posthumanism

PLAYING TOWARD MULTIPLICITY: DISORIENTING INTRA-ACTIONS WITH MATERIALS & LEARNING IN AN ESCAPE ROOM

PLAYING TOWARD MULTIPLICITY: DISORIENTING INTRA-ACTIONS WITH MATERIALS & LEARNING IN AN ESCAPE ROOM

Written by: Ali R. Blake * 1 , Melita Morales * 2 , Jon M. Wargo 3 , Alex Corbitt 4 , & Joseph Madres 1

*shared first authorship. 1- Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA, USA. 2 - School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA. 3 - University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA. 4 - State University of New York at Cortland, NY, USA

Abstract: In this paper, we follow the co-constitutive material-participant relationships that propel action in escape room play, particularly how they open and close paths for learning. We focus on how learning is organized in one escape room game, The Author’s Enigma, as intertwined with conversations on play and learning to consider the relational values and ideologies that appear through more-than-human encounters. We contribute a critical (new) materialist draw toward material-participant intra-actions  to notice the production of narrowed messages, as well as openings that lead toward multiplicity. Thinking-with-theory; we take up Ahmed’s (2006) concepts of orientation and disorientation to consider objects’ arrivals and their not-yet-presence. We also move with Barad’s (2003) concept of intra-action, perceiving more-than-human actors as ‘matter-in-the-process-of-becoming’. Following a conch shell as a vibrant material in the ecology of escape, we trace participants and the shell through moments of intra-action across escape play. We detail the communicative forms produced through material intra-actions as both open and closed, while producing resonant logics with players in the room. We discuss implications for: 1) game-based approaches to education; 2) disruption to assimilative lenses for sensing and supporting learning; and 3) valuing particular relational arrangements with materials.

Keywords: orientation, disorientation, intra-action, thinking-with-theory, escape rooms, play, games, posthumanism, materiality

TECHNO-VEGETAL COLLABORATIONS: PLANTS AS COLLABORATORS IN THE DESIGN OF A COMPUTER SCIENCE LEARNING ENVIRONMENT

TECHNO-VEGETAL COLLABORATIONS: PLANTS AS COLLABORATORS IN THE DESIGN OF A COMPUTER SCIENCE LEARNING ENVIRONMENT

Written by: Michael Lachney. Michigan State University, East Lansing, United States

Abstract: : Posthumanist educational methodologists, theorists, and researchers tend to reproduce zoocentrism by privileging animals over plants in their scholarship. This comes at a time when disciplines from across the academy are taking “plant turns” by attending to plants’ abilities to sense and communicate, as well as their material relationships, representational significance, and lively entanglements with non-plants. This amounts to a rejection of traditional Western science and philosophy that treat plants as passive forms of life. To encourage this plant turn in posthumanist educational scholarship, I turn toward Anishinaabe-gikendaasowin, plant science, and continental philosophy to help recognize the agencies and behaviors of plants that challenge human exceptionalism. I engage with these knowledge systems through multispecies storytelling about the collaborative design of a library computer science learning environment. Multispecies stories from these collaborations not only show how plants contributed to computer science learning, but also how they affected and were affected by humans, nonhumans, and technologies in the library. These findings have implications for posthumanist educational research and computer science education

Keywords: posthumanism, plant turn, computer science education, zoocentrism, Anishinaabegikendaasowin, plant science, continental philosophy

OPEN(ING) SILENCES: SITUATIONAL ANALYSIS IN PRACTICE

OPEN(ING) SILENCES: SITUATIONAL ANALYSIS IN PRACTICE

Written by: T. Elias, Independent Scholar

Abstract: As the world around us becomes increasingly digitized, datafied and commodified, so too does education. Seeking to address these realities, educational researchers are increasingly adopting posthuman perspectives, including sociomaterialism. As a feminist onto-epistemology, sociomaterialism considers both how we shape and are shaped through our ongoing interactions with our social and material worlds. Adopting this perspective brings into question many of the assumptions embedded within traditional methodologies and challenges educational researchers to adopt approaches that address the indirect, messy and interwoven nature of our technological, social and economic realms. This article argues that, as an explicitly posthuman approach to research, situational analysis is well suited to grappling with these sociomaterial complexities. It then presents an exemplar in which situational analysis was used to study open education’s relationships with scale from a sociomaterial perspective. Drawing from this exemplar, it argues that situational analysis offers a methodological “structured flexibility” with the power to open up silences by making the hidden visible, supporting collaborative research and enabling a form of “crystallization” in increasingly sociomaterial ways.

Keywords: situational analysis; educational research; open education; digital education; silence; sociomaterialism; posthumanism