T8 Locating reality
T8
Locating reality
Tony Brown (2013) The power of pedagogical documentation to speak ACTION to teachers According to Ballard (1973), in the past we took the external world as representing reality, however much it confused us. It contrasted with our inner world, our imagination and fantasies, hopes and fears, which we took to represent a fictional world. These roles, he argues, have been reversed and now the prudent step for us is to deal with the world around us as the fiction and our inner world as the reality. The diet we are fed by external sources – mass media, advertising, big business, politicians – appear less and less part of a reliable, trustable world. These sources need us so much that they constantly seek to tell us new fictions about what they imagine we want. So slippery, ungraspable, fleeting and unreliable has the outer world become that the best strategy for dealing with it is to see it as a complete fiction. In contrast, what we believe in, know for sure, what we are committed to, comes from the reality of an inner world that we can rely on with increasing confidence. There are alternatives to the dominant discourses of schooling and education that are being promoted by rich individuals who want to run schools, and politicians who see education only in terms of missed revenue opportunities for big business. What teachers, children and the great majority of parents possess with a considerable degree of congruity is a powerful inner vision of what education should and can be. This is the reality that denies the fictional stories from the external world that wish to marketise children, their childhood and their education. One way of challenging orthodoxy is to look for alternative discourses and that is what Lenz Taguchi (2010) does in her book, Going Beyond the Theory/Practice Divide in Early Childhood Education. Taguchi follows a feminist post-structural approach to educational practices. She writes about embracing reflexive, deconstructionist collaboration, together with a number of EY practitioner colleagues. Lenz Taguchi seeks to “trouble and challenge what is going on in the education arena today, where pedagogical practices are being increasingly mainstreamed and normalised” (p. 4). She uses the Agential Realism theories of Karen Barad (2007) Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Barad’s conjecture is that the world is made up of phenomena. Objects do not precede their interactions. Rather they emerge in space–time as a consequence of particular intra-actions. This perspective blurs the distinction between human and nonhuman, heralding an important challenge to individualist metaphysics. As distinct from actor–network theory, Barad’s view is that phenomena are not gatherings of humans and nonhumans. The world of artefacts emerges as a result of conditions of possibility following the laws of physics and the speculations of Neils Bohr, among others. In her book, Lenz Taguchi’s approach is to innovate around discourses of Early Years pedagogy, seeing it as an emergence that is consequent upon intra-activity. This allows her to develop her discussion of EY education so as to shift the gaze toward intra-active relationships and away from the dominant discourse built around interpersonal relationships. Interestingly this may be seen as establishing similar viewpoints to those held by the young baby, who makes few distinctions between self–other; inside–outside; living– nonliving, learning–experience. Lenz Taguchi’s approach blurs distinctions between living organisms and the totality of the physical environment – “things”, artefacts, spaces and places.
©Routledge/Taylor & Francis 2014
This collapsing of independences in favour of agential realism requires a collapse of epistemology and ontology into an onto-epistemology; a blurred intra-relational space which includes notions of being (ontology) and notions of knowing (epistemology). What this preliminary argument does for learning and teaching is the heart of Lenz Taguchi’s book. Gone are the binary divides; theory–practice, science–philosophy, reality–discourse and nature–culture. In their place is pedagogy, emerging from practice, from discourse between professionals but crucially also between people and documentation. From this perspective, both the human and the nonhuman evidential records of pedagogy demonstrate agency. The totality of children’s lived experience in formal settings emerges through the agential consequences of the intra-relational dynamics of human and nonhuman resources, where pedagogical documentation occupies a significant role because of the powerful condensation of intentionality that it contains. Thus, pedagogical documentation has performative agency. “[T]he photograph, sketch, or written words of an observation will also put things in motion by means of its own agentic force and materiality. Thus, new possibilities for intra-action with other matter and organisms will emerge” (p. 64). References Ballard, J. G. (1973) Crash. London: Vintage. Barad, K. (2007) Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Taguchi, L. H. (2010) Going Beyond the Theory/Practice Divide in Early Childhood Education: Introducing an Intra-active Pedagogy. London: Routledge.
©Routledge/Taylor & Francis 2014
Locating reality
Tony Brown (2013) The power of pedagogical documentation to speak ACTION to teachers According to Ballard (1973), in the past we took the external world as representing reality, however much it confused us. It contrasted with our inner world, our imagination and fantasies, hopes and fears, which we took to represent a fictional world. These roles, he argues, have been reversed and now the prudent step for us is to deal with the world around us as the fiction and our inner world as the reality. The diet we are fed by external sources – mass media, advertising, big business, politicians – appear less and less part of a reliable, trustable world. These sources need us so much that they constantly seek to tell us new fictions about what they imagine we want. So slippery, ungraspable, fleeting and unreliable has the outer world become that the best strategy for dealing with it is to see it as a complete fiction. In contrast, what we believe in, know for sure, what we are committed to, comes from the reality of an inner world that we can rely on with increasing confidence. There are alternatives to the dominant discourses of schooling and education that are being promoted by rich individuals who want to run schools, and politicians who see education only in terms of missed revenue opportunities for big business. What teachers, children and the great majority of parents possess with a considerable degree of congruity is a powerful inner vision of what education should and can be. This is the reality that denies the fictional stories from the external world that wish to marketise children, their childhood and their education. One way of challenging orthodoxy is to look for alternative discourses and that is what Lenz Taguchi (2010) does in her book, Going Beyond the Theory/Practice Divide in Early Childhood Education. Taguchi follows a feminist post-structural approach to educational practices. She writes about embracing reflexive, deconstructionist collaboration, together with a number of EY practitioner colleagues. Lenz Taguchi seeks to “trouble and challenge what is going on in the education arena today, where pedagogical practices are being increasingly mainstreamed and normalised” (p. 4). She uses the Agential Realism theories of Karen Barad (2007) Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Barad’s conjecture is that the world is made up of phenomena. Objects do not precede their interactions. Rather they emerge in space–time as a consequence of particular intra-actions. This perspective blurs the distinction between human and nonhuman, heralding an important challenge to individualist metaphysics. As distinct from actor–network theory, Barad’s view is that phenomena are not gatherings of humans and nonhumans. The world of artefacts emerges as a result of conditions of possibility following the laws of physics and the speculations of Neils Bohr, among others. In her book, Lenz Taguchi’s approach is to innovate around discourses of Early Years pedagogy, seeing it as an emergence that is consequent upon intra-activity. This allows her to develop her discussion of EY education so as to shift the gaze toward intra-active relationships and away from the dominant discourse built around interpersonal relationships. Interestingly this may be seen as establishing similar viewpoints to those held by the young baby, who makes few distinctions between self–other; inside–outside; living– nonliving, learning–experience. Lenz Taguchi’s approach blurs distinctions between living organisms and the totality of the physical environment – “things”, artefacts, spaces and places.
©Routledge/Taylor & Francis 2014
This collapsing of independences in favour of agential realism requires a collapse of epistemology and ontology into an onto-epistemology; a blurred intra-relational space which includes notions of being (ontology) and notions of knowing (epistemology). What this preliminary argument does for learning and teaching is the heart of Lenz Taguchi’s book. Gone are the binary divides; theory–practice, science–philosophy, reality–discourse and nature–culture. In their place is pedagogy, emerging from practice, from discourse between professionals but crucially also between people and documentation. From this perspective, both the human and the nonhuman evidential records of pedagogy demonstrate agency. The totality of children’s lived experience in formal settings emerges through the agential consequences of the intra-relational dynamics of human and nonhuman resources, where pedagogical documentation occupies a significant role because of the powerful condensation of intentionality that it contains. Thus, pedagogical documentation has performative agency. “[T]he photograph, sketch, or written words of an observation will also put things in motion by means of its own agentic force and materiality. Thus, new possibilities for intra-action with other matter and organisms will emerge” (p. 64). References Ballard, J. G. (1973) Crash. London: Vintage. Barad, K. (2007) Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Taguchi, L. H. (2010) Going Beyond the Theory/Practice Divide in Early Childhood Education: Introducing an Intra-active Pedagogy. London: Routledge.
©Routledge/Taylor & Francis 2014
