A critical materialist entry into the comforts and dangers in defining academics’ of science teaching and learning research communities

Abstract

Research on science teaching and learning commonly makes use of reductionism to specify conditions of science learning. In my studies of academics’-of-science-teaching-&-learning (academics’-of-st&l) research practices and values, I discuss how philosophic inquiry shifted my research practices from reductionism to critical (or, “new”) materialism, where critical materialism is a research approach attuned to the materiality of social practices. Reading materiality as affectual, intellectual, and spatial components of practices turns my attention toward the logics informing academics’-of-st&l research practices as well as the comfortable and dangerous effects of particular practices on our connectible landscape. In this forum response, I briefly explore multiple logics informing academics’-of-st&l conference attendance choices, in addition to these choices’ alignment to communal definition rendered by governmental and conference entities. I also explore other modes of communal boundary-marking experienced by academics-of-st&l that do not make use of formal definitions, but suggest that it is in the minutiae of conference relating that academics-of-st&l construct their sensing of communal un/boundedness. With these explorations, I hope to generate awareness of the small shifts that re-configuring practices can make possible in academics’-of-st&l connectivity.