The Laboratorization of Schools: Laboratory Metaphors in Twenty-first Century US Education

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn twenty-first century US education, laboratory metaphors are used to frame school governance and classroom practices. To explore how non-laboratory and non-traditional laboratory settings are framed as sites for experimentation, science and technology studies (STS) has two parallel trajectories for conceptualizing the laboratorization of society: the literal implantation of laboratories into physical locations and the metaphorical application that looks at the world as if it were a laboratory, that is from a ‘laboratory perspective’. Concerning the latter, the laboratory perspective offers STS ways to study: (1) how laboratory metaphors frame social and cultural understandings of scientific knowledge production; (2) the work laboratory metaphors do when used to describe non-laboratory settings. Fieldwork in two classrooms reveals how laboratory metaphors reproduce different but coexisting images of scientific knowledge production. There is an ideal image of laboratories as orderly, with a controlled amount of outside influence. This image frames schools as places with which to experiment from the top-down. There is a more empirical image of laboratories as socially and culturally structured. This image frames schools as places to conduct experiments from the bottom-up. Though each framing positions teachers and students differently, both are useful for characterizing the dynamics of US education.