Sociomateriality as a partner in the polyphony of students positioning

Abstract

Abstract In this article, an innovative academic course, inspired by the Bakhtinian perspective and positioning theory, is presented and discussed. Within this dialogic framework, we argue that the sociomateriality of the setting cannot be considered as a separate voice because it influences the polyphony of the students' intricate positioning processes. The research context was a semester-long course on “Materiality in contexts” attended by 26 university students (6 male and 20 female), which introduced sociomaterial perspectives in education. During the course, hands-on activities were organized jointly by teachers and students, including two workshops addressed to children (aged 4–11 years) and their parents, in which the participants were involved in creating musical instruments and inventing figurines' means of transportation. The data presented in this article concern the transcriptions and analyses of three focus groups conducted at the end of the course to allow the university students to reflect about their lived experience. Through a qualitative analysis, we discuss several excerpts extracted from the focus groups to show how sociomateriality enters the polyphonic orchestration of voices concurring to define students positioning.