Posthumanist Perspectives on Learning

June 17, 2019 (full day workshop)

Peppler, Kylie, University of California at Irvine, kpeppler@uci.edu
Keune, Anna, Indiana University Bloomington, akeune@iu.edu
Wohlwend, Karen, Indiana University Bloomington, kwohlwen@indiana.edu
Rowsell, Jennifer, Brock University, jrowsell@brocku.ca
Goldstone, Robert, Indiana University Bloomington, rgoldsto@indiana.edu

Where the learning sciences have a long-standing emphasis on tools and materials as important for the study of learning, recent material turn across literacy, early childhood, discourse, and mathematics education studies suggests paradigmatic shifts in how we approach research on learning. To advance our understanding of how these shifts can help uncover ongoing learning and collaborative processes, essential work is needed to clearly articulate the implications of posthuman and materialist views of learning for the learning sciences and CSCL community. To initiate this conversion, this workshop is organized around three themes: (a) reconsidering relationships between humans and the material world, (b) exploring methodological and theoretical implications, and (c) probing how materials shape learning and participation in ways that have been undertheorized in the learning sciences to date.

This full-day workshop seeks to reconsider the relationship between the human and the material world, explore methodological and theoretical implications, and the implications for how materials shape both learning and participation in ways that have been undertheorized to date in the learning sciences. The workshop is organized around three main themes with focal questions that we intend to explore in the workshop:

• Theory: How can we reconcile posthuman and materialist approaches with key concepts in education, including learning, collaboration, development, and agency? How do we leverage skepticism to advance our understandings of posthuman and materialist perspectives on learning? How do these approaches resonate and extend distributed cognition and embodied/situative approaches to learning in CSCL and the learning sciences?
• Methods: How do we capture and analyze onto-epistemological approaches to learning and development, including intra-action as well as broader repetition and transformation patterns that influence the learning process? How can new technological advances for capturing movement of sound, heat cameras, and other machine-readable data points capture learning processes and advance our understanding of the same?
• Design: What would designing within posthuman education look like and what does this mean for the conceptual understanding of design principles? What approaches to child-nature relations can support a holistic understanding of the onto-epistemological nature of learning and development?

For more details (e.g., schedule), please visit the workshop website: https://materialityoflearning.weebly.com

In addition to the CSCL workshop registration, to help prepare a high-quality workshop we request all workshop participants to register via our online survey by May 17th, 2019: https://tinyurl.com/ybe2z4mq ​