Bruno Latour’s “The ‘Pedofil’ of Boa Vista: A photo-philosophical montage

Megan McGinty

Latour, B. (1995). The “Pedofil” of Boa Vista: A photo-philosophical montage. Common Knowledge, 4(1), pp. 144-187. 

In this reflective photo-prose essay, Latour follows a group of physical scientists into the field as they investigate the border between a savanna and a forest. As the scientists, a pedologist, a botanist and a geomorphologist, investigate and debate, Latour works alongside them in an effort to decipher ‘scientific reference’.

“Is the referent what I point to with my finger or what I bring back to the discourse?” p.150

As he traces the story arc from material survey (soil, plants) to scientific theory (the forest is encroaching onto the savanna) to next phase of investigation (Do worms account for the unusual soil profiles, and if so, how?), Latour moves back and forth between the photos and text, using each photo and its accompanying commentary to lay out a series of steps in the concurrent pedologic / botanical / geomorphic and socio-philosophical investigations. In selecting particular photographs and then narrating them with reflective captions, Latour is mirroring the actions of his fellow scientists, who are collecting data in various forms and samples— a blade of grass, a soil horizon, a coded soil color— and transmuting them into data via de- and re-contextualization, allowing the sample to represent a new piece of information in the process. Each of these bits of information are referents to a piece of the greater puzzle. It is not the mere act of representation that makes each sample important. It is the ability of that sample, in in the hands of the appropriate disciplinarian, to become a point of knowledge, transcendent of both its former and future contexts.

“It seems that reference is not what one points to, or what, from the outside, one would use to guarantee the truth of a statement; rather, it is that which remains constant through a series of transformations. Knowledge does not reflect a real exterior world that it would resemble via mimesis, but rather, a real interior world, the coherence and continuity of which it helps to ensure.” (p. 170, emphasis Latour’s)

These disciplinarians are then able to place the links into a larger series of understandings (held by the investigative team) about the soil processes on the edge of the forest / savanna border in Boa Vista. The result is a chain of movements from material (matter) to representation (form). This process is depicted by a chain figure that Latour draws, a most important part of the chain being that steps can be traced inboth directions.

“To know is not to explore, but rather to be able to return on your own footsteps, following the path you have just marked out.” p. 184

It is in this last quote that I see the relevance of this article to our seminar on science education an d reform. As science practices are translated into classroom practices, student mimicry of the steps or the practice is not sufficient for deep scientific understanding. That is, if students are not able to carry ‘that which remains constant through a series of transformations’, they will not have learned the art of scientific practice.

At the same time, Latour flips things in and out of context pretty quickly here and it can be easy to underestimate the difficulty of forging a link in Latour’s chain of meaning. For example, savanna soil is represented in a profile, a cube, the contents of a pit, a sample sent to Manaus, a texture, a codified color number, etc. In its various forms and contexts, the soil carries different meanings; the important point is not to get so caught up in the transformed soil in its new form (sample catalog number, texture, paint code) that we mistake the constancy of all its properties, i.e. that we don’t wind up trying to grow savanna grass on a paint chip the color of savanna topsoil.

Questions for discussion:

How closely can school lessons reflect the conditions under which scientific knowledge is produced? How far back (or forward) along Latour’s chain must teachers go to ensure that a scientific form is being sufficiently connected to its material origins? That is, how will they know they have created an adequate reference? (p.180)

The Mangle of Practice: Agency and Emergence in the Sociology of Science

Charlene Nolan

Pickering, A. The mangle of practice: Agency and emergence in the sociology of science. American Journal of Sociology,99(3), 559-589.

I found this article to be particularly dense, so my post is quite long as I try to work through this. I think it may be helpful to digest this article by understanding first 1) what is the concern with sociology of science; 2) what is the mangle of practice; and 3) what does it mean for us to decenter humanist science? I believe I can provide some insight into the first 2 questions, but the latter I believe we may need to discuss in class.

1) What is the Concern with Sociology of Science.

Pickering argues that sociology of science is now at a cross-roads to either reject non-human agency in understanding the practice of science or to recognize material agency with the caveat that now only “hard” scientists can practice science. Pickering offers the alternative of recognizing the dialectic, albeit asymmetrical dialectic, between material and non-material agentic forms (i.e. humans and tools). I would have found an explicit definition of what Pickering considers as “agency” helpful for digesting this chapter. Perhaps it is in the article and if so, would someone please provide a page number! I’m not familiar with actor-network analysis or sociology of science enough to know what the standard acceptable form of “agency” is. I therefore, assume that agency merely refers to the ability of a human or non-human to act in the world. In the case of humans, we act in accordance with specific goals and cultural practices, implicit and explicit, in mind. Non-human material tools act without intentionality, including and especially without human intention. This, I believe is the crux of his argument for why we should consider non-human material agency. It acts, at times against our wishes, and we then must re-act. This action and reaction constitute the “mangle of practice” which I attempt to outline in the next section.

To be completely clear, when Pickering talks about non-human things, I believe (and hope) he is talking about tools and artifacts and not non-human living things. In order to make his point about non-material agency, it is important to recognize that the non-material forms to which he refers have no intentionality in their agency. I suppose you could make a similar argument that non-human living kinds can participate in the “mangle of practice,” which I outline in the next section of this post, but I would argue that we would then have to consider the intentionality (future goals) of those non-human living kinds.

2) The Mangle of Practice

 “Resistance (and accommodation) is at the heart of the struggle between human and material realms in which each is interactively restructured with respect to the other—in which, as in our example, material agency, scientific knowledge, and human agency and its social contours are all reconfigured at once.”- pg. 385

I found the above quote to be particularly helpful. I believe this quote, plus the temporal unfolding of this process of resistance and accommodation to be the heart of the “mangle of practice.” In essence, what is the dialectic relationship between human and material in terms of resistance and accommodation unfolding across time?

One question that I had here was whether a material could accommodate or if this was solely a human accomplishment because it requires intentionality? Is this part of what Pickering means by an asymmetrical dialectic?

3) How this relates to us?

I found it interesting that in understanding the mangle of practice, Pickering emphasized modeling as an example of the link between the dialectic relationship of humans and materials. As humans design materials, encounter resistance from that material in regards to intended goals, and accommodate and redesign said materials, we participate in an act of modeling. “Modeling, then, is the link between existing culture and future states that are the goals of scientific practice, but the link is not a causal or mechanical one: the choice of any particular model opens up an indefinite space of different goals” (pg. 383).

Guiding questions for class discussion:

1. As a way into the discussion, can you think of a situation where you were modeling something and it did not go originally as planned? How does this connect with the mangle of practice?

2. What does this mean for us as we design learning environments and materials/tools to facilitate learning? How do we take into account material agency into our design and teaching?

Language demands and opportunities in NGSS practices

Sukh Makhnoon

Language Demands and Opportunities in Relation to Next Generation Science Standards for English Language Learners: What Teachers Need to Know by Quinn H, Lee O, Valdés G, 

In science, everyone is an English language learner (ELL). This is because words and terminology used in science is often different from their everyday meanings. Words such as "Energy" have everyday usage that is broader and less defined than their scientific meaning. Learning new discipline-specific words is an everyday exercise in science (words such as gene, biome, proton etc).

Students for whom English is the second language of instruction, the language learning challenges are doubled- they have to learn 'Science language' as well as English language. To help ELLs in their learning, the article provides several tools for teachers to use in their instruction, with particular focus on 4 of their 8 practices that are most inter-related, represent major shift in ideas and require classroom discourse and therefore opportunities for language learning.  

The article suggests several tools for teachers, some of which are:

Literacy strategies: don't simplify the challenges of science reading, rather provide them with tools to "decode" complex sentences

Discourse strategies: establish classroom norms to encourage questions; "use multiple modes of representation (gestural, oral, pictorial, graphic, and textual) to communicate meanings".

Home language support: allow 'translanguaging' or offer connections between science-y words and their native language 

Home culture connections: students' backgrounds can serve as important experiences in academic learning

Questions to think about:

What was a memorable experience for you when familiar words were being used in unfamiliar ways and you could not follow the science-y discussion? Do you think instances like this happen often in science or science communication? What do you do in your practice to accommodate ELLs? 

Rethinking Dichotomies in Modes of Thinking

Jeanne Chowning

Warren, B., Ogonowski, M., & Pothier, S. (2003). “Everyday” and “Scientific”: Rethinking dichotomies in modes of thinking in science learning. In A. Nemirovsky, A. S. Rosebery, J. Solomon, & B. Warren (Eds.), Everyday matters in mathematics and science education (pp. 119–152). Mahwah, N.J.: Erlbaum.

OVERVIEW/BACKGROUND

In this article, Warren, Ognowski, and Pothier aim to reexamine the traditional dichotomies of ‘everyday’ and ‘scientific’ thinking as they relate to science learning. Binaries, they note, are common across domains in Western thinking and are often conceptualized in terms such as: “abstract versus concrete; complex versus simple; analytic versus intuitive; decontextualized vs. contextualized; advanced versus primitive; domesticated versus savage; theoretical versus practical; examined versus unexamined” (p. 119).  The authors note that the first term of each pair is traditionally more highly valued.  Warren et al. point out these dichotomies also play out in science education research, between those who believe that scientific worlds are discontinuous with ordinary and those who believe that the relationship between scientific and everyday experience is continuous.  They note that, “The main point of contention is whether students’ ways of conceptualizing, representing, and evaluating their lived experience should be viewed and treated as errors that impeded learning or as generative resources in learning new ideas and traditions of inquiry” (p. 121).

A discontinuous view, for example is found in research on student misconceptions, which aims to investigate/correct errors in student thinking and to bring them in line with scientific concepts.  In this perspective, students from groups traditionally underrepresented in science are perceived to be at a disadvantage because their everyday experience differs the most from “Western science.” In contrast, those who adhere to the continuous view (such as the authors), believe that students’ experiences are constantly used as a reference and a resource -  and that teachers should be concerned with “uncovering children’s’ competence” (p. 122).

STUDY

The researchers analyzed a classroom inquiry into Newtonian ideas by first- and second-graders.  The classroom teacher, after two months of investigation of motion, introduced students to a simplified version of Newton’s Second Law as “an object of inquiry” for students to “think with, probe, interrogate” rather than a law to be applied formulaically (p. 123).  They focused on the talk of three children, who reference their everyday experiences with motion as they build their understanding.  For example, one student, Elton, linked his experience with running down hills to the phenomenon of a car going down a ramp.

THEORETICAL FRAMING

The authors draw on Bakhtin’s (1981) view of “interanimation,” which arises from the “fundamentally heteroglossic nature of language” (p. 140).  The word reflects the creative and generative coming together of different perspectives that are not ordinarily in contact with each other (such as baby carriages, which the students knew rolled down hills, and Newton’s laws). Linguistically, the word conveys “mutuality” and “between-ness” as well as “bringing to life” or “filling with life” (p. 141).  Students who create new language objects to focus their analysis (such as Letisha, who referenced a “turned car”) bring together their own experiences with cars and motion with the abstract ideas of Newtonian physics. (p. 141).  Warren et al. describe how “interanimation “denotes a process whereby a person comes to regard one way of conceptualizing, representing and evaluating the world through the eyes of another, each characterized by its own objects meanings, and values. As such, it resists the strong temptation to dichotomize modes of thinking or being” (p. 142).

IMPORTANT POINT
Letisha (a student from an under-represented background) exhibited talk and ideas that, viewed through the lens of traditional dichotomous thinking, looked “outside of the boundaries of the task.” The authors and the teacher had to actively work at recognizing the value of this student’s “expansive thinking” (p. 143).  “...Rather than assuming that the problem resides in Letisha – in something about the way she thought or spoke, in some deficit in her background of life experience, or in the incompatibility of her ways of knowing with those valued in sciences – we assumed that the problem resided in our norms of interpretation, in our assumptions and expectations regarding what counted as a meaningful response to the teacher’s questions; in other words, in our own trained inability to see and hear the intellectual substance of Letisha’s talk” (p. 144).  Afterwards, the teacher shifted her way of engaging with Letisha, framing her as more intellectually competent and asking more expansive questions of her.  The authors note that how we view students and their experiences has great import for how they are able to engage and participate in science.

QUESTIONS

1) Do you agree with the authors’ analysis of the “misconceptions” approach to science research and learning? Is it misguided, or can it be a helpful way to think about supporting science students?  What if a student is traveling down a path that is based on his or her own experience, but that contradicts the science concept being focused on?

2) How can learning in classrooms be best organized to help to facilitate the connections between ‘everyday’ and ‘scientific’ thinking?  What are the characteristics of those learning environments?  Which NGSS practices can be mobilized to emphasize those connections?  How would those classrooms look for first graders, middle school students, high school students, or college students?

 3) What are the broader equity implications of positioning students as capable and of valuing ‘expansive thinking’?

 4) Can you think of an example of where you creatively wove together your own experiences and connected them to broader theoretical concepts (where you participated in “interanimation”) in your own learning? Was the interanimation valued in that context?  How did it advance or hinder your understanding?

Engaging Science through Cultural Studies

Bridget DuRuz

Rouse, J. (1994). Engaging science through cultural studies. Philosophy of Science Association, 2, 396-401

In this article Rouse discusses philosophical issues that help contrast the standard approach to science to an alternative approach to interdisciplinary science through a cultural studies perspective. A cultural studies perspective is necessary to see how the philosophy of science has been narrow – exclusively directed to elite, academic, and prestigious fields (i.e. quantum mechanics, general relativity, evolutionary biology, molecular genetics), and has “promised to secure unity and autonomy of scientific work.” But a philosophical perspective on science should acknowledge practices linked to other fields (i.e. medicine, agriculture, industry), which proves how interesting, complicated and dynamic science really is.

The dynamics of science practices encourage deflationary thinking – that which is opposed to views that claim scientific knowledge as a whole is true and rational. It recognizes a wide range of knowledge but doesn’t see the coherence. It permits more heterogeneity to ordinary knowledge in particular contexts. It questions what historically counts as knowledge seeing there are more informative ways of interconnecting what people do. The dynamic and deflationary approach questions power and knowledge.

Alternative Approach: A more adequate picture of science can be obtained by viewing it as a continuously transforming pattern of situated activities through Cultural Studies. Sciences are ongoing and dynamic practices – we make sense of what scientists do as a response to past research and an anticipation of future developments and continually reconstruct the science narrative to accommodate new people and things, and to tap into new possibilities.

Standard approach: scientific knowledge foregrounds, limits and justifies science by means of global, a priori principles. Traditional philosophy addresses epistemological problems and questions of significance asking, are truths are irrelevant? Who decides:

• Which projects are significant and worth engaging
• What skills, equipment, procedures are important or necessary
• Which results are worth publishing
• Which developments are important
• How any claim is important

Rouse offers the “Legitimization Project” as a way to question standard science:

• Rationality of scientific methods: The project objects to wholesale legitimization of rationality, production of scientific knowledge and methods
• Success of scientific theories: The project rejects a single aim best makes sense of scientific practices or achievements. The project denies the object of philosophical interpretation or sociological explanation is the content of scientific knowledge, or the internal history of sciences (philosophical truths of science)
• Social construction of scientific knowledge: The project objects to scientific communities embody a consensus on basic beliefs, methods, values (because it leaves room for considerable differences over time)

Reflection:       Sciences are ongoing and dynamic practices. People’s understanding is reconfigured through scientific practices. If we focus on how and why science matters to multiple participants and encourage interpretive differences we can get a more adequate picture of science as a continuously transforming pattern of situated activities through Cultural Studies. Sense-making is continually reconfigured by each subsequent course of research where scientists have a shared situation which then can be understood in divergent ways.

“ ‘The recent is the result of something which did not happen,

[while] the past is the trace of something which will not have occurred’

(Hans-Jorg Rheinberger, 1994, 67).”

Question:         What constitutes Science knowledge? How can we allow for multiple interpretations in science as a social construction of scientific knowledge when historically what counts as knowledge comes from scientific communities? How can we value a consensus of rationality, scientific methods, and scientific theories, or philosophical truths of science?

Engaging Science through Cultural Studies (Links to an external site.)

Joseph Rouse

PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association  (Links to an external site.)
Vol. 1994, Volume Two: Symposia and Invited Papers (1994), pp. 396-401

Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Philosophy of Science Association

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/192951

Philosophical Terms

Deflationary theory: asserts that the predicate truth (Links to an external site.) of a statement does not attribute a property called truth to such a statement

Epistemology:  the study of knowledge that questions what knowledge is and how it can be acquired

Epistemological Eliminativists:  believe the existence of mental phenomena is analogous to the ancient belief in obsolete theories such as the geocentric model (Links to an external site.) of the universe Epistemological eliminativists – ordinary talk about knowledge should be replaced with more informative vocabulary - proposed replacement theories

Metaphysics: explaining the fundamental nature of being (Links to an external site.) and the world (Links to an external site.) broadly in two basic questions: What is there? and What is it like?

Verificationism:  to ensure truth or falseness and meaning of philosophical statements. Verifiability principle:  only statements about the world that are empirically verifiable or logically necessary are cognitively meaningful—theology (Links to an external site.), metaphysics (Links to an external site.), and evaluative judgments, such as ethics (Links to an external site.) and aesthetics (Links to an external site.) are cognitively meaningless. 

Funds of Knowledge and Discourses and Hybrid Space

Charlene Nolan

Barton, A. C., & Tan, E. (2009). Funds of knowledge and discourses and hybrid space. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 46(1), 50-73.

Calabrese Barton and Tan (2009) expand funds of knowledge from what happens at home, to how funds of knowledge can be meaningfully used to guide (or perhaps challenge) learning in the classroom. Of particular importance to these authors is the creation of a hybrid space. Using Moje et al. (2004), the authors describe hybrid space in three dimensions with focus on the last one. Hybrid space is:

• a supportive scaffold that links traditionally marginalized funds of knowledge and Discourse to academic funds and Discourse
•  a “navigational space” in gaining competency and expertise to negotiate differing discourse communities
• where diff funds of Discourses coalesce to destabilize and expand boundaries of official school Discourse (pg. 52). 

My understanding of the difference between the traditional "bridge" between funds of knowledge & school and the hybrid space is the dimension of authorship. In traditional bridges, official school "knowledge" or ways of accessing this knowledge are still privileged while funds of knowledge are hinted at. I think best in examples so I'm giving one as a way of showing my thought process. Perhaps an example would be if a child practices math at home by doing a lot of shopping with a limited budget, a teacher may hint that when doing addition or subtractions it "like what you do at home." This would be an example where a teacher recognizes the mathematical competency of a child and may position that child as an expert; however, there would be little room for a child to transform the pedagogy or unit lesson by bringing that skill/practice. In a hybrid space, a teacher might ask that child to help plan a lesson where they will learn addition and subtraction by pretending to buy food with a limited budget. The child or children would beresponsible for co-authoring the lesson and the learning. Thus hybridity is achieved not only when the figured worlds of "home/community" and "school" coalesce, but when authorship of learning is shared between teacher and classroom.

By way of exploring the idea of hybridity I thought it might be interesting to create a set of practices that a new teacher could use in the first week of (either the school year or a new unit) to elicit funds of knowledge. I am imagining a protocol that would ask teachers to think about not only how they would collect these funds, but how they would allow space for hybridity to occur. There may be danger in operationalizing real and meaningful relationships to elicit and honor funds of knowledge, but it may also be useful to think of strategies that teachers can use without relying on the typical "You're ethically different, tell me all about your culture."

Remaking Plant Relatives - Navigating Multiple Epistemologies

Christie Barchenger

Bang, M., & Medin, D. (2010). Cultural processes in science education: Supporting the navigation of multiple epistemologies. Science Education, 94(6), 1008-1026. 

A quote to start:

“Culture” and “science” are two concepts that are strongly subject to stereotyping and simplistic definitions. For example, it may be easy for some people to think of science as a body of knowledge and to imagine scientists as (White) men wearing white laboratory coats and using beakers and test tubes. Similarly, it is easy to think of culture as a set of ideas about what people think or customs rather than as affecting how people think. If these stereotypes and reductionist approaches remain unchallenged, then it is natural to take some preexisting science curriculum and build in a cultural connection by “adding culture to it.” Indeed, this is an approach that has been widely advocated and used but has failed to have the desired impacts (Hermes, 1999; Yazzie-Mintz, 2007). In part, we think this is because it has not addressed the core problems of culture in science and science education nor has it recognized the embeddings of culture in everyday practices." (Bang and Medin, 2010).

In this article, Bang and Medin engage in the conversation of how to open up spaces within science education for students, teachers, communities, and researchers to engage with multiple science epistemologies. One of the foundations to this work is naming and understanding 'science education' as Western science which, far from being acultural, is deeply cultural while being presented in the dominant discourse as 'objective' or neutral. Another related foundation is "understanding learning and development as fundamentally cultural processes" as opposed to seeing learning and cognition as something that ought to be identical across humans with differences being seen as inferior or abnormal. A third foundational piece is the recognition of community-derived knowledge as fundamentally important to students' learning processes instead of an obstacle or source of errors that must be corrected.

A strong conceptual framework, which I've only skimmed the surface of here, sets the stage for the researchers' community-based design research project that worked to structure learning settings for Indigenous students in Chicago and rural Wisconsin which allow for exploration and negotiation of Indigenous ways of knowing the natural world and 'modern' Western science. One of the vignettes shared in the article tells how students were responsible for observing, caring for, and learning more about a particular "plant relative" in an urban setting, then translating that relationship to local forests by looking for the plant and considering its interactions with the rest of the ecosystem. Thi highlights how Indigenous knowing can be centered in students' sense-making about the natural world:

   To begin, the naming of learning about plant ecology as “remaking relatives” places the foundation of student learning in a community-based epistemology in which plants are relatives.

 This vignette and framing made me stop and truly consider what some of the assumptions are going beneath the Western science epistemology about 'relatives' and 'families'. Western science, from my understanding, categorizes the closeness of relationship amongst living things in terms of genetic (and sometimes physiological) similarity. I'm more closely related to my biological parents than to my College of Ed friends because our genes more similar; organisms are organized into different 'families' based on similar characteristics.

Yet, we could think of relatives in a more ecological sense; am I more closely related to my College of Ed friends because we interact on a more regular basis and our lives overlap at more points than mine does with my parents in the Midwest? Is a squirrel actually not related to the acorns that it gathers? This is not to say that this ecological 'relations' idea I put forth here is actually representative of any Indigenous way of knowing (I can't claim that knowledge as something I 'have'). It's a way I'm muddling through thinking about this, by setting up a potential alternative to 'relatives' based on genetics. Another thought that comes to mind is the concept of kin and fictive kin in some African-American communities; this way of thinking about relations and family has historically (and currently still does) come into conflict with dominant culture, genetic-relationship based ways of determining family, in areas such as foster care. Here, though, I'm already falling into a 'trap' that Bang and Medin warn about: thinking of ways of knowing as a dichotomy that oversimplifies both epistemologies.

I'll leave my thinking there for the moment and be honest in saying that this is a difficult article to summarize in some ways because of its complexity and, in my opinion, importance. Designing and opening up spaces where students can engage with science in ways that affirms different ways of knowing about the natural world and different identities within that work is of utmost importance. This article is certainly worth reading in its entirety, several times, and seriously considered in its relevance not just to Indigenous students but all students, including those from a dominant cultural background.

Important Point/Quote:

Given that science instruction is seldom recognized as a set of cultural practices, many Native students may aptly be perceiving a sharp divide between everyday practices and what takes place in school. The lack of recognition of science and science education as being a set of cultural practices may implicitly or explicitly teach Native students that their own orientations and practices are not recognized or appreciated in school contexts or relevant to professional science. Consequently, it may be hard for Native students (as well as others) to resist the view that science is indeed a practice peculiar to White males and that science learning consists of the “received wisdom” of the dominant culture. That is not a prescription for engagement with science. We have attempted to address this and related issues in our community-based science programs.

Question for consideration:

Can space be made within K-12 classrooms (a setting which makes a set of statements about what learning is and where it takes place) for students' navigation of multiple epistemologies? This research was based in a summer program, among other non- 'conventional K-12' classroom settings.