Summary
The special issue Educational Settings as Interwoven Socio-Material Orderings contributes to the advancement of context-oriented approaches to education, learning and development by combining thick descriptions and theory-dense analyses of concrete and eventually interrelated socio-material arrangements in and across a variety of educational and developmental contexts. We explore below two issues that seem to be central across the relevant literature as well as across the contributions by the authors of the special issue: (a) the notion of “individual” as a relevant unit of analysis and (b) the notion of “socio-material orderings” as another relevant analytical frame. The notions “individual” and “socio-material ordering” encompass all research participants and arrangements, including therefore the researchers and their everyday settings. The last part of our paper discusses the epistemological and methodological implications of this proposition.
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Notes
As in the expression “the king and his subjects” with “subject” deriving directly from the Latin “subjectus” and “subgicere”, meaning submission (Gaulejac 2009).
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Acknowledgments
The authors are grateful to Athena Sargent for revising the language of the paper as well as to the anonymous reviewers and to the Springer team for their kind assistance in editing this special issue.
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Dr. Anne-Nelly Perret-Clermont. Department of Psychology and Education, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Esp. Louis-Agassiz 1, 2000 Neuchâtel, Switzerland. E-mail: Anne-Nelly.Perret-Clermont@unine.ch
Current themes of research:
Social and cultural psychology of development. Learning in school and vocational contexts. Argumentation and thinking. Psychology of communication. Design and training policies.
Most relevant publications in the field of Psychology of Education:
Perret-Clermont, A.-N. (1980). Social interaction and cognitive development in children. London: Academic Press.
Perret-Clermont, A.-N., Pontecorvo, C., Resnick, L. B., Zittoun, T., & Burge, B. (Eds). (2004). Joining Society. Social Interaction and Learning in Adolescence and Youth. Cambridge (UK): Cambridge University Press.
Psaltis, C., Gillespie, A., & Perret-Clermont, A.-N. (Eds). (2015). Social Relations in Human and Societal Development. Basingstokes (Hampshire, UK): Palgrave Macmillan.
Dr. Michalis Kontopodis. School of Education, University of Roehampton. Roehampton Lane, London SW15 5PJ UK. Email: michaliskonto@googlemail.com Web: http://mkontopodis.wordpress.com. Twitter: @m_kontopodis
Current themes of research:
Socio-material & socio-cultural approaches to human development. Educational and social inequalities. Global education. Teaching and learning with digital media.
Most relevant publications in the field of Psychology of Education:
Kontopodis, Michalis (hardcover: 2012, paperback: 2014). Neoliberalism, Pedagogy and Human Development: Exploring Time, Mediation and Collectivity in Contemporary Schools. London and New York: Routledge.
Kontopodis, Michalis; Wulf, Christoph & Fichtner, Bernd (Eds) (2011). Children, Development and Education: Cultural, Historical, Anthropological Perspectives. Dordrecht & New York: Springer.
Guest editors:
M. Kontopodis, University of Roehampton
A-N. Perret-Clermont, University of Neuchâtel
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Kontopodis, M., Perret-Clermont, AN. Educational settings as interwoven socio-material orderings: an introduction. Eur J Psychol Educ 31, 1–12 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10212-015-0269-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10212-015-0269-2