Praxeologie & Differenz im erziehungswissenschaftlichen Diskurs

Beskrivelse

Steps to an Ecology of Practices? Social practices are the producers of difference – not least within the educational sector. Through the doings and sayings of educators, administrators, and students themselves differences are produced as to how students are envisioned, how interaction with students are performed, etc. In addition material arrangements and infrastructures sediment, channels, prefigure, facilitate or hampers the social practices in producing differences. Social practices and material arrangements are thus closely intertwined and crystalize into practice-arrangement-bundles that, in turn, form larger constellations that encompass more practices and larger arrays of material arrangements. The flat ontology of practice theory envisions the dynamics amongst social practices and between social practices and material arrangements as indeterminate, contingent relations that are malleable by actor’s ends and projects, but also by physical and biological causation (e.g. Schatzki 2002). In understanding the production of difference in the educational sector practice theory claims that these subtle relational dynamics must be discerned. Recently practice theoretical scholars have suggested adopting the metaphor of ‘ecology’ to highlight the interrelatedness and interdependencies in constellations of practices bundles and material arrangements (Kemmis et al. 2012, Kemmis et al. 2014). Here the notion of ‘ecology’ is unfolded in order to better understand the perseverance and inertia in educational practices and eventually suggest change strategies. The mechanisms of ecologies are, in other words, introduced to explain the production of difference and give accounts for the ‘setup’ of the dynamics that constitute the social realm under investigation – say the practices that unfolds in what we construe as the educational sector. However, it is worth further exploring the notion of ‘ecology’ to make explicit the ontological presumptions carried along with the ecological accounts. The metaphorical reference to ‘ecologies’ is indeed suggestive for explanations that want to highlight the complexity, interrelated and dynamic nature of social phenomena and realms, but it might – as all metaphors – be deceptive by imposing implicit and unexamined ontologies. Building on this suggestion this paper critically examines the concept of ‘ecology’ to evaluate its merits for practice theory – mainly through the resources of Kemmis et al., Capra and Gregory Bateson. Gregory Bateson’s notion of a ‘difference that makes a difference’. It further extends the discussion by reflecting on Joseph Rouse’s naturalistic development of practice theory and his notion ‘niche construction’ (2014 and forthcoming).

Periode	29 jan. 2016
Begivenhedstitel	Praxeologie & Differenz im erziehungswissenschaftlichen Diskurs
Begivenhedstype	Konference
Placering	Flensburg, TysklandVis på kort