School talk. Cartography, morphology, and theoretical study of school making

Since its foundation, the school has been severely criticized. In recent decades the school has yet again become a talking point for both scientific and public debate. Education in general, and the school in particular, is challenged by requirements of the so-called knowledge-led society and successive innovation within the field of information and communication technology. Schools are asked to broaden their perspectives in the pursuit of self-realization, social integration, active citizenship, and employability for their pupils. Therefore, on one hand it seems that the school as a whole - its purpose, its methods, and its content - is increasingly questioned due to recent (societal) developments, while, on the other hand, the societal requirements a school is expected to meet are increasing. Within this dissertation, we take neither these challenges or requirements as our point of departure. Instead, we start with the school as it occurs on a daily basis. In other words, we approach the school as a practice-in-the-making which is continuously molded by both human (teacher, pupil) and nonhuman (tables, chairs, books, blackboards) entities.

In approaching the school as a practice-in-the-making, we rely on both the work of Bruno Latour and the empirical fieldwork within one secondary school. An initial part of the study is inspired by Actor-Network Theory (ANT). With ANT, as described by Latour (2005), we understand the school as the relational result of the continuous interweaving of both humans and nonhumans. The school is then no longer approached as a specific time and place where humans meet to learn from one another. Instead, it is in and through the coming together and interacting of teachers, pupils, books, blackboards, cars, and other entities that the school is enacted. A cartographical approach enables us to register the multitude of interactions and entities as an - always provisional - assemblage.

Later on in the study, we attempt to deal with the question of the particularity of the school. In other words, we question whether there is something uniquely specific about the school as a form of education. In order to answer this question, we make use of Latours ‘mode of existence’ notion (2013b). On the basis of the cartography and by means of a morphology, we articulate the school as a form of education consisting of three components: time, space, and a regime of enunciation. Otherwise said, the school is approached as an assemblage consisting of different forms (‘to prepare’, ‘to practice’) which are characterized by a specific time (‘potentiality’, ‘cyclic time’), a specific space (‘classroom’, ‘practice room’) and a specific regime of enunciation (‘noise’, ‘articulation’). As such, we focus on the continuous interweaving of both human and nonhuman entities and the manner in which they enact a specific configuration.

Based on the findings of the cartography and the morphology, we conclude that the school, as a specific form of education, can be described as a pause. A pause is then understood as a suspension in which the material dealt with in school becomes detached from its everyday use and meaning. Liberated from its everyday circulation, the material at hand can appear as subject matter. Describing the particularity of the school as a pause provides us with a new vocabulary to further the discussion surrounding the school without (starting from) the (societal) evolutions that surround the school. Alternatively, the school can be talked about, approached and appreciated in the way it takes place on a daily basis.

References

Latour, B. (2005a). Reassembling the social: An introduction to Actor-Network Theory. Oxford: University Press.

Latour, B. (2013b). An inquiry into modes of existence: An anthropology of the Moderns. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.