Visual, Literary, and Numerical Perspectives on Education: Materiality, Presence, and Interpretation

Abstract

This chapter analyses how modes of enquiry relate to the materiality of education and to educational presence. Presence, according to Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht (Diesseits der Hermeneutik. Die Produktion von Prasenz (trans: Schulte J). Edition Suhrkamp, Frankfurt, 2004), implies material or physical experience in space before interpretation comes to the fore. Concentrating on materiality explicitly means to focus on what can be seen, sensed and touched. Thus, materiality studies can be related to sensual perception and necessitate reflection on substantial differences between objects and discourses. This not only implies a reflection on the materiality of cultural representations, like books, images and other media, but also on cultural practices as technologies of knowledge-making and meaning-making through the handling of things and artefacts. Materiality of education stresses the laboratory-like nature of education in the sense that it reveals education as an apparatus, essentially operating within a matrix of time, space, function, form, handling and interaction. Modes of enquiry, in contrast, refer to interpretation or methodological operations that ultimately process and transform educative manifestations into meaningful cultural representations and/or social structures. Educational presence is subject to visual, literary and numerical transformation. Whereas visual and literary reflections on education are categorized as cultural, artistic or documentary, numerical transformations are referred to as results of research and methods of quantification. The chapter focuses on the way in which visual, literary and numerical aspects of education are shaped and how they refer to educational presence in schools at the turn of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Its central thesis questions how quantitative educational research is commonly understood. It argues that educational research following a numerical logic is in fact highly normative and interpretative, whereas visual and literary approaches to education (e.g. photography and fictional texts) get closer to education’s essence or experience, as they operate through sensual perception and thus question norms and emotional conditions of schooling.