Abstract:

The active agency of teachers is at the core of any teaching practice, to the extent that the didactic interaction of students and teachers might appear as enclosed system of practice; often studied and labelled as anthropocentric performative contexts.

In terms of agency, if formulations of performative epistemologies, actor network theory-studies, assemblage theory, or James J. Gibson´s concept of affordance tells us anything, an agency of learning is never limited to human-to-human interaction. What is at play is a range of both human and non-human agents, in terms of rhizomatic assemblages and landscapes of material agents, with enough affordance and agency to open up new fields of understanding and context-grounded learning.

This article traces the agency of teaching within learning processes of rhizomatic contexts beyond the scope of exclusively human agency. More than a question of who our teachers are, this begs the question of what, where, and even when of material agents.

This article argues that a largely untapped agency of learning might be found outside of a strictly human-to-human interaction, in terms of rhizomatic learning within heterogeneous assemblages in our material surroundings.

As step to developing a rhizomatic approach to material learning within a school setting, this article is based on an analysis of elementary school learning conducted as practical participation in archaeological field surveys and excavations. We build on our experiences as archaeologists and educators, qualified with participant questionnaires, from six archaeological dissemination projects in Norway (2007-2018).

In their everyday work archaeologists, in common with other material investigators, practice a highly developed rhizomatic learning gained from the material assemblages of landscape features, material traces, and their own in-site “gut feeling”. Much like Vygotsky´s tools of learning, or Bruners concept of scaffolding, a materially informed learning cumulates from a basic awareness of material clues, features of a landscape. Enabling elementary school children to participate as on-site investigators and field surveyors, immediately setting out on their own materially informed rhizomatic process of learning, this article recounts some of the results from this effort. Allowing the children enough clues, and give direct and to-the-point answers when asked, still providing enough silence for non-human agency of a site to be experienced, examined and pondered, facilitated an unexpected more-than-human arena of learning. Some of the more baffled participants turned out to be class teachers, having witnessed notoriously uninterested or disruptive children highly focused and brimming with intricate and often very advanced questions.

This type of rhizomatic material learning is scarcely used in Norwegian schools. This is a paradox, given a strong educational emphasis on facilitating learning agency and practical contexts circumventing learning obstacles and tendencies of existential disinterest.

An additional, equally unexpected, paradox is the archaeologists´ tendency to immediately discard their own highly rhizomatic mode of learning as soon as school children appear, in favour of conducting themselves as lecturing classroom teachers in their best efforts of on-site dissemination. As soon as the school children leave, the archaeologist resume their rhizomatic learning from context-grounded, non-verbal clues.

Keywords:

Material Agency, Rhizomatic learning, Education.