10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17517
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2038-3460
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Assunta Viteritti
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Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
knowledge
Dis/Entangling the Worlds of Education through a STS Perspective
Text.Serial.Journal
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Conference Reflections
2022-03-26
2023-06-28
2022-03-26
2023-10-23
107-113
TS
Assunta Viteritti
2021
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17517
107
Sapienza University of Rome
2038-3460
2
knowledge
en
113
Dis/Entangling the Worlds of Education through a STS Perspective
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/article/download/17517/16361
12
                                                                 Conference Reflections
                                                                                           107




Dis/Entangling the Worlds of Education
through a STS Perspective
           Assunta Viteritti                                Leonardo Piromalli
           Sapienza University of Rome                       Sapienza University of Rome



     Abstract: All fields of education are affected by technological and digital
     processes. Blackboards (physical and digital), information infrastructures,
     chairs (mobile and immobile), online platforms, educational data, they are all
     weaving together with humans the very fabric of educational and research
     processes and practice in school, university, and training settings. These en-
     tangled processes are shaping educational scenarios through heterogeneous
     practices. In this short contribution, we shall unpack such processes and ex-
     plore the emergence of relational textures across educational scenarios.

     Keywords: sociomateriality; digitalisation; education; learning; knowledge.

     Corresponding author: Leonardo Piromalli, Sapienza University of Rome,
     Department of Communication and Social Research, Via Salaria 113, Rome,
     Italy. Email: leonardo.piromalli@uniroma1.it




Introduction
    When we received the announcement of the upcoming VIII STS Con-
ference, we decided to convene a panel session on how to perform STS-
oriented research in the field of education (“Education and/as its making:
Vulnerabilities in the sociomaterial worlds of learning”). The educational
field is in fact dense now with relational processes that entangle humans
and non-humans and produce significant effects that deserve scholarly in-
vestigation.
    In this contribution, we shall offer an overview of the contributions
brought by the participants to the panel session and provide a summary of
the emerging STS perspective in education and its contribution to educa-
tional studies. Two issues will be investigated: how sociomaterial processes
are (re)shaping education, and how digitalisation and platformisation pro-
cesses are reassembling educational policy and practice.



 TECNOSCIENZA
 Italian Journal of Science and Technology Studies
 12 (2) pp. 107-113 - ISSN 2038-3460
 www.tecnoscienza.net                                2021
108                                                         Tecnoscienza – 12 (2)

1. Sociomateriality, Technological                 Frames,       and       the
(Re)Shaping of Education

    The STS approach was translated in the field of education in the first
decade of the 21st century with the introduction of the concept of socio-
materiality. This notion was originally put forward by Wanda Orlikowski
(2007) for describing the constitutive entanglement of social and material
processes in everyday organisational life. Soon after, the German sociolo-
gist Estrid Sørensen brought about this concept in educational studies for
exploring how both humans and non-humans are implicated in relational
arrangements in educational scenarios, and what are the effects of this en-
meshment (Sørensen 2007; Sørensen 2009; Fenwick et al. 2012; Fenwick
2015). As Mathias Decuypere recently argued (2019), the STS approach in
education enables to observe simultaneously the ‘doing’, the ‘un-doing’,
the ‘re-doing’, and the ‘non-doing’ of educational actors within and across
their intimate relationships. Artefacts and materiality – such as technology,
space, body, policy, practice – have thus taken centre stage in scholarly
investigation into the (re)shaping of local and global educational processes
(Sørensen 2009; Fenwick and Landri 2012; Landri 2018). The socio-
material sensitivity in education is often adopted for exploring the emer-
gent effects of the assemblage of human and non-human actors in educa-
tional scenarios, and the design and translation of educational policy (Fen-
wick and Landri 2012). A wide range of research opportunities thus un-
folds for investigating educational processes through a sociomaterial ap-
proach.
    For instance, the everyday professional and epistemic practices (Knorr-
Cetina, 1999) of university professors are nowadays attached to (Latour
1990; 2011) and entangled with (Barad 2007) complex and non-neutral so-
ciomaterial networks. The life of university professors has become a daily
Odyssey, as they are constantly caught in the multiple effects of new organ-
isational and administrative practices that extend beyond the consolidated
teaching and research activities. In order to comply with the ‘moral frame’
imposed by new public management logics, university professors must con-
tinuously account for their work and attend to many administrative re-
quests that emerge from the marketisation of academic institutions: they
must produce efficient performance in the professional academic market;
they must update their personal performance indicators on their institu-
tion’s digital platforms; they must self-monitor their rankings, positioning
and citational indexes; they must meet specific performance standards if
they wish to qualify for funding opportunities. The agency of university
professors thus allies with new ecologies of elements, and produces unex-
pected attachments to these sociomaterial networks. New sociomaterial
textures emerge thereby (Orlikowski 2007; Fenwick 2015) which diverge
from conventional university practice.
    A sociomaterial perspective is also adopted for exploring technological
Viteritti and Piromalli                                                   109
artefacts as relational arrangements that are inscribed with specific – and
sometimes conflicting – moral values (Bowker and Star 1999) and pro-
grammes of action (Akrich and Latour 1992). As argued by STS scholars,
educational artefacts are better understood as ‘matters of concern’ rather
than ‘matters of fact’ (Latour 2004). Michael Schlauch (Free University of
Bozen-Bolzano, Italy) drew on these insights to discuss the effects of soci-
omaterial entanglement between human actors and texts in educational
scenarios. In particular, he combined the sociomaterial sensitivity and the
‘interpretive flexibility’ approach (Bijker 1997) for discussing how educa-
tional texts have configured processes and practice in education through
history. By following a methodological path “that leads from text to things
and from things to texts” (Latour 1992), Michael Schlauch distinguished
three competing technological frames (‘teacher-centred’, ‘technology-cen-
tred’, and ‘distributed’) that afford different kinds of spatial arrangements
and interactions. While providing the technological frame for most educa-
tional texts, the ‘teacher-centred’ and ‘technology-centred models’ contrib-
ute in (re)producing vulnerable interactions in classrooms. Instead, the
‘distributed instruction’ frame involves instances of ‘repurposing’, ‘rein-
scripting’ and ‘repairing’ (Jarzabkowski and Pinch 2013) that expand the
affordances of the artefacts beyond the prescribed programme. Socio-
material flexibility in educational technology should therefore be further
explored and fostered.


2. Platforms, Digital Technologies, and New Assemblages
Across Educational Policy and Practice

    The concept of ‘assemblage’ is also very significant today in STS studies
on education. The strength of this notion resides in the fact that it enables
to describe both the emergence of events and objects in social and material
spaces, and their entanglement in heterogeneous relational networks.
    This concept is often mobilised to inspect educational policies as ever-
changing entanglements that are seldom coherent and complete (technol-
ogy and software companies, educational practices, subjects, texts, pro-
grammes, tasks, exercises, teachers, students, etc.). ‘Assemblage thinking’
is also useful for unravelling the ‘power networks’ (Williamson 2019) that
tie together edtech market actors (such as Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc.)
and institutional actors (schools, universities, etc.). Moreover, this concept
is deployed to analyse digitalisation processes in education (Gorur 2011;
Landri 2018), as it allows to untangle the hybrid relational networks that
bring together configurations of actors and technical processes striving for
the digitalisation of educational spaces and practices. This has been dis-
cussed in educational studies on computer-mediated instruction (CMI) in
university settings (Nespor 2012), and on digital applications and techno-
logical ecologies of learning (Decuypere 2019). Digitalisation processes
have also been addressed in scholarly research on the design and use of
110                                                          Tecnoscienza – 12 (2)
learning platforms, which might emerge as invisible architectures that
build networks of action and reassemble educational processes (William-
son 2018). More broadly, digitalisation processes in education have been
often addressed in recent literature as the effect of complex sociomaterial
relational assemblages (Landri 2018; Decuypere et al. 2021).
    An interest to assemblages, platforms, and digital technologies has in-
deed emerged in our session. Some contributions have embraced this sen-
sitivity in order to explore the making and the effects of infrastructuring
and platformisation processes on academic professionals, IT specialists,
and students in order to highlight sociotechnical features of interoperabil-
ity and inspected standardisation and marketisation processes. Mariacris-
tina Sciannamblo (Sapienza University of Rome) discussed how digitalisa-
tion processes in academic life and other knowledge production processes
might contribute both in creating new spaces for action, and in (re)produc-
ing older vulnerabilities and new fractures.
    Research on digitalisation processes in education have singled out a par-
ticular tension in empirical settings (van Dijck et al. 2019): on the one hand,
edtech actors might attempt at imposing top-down digitalisation and plat-
formisation policy and practice; on the other hand, interdisciplinary pro-
fessional communities can build from-below digitalisation and platformisa-
tion processes.


Final remarks

    The notions of sociomateriality and assemblages in education have be-
come significant lens for examining phenomena and processes – artefacts,
technical devices, platforms, spaces, policy, practice, etc. – that emerge to-
day in the educational field. This sensitivity allows for ‘thicker’ explora-
tions on the active role played by all forms of materiality – both digital and
analogue – in the making of contemporary education. In particular, a post-
humanist and sociomaterial perspective can be fruitfully adopted to inves-
tigate the heterogeneous entanglement processes across which education is
negotiated and fabricated (Latour 1992; Braidotti 2019).
    The scenario of contemporary global education is marked by tensions,
complexities, and fractures. Technology in education can indeed foster the
(re)production of existing vulnerabilities and inequities, since it might in-
scribe new normativities (through discourses, policies, regulations, behav-
iours, algorithms, etc.) and foster marketisation processes in education
(Williamson 2019). However, technology can also mend troubled social
worlds that are challenged by educational crises at both at the local and
global scales. Alternative cultures, spaces, and connections can thus be en-
visioned and enacted.
    As argued by scholars, the COVID-19 pandemic has prompted a sig-
nificant ‘acceleration’ in educational processes worldwide (Cone et al. 2021;
Grek and Landri 2021). It becomes paramount now to inspect all processes
Viteritti and Piromalli                                                          111
that might be (re)shaping the educational field, dis/entangle all social and
technical processes, and invent new postures and lexicons that can help
dispel technological determinisms. A STS sensitivity to educational pro-
cesses is a valuable tool in this endeavour. The challenge for STS scholars
in education is indeed to unravel the hidden cultures inscribed in technol-
ogies, co-produce reflexivity and expertise through engagement with re-
search partners, and interfere in the empirical field itself.
    The issue at stake is to start examining educational practice and policy
as a heterogeneous set of relational processes. A renewed recognition of
the inherent sociomateriality, uncertainty, and nonlinearity of educational
processes might then help to imagine and perform alternative worlds.


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