Material Practice and Materiality: Too Long Ignored in Science Education

1. Ending Matters

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 231-231

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   2. Communicating Through Silence: Examining the Unspoken, the Unsaid, and the “Not Done” in Science Education

      • Kathryn Scantlebury, Anna T. Danielsson, Anita Hussénius, Annica Gullberg, Kristina Andersson

      Pages 233-244

   3. Conclusion: Telling Us What to Do. Moving on in a Material World

      • Catherine Milne, Kathryn Scantlebury

      Pages 245-250

2. Correction to: Teachers as Participatory Designers of a Professional Development Website

   • Shirley Simon, Paul Davies

   Pages C1-C1

3. Back Matter

   Pages 251-252

   PDF

In this book various scholars explore the material in science and science education and its role in scientific practice, such as those practices that are key to the curriculum focuses of science education programs in a number of countries.

As a construct, culture can be understood as material and social practice. This definition is useful for informing researchers' nuanced explorations of the nature of science and inclusive decisions about the practice of science education (Sewell, 1999). As fields of material social practice and worlds of meaning, cultures are contradictory, contested, and weakly bounded. The notion of culture as material social practices leads researchers to accept that material practice is as important as conceptual development (social practice).

However, in education and science education there is a tendency to ignore material practice and to focus on social practice with language as the arbiter ofsuch social practice. Often material practice, such as those associated with scientific instruments and other apparatus, is ignored with instruments understood as "inscription devices", conduits for language rather than sources of material culture in which scientists share “material other than words” (Baird, 2004, p. 7) when they communicate new knowledge and realities. While we do not ignore the role of language in science, we agree with Barad (2003) that perhaps language has too much power and with that power there seems a concomitant loss of interest in exploring how matter and machines (instruments) contribute to both ontology and epistemology in science and science education. 

• New Materialism
• material practice
• scientific practice
• material culture
• science classroom
• material feminism
• agential realism
• agential cuts
• apparatus
• intra-actions
• agential materials
• material practice in science education
• materiality in science education
• Socio-material relations
• learning and instruction

• New York University, New York, USA

  Catherine Milne

• University of Delaware, Newark, USA

  Kathryn Scantlebury

Policies and ethics