Sociomaterial Approach Research Articles

Spatializing literacy-as-events. Literacy in new techno-scholastic environments of lower secondary classrooms

Drawing on recent re-conceptualisations of the established concept of literacy events into literacy-as-events, this article furthers empirical and theoretical understandings of spatiality in classroom literacy. Using a socio-material approach, it investigates spatial formations of literacy-as-events in lower secondary education in new techno-scholastic environments, where the digital and the scholastic have become indiscernible from each other. The empirical material consists of video recordings from Swedish and Danish classrooms, using two cameras and screen-recordings of students’ screens. From a rich data material, three examples were selected for analysis, thinking with notions of spatial imaginaries and the metaphors of network, region, resonance and fluidity to investigate spatial formations as students work with literacy tasks. The analysis shows how literacy in these digitally rich classrooms becomes distributed over a range of distances in the physical classroom space, where we identify projector-laptop, student-laptop and through the screen formations as examples of spatial formations important for what it means to be a student in contemporary digitalized classrooms. The article highlights the importance of further discussions on how digital technology contributes both to new potentials for meaning-making, and to challenges related to managing a constant state of fluidity without reverting solely to traditional regulatory practices.

Ludic reading is 20 minutes a day? – Adding a socio-material perspective to ludic reading

This article presents unexpected findings about children’s experiences with ludic reading, discovered through a collaborative project involving schools, libraries, and Pedagogical Learning Centres (PLC). The findings reveal that while children’s ludic reading experiences often reflect a goal-oriented, functional approach typical of educational contexts, they also seek social, playful, and immersive reading environments. This article explores how a socio-material approach can illuminate these findings, which existing literature does not fully address. The research question guiding this study is: How can a socio-material perspective on ludic reading inform professionals in rethinking initiatives to enhance children’s ludic reading? The methodology involves analysing these unexpected findings, termed ‘stumble data,’ derived from empirical material based on child-centred methods. The results suggest that a socio-material perspective can bridge the contexts in which ludic reading occurs. The article concludes that this perspective provides new explanatory frameworks and practice opportunities by integrating social and material elements that have not been sufficiently explored in the literature.

Rethinking Human and Non-Human Relationships in Curriculum Studies: Implications of a Socio-Material Approach

Rethinking Human and Non-Human Relationships in Curriculum Studies: Implications of a Socio-Material Approach

Translanguaging in digital picturebook reading: a sociomaterial perspective

ABSTRACT This ethnographic case study investigates how a young rural Chinese EAL learner engages in a translanguaging process as she reads a digital and multilingual Cinderella picturebook in her home. It documents wide-ranging translanguaging relations dynamically formed among this learner, the researcher as a reading partner, and a myriad of nonhuman materials (modes, languages, tablet, software, time, space, etc.). Accordingly, the current research adopts a sociomaterial approach to examine language and literacy learning environments in terms of social and material dynamics. A sociomaterial perspective on translanguaging expands the researcher’s gaze from looking only at individual actions or social interactions in translanguaging practices to consider how nonhumans also constitute and affect these practices as active agents.

What’s in it? – schoolbags in the lives of pupils and classrooms

ABSTRACT The overarching aim of the present study is to investigate such an invisible object; namely, schoolbags and how their contents function in the lives of pupils between the privacy of the home and the societal world of schools. A sociomaterial approach is used to understand schoolbags as objects that enable certain actions and norms. The uniqueness of the study calls for a more basic approach on the analytical level, carefully investigating and describing the content of the schoolbags as well as their context seeing them as frozen moments of processes. The data material consists of photographs depicting contents of 16 German satchels, which were analysed alongside a description of exterior appearances of schoolbags and the material context of the classroom. The findings show that the function of the schoolbags exceeds their obvious transportation purposes, and that they are complex, entangled objects in the construction of “schooling” and “the pupil”.

Social moderation and calibration versus codification: a way forward for academic standards in higher education?

ABSTRACT A key responsibility of higher education providers is the accurate certification of the knowledge and skills attained by their students. However, despite an intense focus on developing relevant quality assurance regulations, academic standards in higher education have remained resistant to explication and consistent application. In this paper, we initially deconstruct and evaluate academic standards and dominant practitioner perspectives on their nature and use, including techno-rational, sociocultural and sociomaterial approaches. The limited prior research on the effectiveness of calibration and social moderation processes is reviewed, highlighting the significant challenges in sharing tacitly held understandings of assessment criteria (attributes of quality) and standards (levels of achievement). Further complications are considered that arise from the varying expertise and power relationships of assessors and the complexities inherent in the development and use of codified artefacts for capturing and sharing standards. We opine that because of the difficulties in clearly representing and agreeing standards, it is unsurprising that there is little evidence of marking consistency to be found in the literature even in contexts where carefully crafted artefacts, such as rubrics, are in use. We conclude that effectiveness would be enhanced through sharing understandings more widely and refocusing the use of assessment codifications towards how they may catalyse effective social moderation and calibration dialogues. Dialogues that foreground individuals’ positions of consensus and dissensus at significant points of interpretation in the assessment process are identified within the paper.

Vibrant Screens: Remote therapy and counselling through the lens of digital materiality.

This article analyses the digital screen as a health technology. In particular, the article asks how screens as a part of therapy settings or counselling practices materialise - or fail to materialise - care. The empirical data comprise interviews with therapy and counselling professionals, whose experiences with technology during the COVID-19 pandemic were my original interest. Adopting a sociomaterial approach to technology use, it scrutinises not only how screens are used, but also how screens themselves act and operate. This approach foregrounds the screen as 'multiple', complicating a dichotomous understanding between in-person therapy and remote therapy. The article argues that the screen operates in a variety of ways that might either facilitate or degrade care and is an essential part of more-than-human care in digitalised societies. Acknowledging the agential capacities of all matter, the article also conceptualises screens as 'vibrant matter'.

Budgets and biologicals: The bio-economization of HIV governance

Changing global responses to HIV/AIDS entail shifting biological loci of surveillance which are believed to constitute HIV risk. Meanwhile, various local institutions and organizations are mobilized to play a key role in HIV service delivery and surveillance. Drawing on a socio-material approach to the body and the economy, this study theorizes the emergence of three ‘HIV service bio-economies’ devised to provide HIV services while controlling HIV transmission in Taiwan. Instead of presuming a divide between the social and the biological, it analyzes how different bodies are produced through differing modes of HIV surveillance and economization, buttressed by global health sciences, state budgets and quantitative metrics. The analysis of multiple ontologies of HIV underscores the political nature of risk-framing in a transnational context, but also how certain bodies incapable of being enrolled in these economies could be further marginalized – a process which might be understood as an ontological politics of HIV.

Measuring digital skills in community adult learning settings – implications for Australian policy development

ABSTRACT Social and economic participation is increasingly dependent on the proficient use of digital technologies in everyday life. Digital skills, alongside literacy and numeracy, are now foundational skills that all Australians should have. Yet, how policy makers, scholars, and adult educators can effectively identify people’s current and desired digital skills is not well established. Existing frameworks tend to be instrumentalist, listing generic abilities that all citizens need for success. Digital abilities, however, are context-specific and attempts to generalise need to be responsive to local circumstances. We present a theory-driven Digital Ability Self-Assessment Tool, developed for a government agency and piloted in a community organisation. The Tool takes a distinctive socio-material approach to overcome shortcomings of other digital ability assessment tools, which often focus on normative measures of skills attainment. Overall, we argue that authentic digital skills policy and programme development must account for the contexts in which digital technologies are used.

Refrains of Friendship in Young Children's Postdigital Play

Today, digital media technologies are ubiquitous and mundane, making the relationship between digital and analog messy and porous. This postdigital condition prompts new analyses of how young children's local encounters with digital media technologies unfold, and how their relationships with digital media technologies carry on after they leave their devices. While sociomaterial approaches to literacy are apt to study how such messy literacies are enacted through singular events, they struggle to account for consistencies that emerge across events. Plugging into the concept of the refrain, we explore how felt consistencies were produced and scored two boys’ friendship through and across events as they watched YouTube, played Minecraft, and played with construction playthings. We find that felt refrains of “dwelling in novelty” were enacted, referring to the set-up of conditions where materialities acted together to produce affectively intense moments of surprise. As moments accumulated, deeply felt friendships were produced over time.

Si(gh)ting the City: An Uber View of Calcutta

In this article, I take a socio-material approach to highlight the changes in the legibility of the built environment due to digital interfacing and the subsequent fragmentation of urban space. Using Uber as an example, I demonstrate how app-reliant mobility practices, reflexive of the changing mobility values in the city of Calcutta, manifest certain “temporal spaces”—quasi-virtual spaces of the online/digital-offline/material continuum—that imbricate the physicality of the city with the digital traces that Uber accrues about a particular location and the data about the rhythms of the individual users within that space. The investigation uses screenshots of Uber pick-up points to conceptualize legibility in the context of temporal spaces and how this changing legibility alters the kinaesthetic quality of Calcutta. Siting the argument in postrepresentationalist thought—one that does not assume an ontological distinction between representations and the referent—this article offers a posthumanist account of spatial performativity that considers the everyday entanglements of human actors, social practices, networked technologies, algorithms, and interfaces that render “legible” the urban space.

The potential of multiprofessional collaboration in integrating dance in early additional language education in primary school

This article explores how a multiprofessional team collaborates in integrating dance in early language education. It is based on the team members’ experiences and reflections as they combined dance with the teaching of Swedish as an additional language in grade 1 in a Finnish primary school. The project was framed by the notion of embodied learning understood as the holistic engagement of learners within their socio-material surroundings. Following socio-material approaches to education, the study examines the team of a dance teacher, a researcher, and the school’s class teachers as an assemblage and multiprofessional collaboration as events that cross subject boundaries. The data assemblage encompasses audio-recorded, embodied, and material documentation of weekly meetings, in which the team co-designed the activities. The analysis maps the collaborative process of integrating language and dance through the post-qualitative approach of embodied writing. It highlights the designed practices, the challenges and the possibilities of the collaboration, and the conditions for successful collaboration. Co-designing dance and language integrated pedagogy occurred in events of disciplinary crossings and in entanglement with the process of becoming an assembled team. These insights illuminate multiprofessional collaboration as an entry point to embodied and cross-disciplinary pedagogies in early language education in primary school.

Relational topologies in the learning activity spaces: operationalising a sociomaterial approach

AbstractTechnology-mediated interactions and datafication are increasingly central in contemporary social dynamics and institutions, including teaching and learning processes. In order to fully understand the complex entanglements of human and non-human actants that emerge in postdigital education, it is essential to imagine new methodological approaches that are sensitive to the multidimensional nature of education—as a socially and materially-situated phenomenon that increasingly takes place across distributed contexts. The overall goal of this paper is to propose and operationalise a new methodological approach for the study of technology in education. It draws on the notion of relational topologies to improve our understanding of educational settings and, ultimately, how learning unfolds. The proposed approach relies on a multi-paradigm enquiry strategy, based on the idea of using “topologies of digital data practices” in combination with the three dimensions that articulate design-for-learning processes according to the Activity-Centred Analysis and Design (ACAD) framework: epistemic, social and set designs. While the article focuses on presenting the elements of the approach from a theoretical perspective, we illustrate its application through the data collected in a small case study that will serve as a testbed. The topologies of relations we present in this article show uses of technology—as described by participants in their own learning experience—that involve different spaces, devices, and personal situations. In doing so, we reveal how humans and non-humans are entangled in hybrid, unstable and generative ways. The article concludes with some remarks on the value of the proposed approach for studying technology in education and its potential to explore the state-of-the-actual in this field, with the ultimate goal of helping inform educational research, practice and decision-making.

Uncovering the sociomaterial assemblage of a culinary heritagization: The Wildschönauer Krautinger schnapps

In the search for geographical and historical distinctiveness, the issue of culinary heritage has taken an important role in agri-food studies for safeguarding local culinary knowledge and traditions of food cultivation and production practices. However, it remains unclear how salient culinary heritage emphasizes the intertwining of tangible and intangible elements, and how sociocultural values and notions of terroir, tradition, and identity enable or constrain community-driven heritagization processes. In this paper, we aim to shed light on the sociomaterial assemblage of culinary heritagization by focusing on the case of a distilled turnip schnapps from the Alpine community of Wildschönau in Austria. We demonstrate how the Krautinger schnapps transitions from a subsistence to a commercial product, and how increasing marketization and demand challenges the relationship between commercialization and preservation of cultural heritage. By combining relational perspectives, sociomaterial approaches, and assemblage thinking, we discuss the constituent intertwining of human and nonhuman entities in the process of culinary heritagization. We apply the sociology of translation as a conceptual framework and identify four decisive moments that highlight the progression and continuity of the Krautinger's sociomaterial assemblage. Our study reveals issues and challenges that may arise for the local community in these moments of heritagization, including the chance of internal reconsolidation by recognizing nonhuman agency and bridging potential risks.

Transparency experience in remote teamwork – a sociomaterial approach

ABSTRACT Transparency in teamwork and across team members' status is one of the main challenges in remote work, and using online collaborative whiteboards (OCW) is a potential solution for more transparent teamwork. We explore the experience of transparency of three design teams who used an OCW called Miro in remote work during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our aim was to gain in-depth understanding on what constitutes transparency in this teamwork context. We conducted a qualitative interview study with 11 participants who are user experience and service designers, and who actively use Miro in their daily work. We adopted sociomateriality as our research lens and thematically analysed the data, finding that transparency at work is a dynamic experience ranging between positive and negative. Rather than being merely users' or organisations' choices or the result of the tool affordances, the experience of transparency at work is an outcome of sociomaterial entanglements between the user, tool, and organisation. Furthermore, the occupational and organisational factors not only affect the experience of transparency, but they also actively constitute it.

Situated sites of migration control: Swiss deportation practices and their relational materiality in prisons, hospitals, and airports

Abstract. Deportation is often studied in the context of research into the administration, enforcement, and control of immigration, with researchers highlighting the violent effect on deportees and studying the various actors involved in the deportation process. This contribution adds to the growing literature on deportation infrastructures by emphasizing the inseparability of deportation procedures from the specific sites in which they unfold, as well as highlighting the analytical interest and political agency of such spaces. My socio-material approach applies a rather classical understanding of infrastructure, asking what three specific deportation sites – prisons, hospitals, and airports – can tell us about deportation procedures as a technology of immigration enforcement. Using Switzerland as a case study, this paper analyses deportation procedures, including the role of human and non-human actors, paying particular attention to the situatedness and relationality of deportation infrastructures. The socio-material analysis of the architecture of the three sites under discussion ultimately exposes deportation as violent statecraft.

Intra-Acting With Technology During Remote Fieldwork in Homes: Curating Video Interviews and Drawing Methods

The ubiquity of remote research practices and the increased adoption of videoconferencing tools are forcing researchers to pay attention to the features of these technologies and how they shape the research encounter. This article draws on experience from a Norwegian research project about digital vulnerabilities and living with smart home technologies. Participants were invited to draw floor plans of their homes, enact everyday routines, and perform a house tour on camera. By enacting collective memory work, reviewing, and discussing fieldnotes and other materials from the interviews, the authors have reflected upon experiences and identified lessons and implications for further research. Drawing on a socio-material approach that views digital technologies as active participants in enacting the research event, the article highlights how the presence of videoconferencing technology shapes the research situation and how data is generated. We show how videoconferencing tools can provide both access to and constraints on what can be done and who can participate and underline the importance of skills for both researchers and participants. We demonstrate how the handholding of the camera and the frame of the lens direct what is seen during a video interview, and how power dynamics between participants and researchers are shaped. We conclude that researchers need to be mindful of how agency is negotiated between technology and humans during remote fieldwork.

Students' learning in theory-based simulation: A socio-material study.

Simulation-based education (SBE) is crucial to prepare nursing students prior to their clinical learning experience. Theory-based simulation learning is increasingly important for analysing how students learn. This study describes and analyses how nursing students learn through simulation in the context of palliative care communication under a socio-material approach and explores the transfer of their knowledge and skills from simulation to clinical practice. Twenty-seven final-year nursing students in six groups participated in two simulated scenarios, followed by a debriefing and post-clinical focus groups to capture their reflections and learning. Fourteen of them joined the post-clinical focus groups after completing their clinical placements. Video recordings of the simulation, and the audio recordings from the debriefing, and post-clinical focus groups were transcribed and coded based on the human and non-human elements that were observed. These were triangulated with data collected through team participant observations, an analysis of the existing syllabi and curriculum, and a participant mapping exercise after the simulation. These various data sources illustrate how student learning and reflections took place. The three themes of student learning derived from the results and analysis were (1) students' expanded learning of health care communication through a socio-material approach in the context of palliative care; 2) students' discovery of the diverse and complex relations and interactions between humans and materials and (3) students' new perspectives on health care communication and the transfer of knowledge and skills through a socio-material approach in clinical practice. This study highlights how SBE can be further expanded using a socio-material approach to prepare students to learn beyond standardised and cognitively driven approaches and procedures. Student learning demonstrates that SBE may develop beyond high fidelity and standardisation to leave room for emergent learning and increased awareness in learning for students and teachers to optimise learning outcomes and competence.

Socio-(im)material-making activities in Minecraft: retracing digital literacy applied to ESD

ABSTRACT Background There is a growing interest in the complexity of socio-materiality-making activities in educational and everyday settings. Indeed, maker-centered learning is considered as a socio-materially embodied process in which artifacts and social and emotional dimensions are interconnected. The making process is also found in everyday life when children engage in specific applications – like Minecraft, where they perform activities in a virtual environment. Purpose Starting from analyzing some episodes recorded with a child aged seven, this paper aims to better understand the maker process in a virtual setting with implications for digital literacy and sustainable development education. Design and methods A socio-material approach is privileged to analyze the data collected. Specifically, we will explore the maker activity as a socio-materially embodied process. Sample The research question will be answered with the support of a case study of one child playing Minecraft. Thinking-aloud modality, observation, notes, and pictures are collected. Then, the verbatim from the semi-structured interview is collected in the same session. The entire session is audio-recorded. Results The three dimensions that emerged are: Resources to make digital objects; Digital Objects became Social Objects; Making digital objects became ground for literacy. From this analysis, we can retrace digital literacy in the Minecraft maker activity and some final considerations for teaching in STEM. Conclusion In conclusion, students’ informal activity in a Minecraft setting could become a potential green environment to ground digital literacy. However, this process needs to be scaffolded and amplified with an enriched level of abstract process, critical, and inquiry attitude.

Informal learning in architectural education through sociomaterial approaches: Towards a network-based pedagogy in design education

Most ethnographic research on architectural education focuses on formal teaching events. It mainly analyses meetings between students and teachers in tutorial sessions, design reviews, and formal presentations. Architectural knowledge, however, is also acquired informally between formal academic sessions. This study focuses on informal design-learning processes within formal architecture academic courses. Our data were collected during eight months of ethnographic study in an immersive masters-level architecture programme. We analysed our data using a macro-level inductive methodology and interpreted our findings using a sociomaterial theoretical approach. This paper offers two types of contributions. Theoretically, it contributes to our understating of informal learning processes in architectural education by demonstrating how different actor network compositions and dynamics affect informal learning. Pedagogically, it re-evaluates the role of the design instructor within a broader context of actors working together to produce knowledge and develops a network approach to design education.