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In Topic 2, I situated the abacus as an educational tool within McLuhan’s (1988) “tetrad”.

I recall struggling, in particular, with the question of what it reversed. The abacus is an ancient tool that was significantly interwoven into socio-cultural and economic practices before it became widely known and used for educational purposes. Of importance is its shift in instrumental value — it began as a dominant tool for transactional relations, to being an educational artifact following the support of brain research. Does this merely present a change of its use, or does it indicate more significant “entanglements” between humans and objects?

New materialism recognizes the “entangled and material nature of humans, discourses, machines, objects, other species, and the natural environment” (Frodeman et al. as quoted in Toohey, 2018, p. 25) in identifying the non-dualistic, non-essentialistic continuum of organic life that pervades the world we live in. Fenwick and Edwards (as quoted in Toohey, 2018, p. 27) argue that material things have agency and thus perform; acting together with other things and forces to “exclude, invite and regulate particular forms of participation”. In other words, human activity is not the sole source of governance – neither is it a fixed nor determinable quality – rather, people, animals, objects, and discourses are embedded in a perpetual process of becoming, in relation to and with one another, essentially, engaging in intra-action.

How does this affect my initial characterization of the abacus? I struggled with understanding my own interpretation of what it reversed — the reason for my limitation has now been made obvious via a new materialistic lense. I was constricted by a false duality in analyzing technological development; as if the attitudes, discourses, and even the natural environment surrounding the use of the abacus were of no significance to its value; as if it belonged to its own track of “becoming”.

Barad (as quoted in Hill, 2018) promotes a diffractive method of analysis situated within an agential realist ontology which asserts that reality is continuously (re)constituted through material entanglements. In attempting to compare the abacus to what it reversed as a form of fixed “best practice”, I had failed to consider the open-ended material-discursive realities that surrounded its use; conditions that materialized in the moment. Thus, to ask “what if other methods had taken root?” is not merely a consideration of possible alternatives, even more, it questions the non-human power and performativity that pervaded and maintained the “assemblage” that is the abacus, as a tool entangled in processes of becoming between both human and non-human entities that had given rise to particular, situated, provisional outcomes.

References

Hill, C. (2018). More-than-reflective practice: Becoming a diffractive practitioner. Teacher Learning and Professional Development, 2, 1-17. Retrieved from http://journals.sfu.ca/tlpd/index.php/tlpd/article/viewFile/28/pdf

McLuhan, M. (1988). Laws of the media: The new science. University of Toronto Press

Toohey, K. (2018). New materialism and language learning. In Learning english at school: Identity, socio-material relations and classroom practice. Multilingual Matters: Bristol.

Online learning opens up a variety of interactive and collaborative opportunities transcending the limitations of time and space in traditional learning. While students may well be able to acquire knowledge via online learning without the “bodily” interactions of a traditional learning environment, at what cost does this come by? Taylor (1996) argues on the value of bodies as being “mindful”; as co-contributors to meaningful educational activities. The pedagogical practices of a traditional university are embedded in physical interactions and architectural features that are akin to “rites of passage” that a student makes into an educated culture (Taylor, 1996, p. 67). In other words, pedagogy is more than just a focus on content.

Umbridge makes this statement in her Dark Arts class:

“…it is the view of the Ministry that a theoretical knowledge will be more than sufficient to get you through your examination, which, after all, is what school is all about (…) as long as you have studied the theory hard enough, there is no reason why you should not be able to perform the spells under carefully controlled examination conditions” (Rowling, 2003, p. 243-244)

But is it truly enough? Lave & Wegner (as quoted in Taylor, 1996, p. 69) emphasize the importance of “legitimate peripheral participation”; learning that arises from shared social spaces through which an individual is exposed to models of how to be. Online learning driven by a curriculum-centered pedagogy might risk reverting to the Umbridge approach by stripping the student of the social and cultural support provided through body-to-body interactions, relegating education to being an “information-to-mind” process that is detached from the “socially constructed interpretive conventions” of pedagogical practices.

Reflecting on both my online undergraduate and graduate programs, Taylor’s (1996) article brings to light the pedagogical practices that govern such learning environments. He argues that a powerful interaction lies between the material and pedagogical aspects of education. In particular, the social inertia of traditional pedagogy is strongly associated with authority, so, while an educational artifact, such as a lecture, may remain constant as it moves from a live lecture hall to a video recording, its authority may not. The social demassification of online learning may have afforded me a more than accessible learning environment, but not necessarily an authoritative one in its altered pedagogical practices. It can then be said that the relative value of my degree might not be all that I had sought out for, should the contributions of pedagogies and materially/culturally inscribed bodies be compromised.

References

Rowling, J. K. (2003). Harry potter and the order of the phoenix. London, UK: Bloomsbury.

Taylor, P. G. (1996). Pedagogical challenges of open learning: Looking to borderline issues. In E. McWilliam & P. G. Taylor (Eds.), Pedagogy, Technology and the Body (pp. 60-77). NY: Peter Lang.