Objects, bodies and space: gender and embodied practices of mattering in the classroom

Abstract

This article focuses on objects, bodies and space to explore how the mundane materialities of classrooms do crucial but often unnoticed performative work in enacting gendered power. Drawing on ethnographic data from a UK sixth form college study, the article analyses a series of 'material moments' to elaborate a material feminist analysis of embodied practices of mattering. I argue that 'practices, doings and actions' (Barad, K. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. London: Duke University Press), while often hidden or taken for granted, are a constitutive material force in producing what and who matters within classrooms. By highlighting objects, bodies and space as entangled material agencies, the article raises new questions about gendered pedagogic practices. It proposes the necessity to rethink classroom space as an emergent intersection of multiple, mobile materialities, and argues that doing so is a crucial task for a material feminist praxis.

Teacher Emotion and Learning as Praxis: Professional Development that Matters

“…These observations took place over a full day and were recorded on the researchers' mobile devices. Whilst making these observations, researchers were conscious of Taylor's (2013) recognition of "that which is resolutely mundane within everyday pedagogic practice" (p. 698) and attempted to give attention to the unremarkable in order to discern the "constellation of human-non human agencies, forces and events" (p. 698). The teachers did not take part in the research process to focus wholly on the creative writing activities.…”

Children writing ethnography: children's perspectives and nomadic thinking in researching school classrooms

“…Alaimo and Hekman (2008, 1) identify a strong tendency in the social sciences to place materiality in brackets. Rautio (2013) states that material beings have been viewed mainly as mediating tools in mental processes, whereas relations between material and living bodies have been considered unworthy of examination (see also Taylor 2013). On reading the children's accounts of their classroom, I began distancing myself from the psychological and sociological orientation that I had adopted as an educational professional.…”

“…Rather, I was drawn to acknowledge hybridity (Prout 2005), fluidity between categories and the inherently 'messy' nature of human lives and identities as continuous entanglements between social relations, power, discourses and non-human elements. I especially noticed, as if for the first time, the part played by the non-human, including material beings such as chairs, pencils and small toys hidden in the pencil case, the class space and physical conditions (see also Taylor 2013;Paju 2013).…”

Pedagogic and learning spaces of leadership development: A sectoral case study

“…However, this view of materiality retains an implicit dichotomy of the physical/natural/material and the social/constructed-technological/discursive-constructions (Hopwood et al 2016). This dichotomy is questioned and problematised in the poststructuralist, post-modernist and certain social constructionist conceptualisations of sociomaterial and embodied realities, which draws on a particular understanding of power, discourse, practices, and relations (Jivan 2017;Taylor 2013).…”