.
Amidst the different position, what is clear is that objects exist historically - both within the history of a society, and within a personal history. Their historical being has implications which carry influence in other aspects of social life, such as discourse. For example, objects like toys and dolls create ritualised practices which become embodied and which furthermore create values and later are transferred into adult behaviour and social change results. Values become codified in discourses. Discourses require paraphernalia in order to perpetuate themselves. Textbooks are instruments of discourse, and the means by which the values of a community may sustain itself. The meaning of a textbook is dependent on the expectations that people have of that object, which in part are codified by the practices which surround that textbook. The question is how do we arrive at a sensible research program which embraces these rich dynamics?
Objects, Mathematics and Mechanisms
Objects and Natural Necessity: The ideological battleground
The real question is “Is Hume right about the lack of foundation for natural necessity?”. Bhaskar and the Critical Realists say "no!", Badiou and the Speculative Realists say "yes!"; the cyberneticians and to some extent the actor network theorists say 'yes...' but at a deeper level of asserting the reality of mechanisms, say "no...". This presents the key battleground for the understanding of objects. If there isn't natural necessity, there must be something else which accounts for our perceptions of event regularities. Badiou and his followers have argued that there must be 'truth' expressed as logical ordering in the world rather than ontological mechanisms independent of humans, and that truth together with language and embodiment can explain the kind of regularities that scientists observe. Badiou's question for the Critical Realists on the one hand, and for the cyberneticians and actor-network theorists on the other, has to do with the nature of change, and the ontology of time. One cannot talk about natural necessity unless one exposes one's implicit assumptions about the ticking clock which sits behind the apprehension of regularity itself.
Badiou draws on Heidegger to help articulate a way of accounting for being which doesn't gloss over the problematic issue of time. Although famous for articulating a theory of technology and concernful action, Heidegger's "Sein und Zeit" at its root is a phenomenological theory about the relationship between subjectivity and the apparently 'objective' world around us. Every engagement with the material world, including with tools and textbooks offers a kind of ‘revealing’ of the world. Heidegger’s understanding of this results in some powerful descriptions of the everyday experience of objects and technologies – particularly those aspects of engagement with objects where the objects do not conform with expectations: where the objects apparently ‘break down’. The break down breaks our 'falleness' in the world. What has to happen is a re-evaluation of reality, and reconception of the relation between "being" and Dasein.
Heidegger's language throws a different light on the skepticism of Hume. The event of the billiard ball being struck creates the conditions for the revelation of "truth". It is not that a causal particular is in operation, but rather a deep principal that holds being together situated between language and events. Meillassoux argues that Hume’s regularity theory is a theory of expectation, and that the expectation of regularity in event successions is something which depends on a probabilistic awareness of the totality of all possible events that might follow the collision. The truth that is revealed through the perception of regularity has to be mathematical, since mathematics is implicated in the essential nature of surprise or expectancy. Since there is no possibility of knowing all the possible events, we must assume that the problem of regularity demands an inspection of the logic of probability. Against Bhaskar, the assertion is that scientific practice reveals truths, not causal powers.
What this means in reality is that a textbook is implicated in a set of events which surround it, and within those events truths as natural orderings are revealed. Some natural orderings are well-known in the sociological literature. For example, the orderings pertaining to social class, the mechanisms of social reproduction, and so on. But there is more that is ordered and whose logical structure can be identified: the social practices of learning and teaching, of understanding or not understanding, of confusion, or alienation, or love, or discovery. Just as a musical work operates at many levels, so do the practices of education. Revealing those levels, the limits between individuals and the relations between different kinds of events become the central focus of this kind of inquiry.
The Cybernetics of Time
Cyberneticians have not been unaware of the problem of time: clearly it is central to their thinking. In trying to reconcile a mechanistic view of perception and reality with an inability to account for time n the process has led to various forms of "immanentist" accounts of time within mechanisms. Within its history, cybernetics has insisted on two views of an object. In the original cybernetic conception, there was an uncritical view of the object-as-mechanism which could be observed, modelled and experimented upon as a way of coming to know the world. This view typically is called ‘first-order cybernetics’. It recognised its limitations, but also presented itself as a practical way of coming to know the world. In the late 1960s and early 1970s this view was challenged, partly in response to a paper by Margaret Mead called “the cybernetics of Cybernetics” which appeared to call for an acknowledgement that the process of observation of objects was itself mechanistic, and that this meant that observation itself had to be problematized. Other thinkers in cybernetics shared this view: the ‘observer problem’ was wrestled with by Pask and others (see chapter 4) led to 2nd order cybernetic thought framing the observation of objects within the overall biological process of perception. The inspiration for this was partly biological: the work of Maturana and Varela on frogs had suggested that mechanisms of perception and communication were no different from mechanisms of cellular replication and interaction. In taking this line, the perception of objects – or even the perception of the external world in general – was recast as a biologically-grounded process of cellular interaction. This biological idea inspired a number of other similar efforts to characterise process as a way of coming to understand understanding, perceive perceiving, and so on.
But to criticise observation was clearly to throw the door open to solipsistic nihilism. Some way of accounting for commonsense everyday experience of objects which was consistent with 2nd order cybernetic thinking was required. Here there were critiques of the various positions: Maturana’s biological cybernetics, whilst it called observation into question, seemed to be firmly based on observations down the biologist’s microscope. Luhmann’s attachment to Maturana’s ideas also threw doubt over his social system theory as a domain for the construction of objects. A logical analytic solution to the cybernetic problem of objects was required.
This was provided by both Von Foerster and Gordon Pask who worked on the idea of perceptual stabilities as objects – partly inspired by James Gibson’s ecological theory of perception. Von Foerster called these “eigenvalues” in perceptual fields. He argued that to perceive an object is to tune perceiving forces into stable patterns: in this way, an object becomes a pattern of stability in the perceiving subject, not an externally existing, causally potent entity outside the domain of the observer. The epistemology that stems from this insight defends an irrealist conception of the world, whilst avoiding the danger of solipsism by presenting a model where realities may be shared through communication processes. However, being grounded in biological models presents presents problems: as usual with such theories, the fault-line in their reasoning lies in their foundations. If people stand inside a virtual reality simulator, we may see some phenomena which might back this up. The regularities of the everyday world can be manipulated. So, by this logic, tables, chairs, books and blackboards aren’t “there” as such. What is “seen” is a patterning in perception. A similar view is expressed by Ernst von Glasersfeld who argues that with his radical constructivism, there is no “object”. All there are are processes of perception. Drawing on the work of Piaget, he considered how the learning of mathematics could be considered from this radical perspective.
There is little critique of the existence of biological cells, the role that instrumentation might play in the observation of those cells, nor is there any consideration of the social context within which observation occurs. Such a view is ambivalent towards the throny problem of naturalism: whilst on the one hand it is in accordance with Hume that there is no natural necessity, the very essence of the cybernetic mechanism may necessitate natural necessity in order to become known. Furthermore, as we discussed in chapter 4, there is an implicit transcendental subject within these ideas which tends towards a “networked” model of society. Von Foerster’s conception of eigenforms, in presenting a logical model of interaction, may yet be useful in defining the conditions under which communication about the world occurs.
Mechanisms or Mathematics?
There is a curious point of contact between the imminentist accounts of time in cybernetics (particularly in the work of Von Foerster) and the work of Badiou. The cybernetic mechanisms rely on powerful recursive mathematical formalisms, which find expression within the branch of set theory called 'category theory'. This branch of mathematics interests Badiou too, and forms the foundation of his work on logic. In other words, an account of mechanistic process gives way to an account of logical ordering. If this is the case, what do we make of the apparently opposed ontological positions presented both by the “Powerful Particulars” of Harré and Madden, or of the generative mechanisms of Bhaskar's Critical Realism?
On the face of it the naturalistic position defended by Bhaskar in talking of the “tendencies, properties and powers” of objects, i.e. to consider objects as “powerful particulars” is a way of characterising more broadly the position of discoverable causal mechanisms seems at odds with the anti-naturalism of Badiou and the speculative realists. When Hume argued that there was no reason why the natural world should exhibit the regular causal laws that physicists experience in the lab, he put the responsibility for such regularity firmly in the heads of human observers. Harré and Madden oppose this presenting the idea of a "powerful particular" as a way of characterising the tendencies of things to behave in certain ways in certain conditions. In this way they introduce the idea of generative causation, an idea which owes its origin to Aristotelian thinking about causation. Causes are not constructs; they lie inherent in the nature of things. In describing the conditions under which a causal power might exercise itself, Harré and Madden rephrase Aristotelian categories: whilst a causal power might be considered to be a material cause, Aristotle's idea of a formal cause is represented as an intrinsic condition for the exercise of a causal power; At the same time, in Harre and Madden's language, there are also extrinsic conditions for the exercise of a causal power - what Aristotle calls the efficient cause. Whilst causal powers cannot be directly perceived, they can be ascribed on the basis of perceiving the relation between the object and any action taken with it. In education, we might reinterpret this to account for the causal power of the textbook as the perception of the relation between the textbook's physical properties and the social situation within which it is used.
Bhaskar's Critical Realism takes a similar path to Harré and Madden's generative causation. However, for Bhaskar causes can be discovered through retroductive reasoning and observation: 'powerful particulars', 'tendencies', etc can be determined. Harre has been critical of this move as it inclines towards dogmatism which focuses only on the intrinsic causal properties rather than the extrinsic and intrinsic conditions under which a causal power might be expressed. However, in underpinning his account of causation in a critique of Hume, Bhaskar unleashes a dialectical materialist argument which has as its target methodological practice in the social sciences. Social entities too have generative causal power (albeit through what Bhaskar calls 'transitive' mechanisms) which too can be discovered, and whose power ultimately rests on the causal properties of matter. Through this intellectual move, the reality of 'powerful particulars' and causal powers leads to a process of methodological critique which ultimately places human emancipation at the heart of its argument. Methodological critique lies at the heart of the relevance of the causal particulars argument in education. Bhaskar's emphasis on transcendental arguments encourages researchers to ask “if we think this is the way to research education, what do we assume the world must be like?”
Object as Actor
Whilst Bhaskar and Harré argue that objects have causal power, tendencies and so on, they do not suggest that objects have agency. Latour, however, does take this view: objects and humans are different kinds of ‘agents’; reality is a network of interacting agents which can be studied through understanding the agencies of people and objects. Latour’s theory embraces a constructivist ontology drawing from the philosophy of Giles Deleuze. It is consequently closely related to the cybernetic position of objecthood as a kind of emergent stability among interacting perceptual forces: it regards the realist attribution of causal power to objects as suspect, since it regards claims to causal power as inseparable from the network within which causal power is exercised: in this Actor Network Theory remains close to Hume's scepticism. Within ANT a particular stance is taken with regard to the status of objects and humans whereby both are seen to ‘act’ in the world. The actions of different agents (including objects) become entwined in processes which tie up human activities which the properties of objects. This entwining mesh comprises the 'network'.
Using Latour’s notion of Actor-Network Theory, the relations between the actions of humans and non-humans can provide ways in which the understanding of these positions may be considered. Latour’s position is interesting because it does attempt to address the ways that humans and things may be thought about together with technology. Of course, this begs the question of what an ‘actor’ is. Latour argues that it is a “An actor in ANT is a semiotic definition – an actant – that is something that acts or to which activity is granted by another…an actant can literally be anything provided it is granted to be the source of action.” But there is a problem here with ‘acting’. As we saw earlier, humans act in line with expectations about the world. Agency is ethical. Actor Network Theory presents a way of thinking about objects where they are imbued with a sense of their enaction within social contexts, and the latent political contexts that lie within them. However, the deeper ethical concerns about the status of objects remains a problem for understanding of the motivations for teachers, technologists and others to insist on the use of objects in the classroom. The perception of objects and their import becomes significant in the understanding of the impact of objects in the process of education.
The challenge with Latour's thought relates to peculiarities in his ontological commitment. The constructivist ontology that he embraces is one which privileges the existence of 'a network' of interactions. Persons, institutions, textbooks, curricula emerge from this network. But where is it? Does it exhibit regularity in its behaviour? Can we come to know it through observation? There is indeed much research by ANT theorists on these questions. The problem is that we cannot prove Hume's scepticism to be fundamentally wrong. Nor can we prove Bhaskar's (or Harre's) realism to be fundamentally right. Latour sits in between with the cyberneticians with another answer to the transcendental question "what must the world be like?" His answer is "there must be a network of agency! Bhaskar's answer is "There must be generative mechanisms"! The cybernetician's answer is "There must be stabilities in the mechanisms of perception!" But what if there is no natural regularity at all? Can an ontological position be produced which assumes this?
Object as Declarations
Perhaps the most important thing John Searle introduces into this debate is to remind us of the importance of the 'stories' we tell about objects and their function in society, rather than worrying about the nature of objects themselves. Where Heidegger talks of ‘expectations’, John Searle talks about subjectivity and collective intentionality. What matters about objectivity for Searle is the relationship between objects and the "status functions" which result in their causal power in society. One of the key differences between the perception of the physical environment and the perception of things like money, or webpages, or textbooks is the extent to which those latter objects exist in a social and political context. Around these objects, functions are performed, rights asserted, commitments upheld and obligations obeyed. This is not perceptions of things as they are in the moving around a branch, the reaching out of the body, the fulfilment of an objective all seem to happen together. For the meanings of the object in the classroom – the textbooks, e-books, web-pages, and so on, we see that each of these objects are instituted by speech acts as they are by their physical constitution. Technologies (particularly) are social constructs.
Searle argues that it is particular kinds of speech act made by people which declare the ‘status’ of objects. The objects of the social life of the classroom, including the objects of technology, are effectively codified instances of practice. Their result from declarations by those around them that “this is the student record system”, “this is the Virtual Learning Environment”, “this is the textbook for Physics 101”, and so on. And what does such a declaration mean? It means “this is what you must read to pass physics 101”, “this is the system which you need to access in order to study this module”, “this is the system which you need to access to enter student grades”, and so on.
In upholding what appears to be a non-objectivist stance, Searle appears to be articulating a philosophy of what matters as it relates to matter. A banknote, whilst its physical presence is something that everyone can see has a constructed meaning determined by the social context within which it is carried (a dollar bill is merely a curiosity in London). It's the social context which renders the banknote meaningful in a way that matters to us. How we can come to know about the causal power of objects? Objects embody so much of the power relations which they inherit from society. An object carries signifiers of power and role. The teacher’s chalk is the marker of authority; the chair and desk the symbol of subservience: within these objects, there are encoded rights, responsibilities, positions, commitments of both teachers and learners. Software typically encodes roles and responsibilities, and more often than not, the roles and responsibilities encoded in the software are not the roles and responsibilities of those people for whom the software is intended. Objects are interventions in the social environment of a person. The hope behind many objects is that through intervening with the object, agency of the person will change. Yet it rarely does. Whilst the intervention of mobile phones and email might have caused gradual change in the behaviour of individuals over a long period of time (see for example the study of Minitel by Feenberg), these processes of change are caused by complex interactions between the expectations of individuals and the communication structures they inhabit. But how can we know these? And why does it matter?
Why Objects matter in Education
After all this philosophical agony about objects, one would be tempted to be highly sympathetic to the beleaguered teachers who throws their hands up and says "why does it matter?" In the very question question "why does it matter?" there is a question about the word "matter". In essence the different philosophical perspectives are views on matter: necessary or contingent; subjective or objective, and so on. How could we possibly know which is right? Is there such a thing as 'rightness' with regard to these questions? Having said this, the path of inquiry into the nature of objects leads us to confront the fundamental relation between the subject and the object, and the relation between the social and the individual. In each case, questions of matter lead to questions of mattering.
What is at stake are different ways of coming to know education, different ways of researching it, different approaches to the rationale for making interventions in it. Objects evolve, but so too do the expectations that individuals have about those objects. Knowledge, understanding, wisdom and learning sit at the interface between objects, individuals and social structures. For example, when Newman argues that:
"The intellect of man [...] energizes as well as his eye or ear, and perceives in sights and sounds something beyond them. It seizes and unites what the senses present to it; it grasps and forms what need not have been seen or heard except in its constituent parts. It discerns in lines and colours, or in tones, what is beautiful and what is not. It gives them a meaning, and invests them with an idea. It gathers up a succession of notes into the expression of a whole, and calls it a melody; it has a keen sensibility towards angles and curves, lights and shadows, tints and contours. It distinguishes between rule and exception, between accident and design. It assigns phenomena to a general law, qualities to a subject, acts to a principle, and effects to a cause."
we have to ask about the process whereby 'energizing' takes place. What is it beyond sights and sounds lies beyond them? What are the sights and sounds of if not an objective world? In what way does the discerning of the beautiful relate to the nature of the object, or to the subject? Are the criteria for the distinction between accident and design inherent in the object, or in the subject or in society?
It may not be so much any particular ontological standpoint which is important here, but rather the path of pursuing ontological thinking from any standpoint. What appears to be the case is that:
The question of natural necessity or not is undecidable. The ontologies which emerge from attempting to penetrate such issues appear to converge and overlap at various points which seem unlikely given the apparently radical differences in their starting points. The cybernetic engagement with the problem of time leads it to a logico-mathematical description of time consistent with the approaches of the speculative realists. The critical realist ontological position which appears directly opposed to constructivist cybernetics finds itself converging on the point of generative mechanisms. But perhaps the most important convergence occurs around the subject of 'mattering'. It turns out that no serious attempt at material ontology can exist without account for social ontology. On social ontology, issues of power, freedom, identity, gender and the role of objects and material in supporting power relations appear to unite perspectives. Given this level of agreement at a high level, it might be reasonable to ask why there is such ontological warfare at a lower level. This I will attempt to grapple with in the next chapter. Aside from worrying about this, it is worth pointing out that this coherence tends to be less well established among the various 'naive' methodological approaches to educational innovation. The message is, it doesn't matter what ontological path you take: ontologies end with the same emphasis on well-being and social ecology.
Varieties of Educational Object
Having considered the various ontological stances regarding objects, it is worth considering the types of object we can see in education. These fall into categories:
- Objects for specific pedagogical purpose
- Objects for the purpose of coordinating educational activity
- Objects for specific scientific purpose
- Objects for general scientific purpose
- Objects for identifying a field of activity
- Fetish objects
Textbooks, specific tools and models fall into category 1. These are objects which have grown with pedagogical thinking over history. The abacus is a good example of an object associated with specific pedagogical purpose in mathematics. More general tools under 2. include the blackboard (and the classroom), and more recently the Virtual Learning Environment. Within such tools, more specific tools in category 1 might reside, together with objects from category 3. Here we might list test tubes, bunsen burners together with the paraphernalia of the physical and biological sciences. In category 4, there are also the more general computational tools which increasingly are applied across the field of scientific endeavour: statistical analysis tools, blogs, speadsheets, databases, etc. In category 5, there are particular objects which signify a particular field of the curriculum. Under this heading, we might see 'industry standard' equipment including movie cameras (for media programmes), artist's studios, musical instruments and practice rooms. Objects from categories 3 and 5 can also become members of category 6. An object is a fetish object if its presence instils desire as well as offers functionality to those pursuing a course of study: fetish objects are sexy! A glance through most university prospectuses today reveals object fetishism put to the service of selling courses. Here we will find sports cars, complex medical instruments, elaborate computing machinery and exploding chemicals. Interestingly, we are unlikely to find objects for general institutional or pedagogical usage in this category.
Conclusion: Darwin's Ontology and Educational Evolution
At this point we should return to the naive evolutionism of educational thinking. Objects can not be seen as independent variables in educational improvement. The number of ontological positions help provide a toolkit for unpicking naive arguments. Uniting each perspective are not objects but relations. Even a materialist ontology such as Bhaskar's which seeks to identify causal powers has to submit to the context within which those causal powers operate (and indeed, the context within which causal powers are investigated): Bhaskar talks about generative mechanisms in Marxist terms as 'relations of production'. To examine objects in education is to examine relations between people. The methodologies of ANT might also examine the relations between objects-as-actors but in the full analysis it doesn't matter since the relations between people and the relations between objects and people will be sufficient to counteract any naive interpretation. What emerges is a an order of people and things: the textbook, the class, the parents, the boss, and so on. Within the order there are tensions between individuals and objects, individuals and individuals, institutions, and governments. In Darwinian terms, there are relations between different species.
The problem with naive thinking about objects and evolution is that it is ignorant of relations, and instead is promoted as if object manipulations work in the interests of learning, without being able to identify how the object is the independent variable in improving the learning process, or indeed, what the learning process is. Naive objectification appears to sit behind unclear thinking about learning itself. Supported with weak methodologies, arguments are made for the transformation of objects, and policies pushed through almost on an ad-hoc basis whilst opportunities for meaningful critique are squashed. This only serves the interests of those in control of the process: in Searle's language, it only serves the interests of those with the deontic power to make the status function declarations. Ontological thinking is therefore not just about getting to the bottom of what an object is; it is about exposing and challenging the power structures which make declarations about objects with regard to self-interest and ignorance about the actual situation or effects that their policies might render. In such a way, academics can find themselves subject to managerial whims, courses deprived of funding which is diverted to pet projects with sexy fetish objects (for example, sports cars), and the rational basis for the organisation of the institution of education fundamentally destroyed by fear and corruption.
We face a choice of action. Do we try the evolutionary/historicist approach and attempt an explanation as to how all these relations between objects and people got there with a view to apprehending some underlying mechanism which would help us improve education? Or do we take an ecological view and look at how the relations between things and 'species' actually works, so as to help us create the conditions for it to work viably and protect it from threats? It is this second view which I want to propose as to how we should be thinking about education. Education is not to be 'improved' or (heaven forbid!) "disrupted". Rather it is to be cared for and handed down to the next generation and in order to do that, it nature as an ecological set of relations must be understood.
Darwin's importance in the history of science is to draw the scientist's attention to history. Until Darwin, science revolved around Newtonianism; after Darwin science included historical analysis (although Darwin considered himself a Newtonian!). But historicised mechanisms are essentially abstractions - they can never be complete in their account of social being. Indeed they can serve unpleasant purposes (eugenics never seems to be far away in educational discourse). History matters not because it contains clues as to the clockwork that makes the world go round, but because it is part of our present lived being. Darwin was perhaps insufficiently aware of how his own history affected his theorising, and our education ministers and politicians are too frequently unaware of how their histories affect not only their educational thinking, but their entire politics.
Educational objects are part of the lived being of our present ecology of education. Many histories - institutional, personal, technological - are enfolded in the being of the education system. At any one time there are parts of it which work well and there are parts of it which are struggling to survive. The benefit of the ontological perspective is to discover which parts are which, how they work, how they affect each other and how one or another part might not be working. More importantly, the educational ecologist through understanding the dynamics of the whole system can see new kinds of interventions which help create new connections. It might be a new textbook; it might be a new tool; but the point is it will only work if the conditions within which the intervention is made and the nature of the intervention itself are understood.
This raises the question as to the fundamental nature of the relationship between the different elements in an educational ecology. If an ecology of education has to account for not only present relations, but historical relations between parents, toys, discourses, institutions, and so on, in what kind of language might such an ecology be represented? If we are looking at people and objects, how do we account for what it is that connects them? How do we account for not only the stabilities in the relations between them (the homeostasis) but also the drive for expansion, growth and development? These are questions which have also faced the ecologists in the natural world. In the last chapter I will examine current developments in the ways that such questions might be approached.
