The Onto-Epistemologies of New Materialism: Implications for Applied Linguistics Pedagogies and Research

Linguistics and applied linguistics were concerned in much of the 20th century with descriptions of language systems: their somewhat-stable syntactic, semantic, and phonological structures, and how these systems/structures were learned and/or how they might be taught most efficiently and effectively. More recently, both fields have also been concerned with sociolinguistic and sociocultural aspects of language and language learning/teaching, and with issues of identity, subjectivity, literacy, and embodied cognition. Describing aims for 21st-century applied linguistics, the Douglas Fir Group (2016: 20) argued that ‘A new SLA [second language acquisition] must be imagined, one that can investigate the learning and teaching of additional languages…[and understand] the social-local worlds of [second language] learners and … pose the full range of relevant questions—from the neurobiological and cognitive micro levels to the macro levels of the sociocultural, educational, ideological, and socioemotional’. Applied linguist Pennycook (2016: 3) similarly noted the need for new ways of conceptualizing language learning to address the ‘stasis …[that] seems to have befallen applied linguistics over the past decade’. In this essay, I explore how new materialism¹ or posthumanism might address some of the questions identified by the Douglas Fir Group and indeed broad questions about language, language pedagogy, and language education research.

Many recognize that we require new concepts, new pedagogies, and new research designs to address contemporary educational issues resulting from increased movement of people, information, and goods across national borders resulting from globalized economies, wars, and environmental catastrophes, increasing employment precarity and income differentials, gender violence, racism, and our ‘algorithmic condition’ (Hui 2016). New materialism foregrounds the material nature of humans, discourses, machines, other objects, other species, and the natural environment, as well as constant change, non-binary thinking, and the porosity of boundaries, and asks for the posing of new problems and new concepts to ‘bring forth a world distinct from what we already are’ (Colebrook and Weinstein 2017: 4). Whether it will bring forth such a world is indeterminate, but new materialism does present challenges to our accustomed ways of thinking, and to our ideas about pedagogy and research.

Feminist political theorists Coole and Frost (2010: 8) observed that a ‘trait of the new materialism is its antipathy to oppositional ways of thinking’ and while new materialist ontologies and epistemologies² offer different ways of thinking about applied linguistics matters, I do not suggest here that the insights of structural linguistics or those of sociocultural or sociolinguistic approaches or applied linguistics scholarship based on these approaches be replaced or superseded by new materialist scholarship. Like Pennycook (2016: 3) I do not believe that new materialism (or posthumanism) ‘offers necessarily the only way forward’. Nor do I think difference necessarily means opposition.³ Rather I explore here how the concepts of new materialism might augment our understandings of additional language learning, teaching, and learners. I begin with an explanation of new materialist conceptions of ontologies (being/becoming), epistemologies (knowledge/knowing), and language, centrally important concepts in applied linguistics. I then focus on pedagogy, reviewing some of the work of educational scholars using new materialist perspectives. Because there are few new materialist studies of children learning additional languages in school, I then present documentation of some school-sited events involving such learners from my own research and discuss the pedagogical implications of a new materialist perspective. I then discuss a more recent project and some research implications of a new materialist perspective. I conclude with a summary and discussion of what contributions new materialism might bring to applied linguistics. As new materialism sees ontology and epistemology,⁴ which are in many ways different from Western European understandings, I begin with a discussion of other ways these matters have been conceptualized.

New materialist ontologies

Chepximiya Siyam, hereditary chief of the Squamish Nation in West Vancouver (Canada), in a discussion about woven ceremonial Salish blankets (traditionally made of mountain goat hair, dog hair, and vegetation), stated: ‘You should think about blankets as merged objects. They are alive because they exist in the spirit world. They are the animal. They are part of the hunter; they are part of the weaver; they are part of the wearer’ (as quoted in Tepper et al., 2017: 1). This view of objects as merged beings that are alive, spiritual, animal, and human is at least superficially similar to the view of feminist new materialists, and physicist Barad (2007), for example, uses the term entanglement as a central concept in new materiality scholarship.⁵ Refusing the central binaries and hierarchies of Cartesian thinking (mind/body and thinking/feeling), new materialist thought holds that the being of everything is in relation to other things. French philosophers Deleuze and Guattari (1987/2005) used the term agencement in French, translated as assemblage in English, to refer to the entanglement of related entities and proposed an ontology of relation: things are as they are (while also constantly changing) because of their interrelations and their entanglements with other things (which are also in other assemblages that are constantly changing).

Feminist researchers have considered binaries and hierarchies (male/female and mind/body) and issues around essentialism for a very long time, and it is through feminism that many have come to new materialism (Barad 2003, 2007; Alaimo and Hekman 2008; Coole and Frost 2010; De Freitas and Sinclair 2014; Jackson and Mazzei 2017; Van der Tuin 2017; and many others). Much effort was expended in feminist scholarship to deny biological determinism and essentialism and to identify the discursive and institutional practices that subordinate women and other groups. New materialism does not discount the importance of these efforts (nor the effects of subordinating practices) but invites a consideration of the entanglements of the animate and the inanimate (including bodily materiality), and how entangled material people, animals, objects, nature, discourses, and so on, proceed together (and are becoming together) in relation to and with one another (Haraway 1997; Alaimo and Hekman 2008; Coole and Frost 2010).

As the quote from Chepximiya Siyam above shows, other religious, cultural, and philosophical traditions do not make the same dualistic assumptions found in Western European thought. Another North American Indigenous (Sioux) scholar, Deloria (1999: 50–53 passim), for example, wrote:

American Indians, understanding that the universe consisted of living entities, were interested in learning how other forms of life behaved, for they saw that every entity had a personality and could exercise a measure of free will and choice… Because the universe is alive, there is choice for all things and the future is indeterminate.

Barad shared Deloria’s conviction that the universe is ‘alive… and the future is indeterminate’. She came to this conclusion through a reading of quantum physics experiments that showed that ‘individual things with their own set of determinate properties’ (Barad 2007: 19) could not be identified. In these experiments, ‘individual things’ were always already entangled with other things and acted together (Barad’s term for this is intra-action) in unpredictable and indeterminate ways. Barad uses the term intra-action to refer to the relation of things changing and becoming together:

[T]he notion of ‘intra-action’ queers the familiar sense of causality (where one or more causal agents precede and produce an effect), and more generally unsettles the metaphysics of individualism (the belief that there are individually constituted agents or entities)… [I]ndividuals do not preexist as such but rather materialize in intra-action. (Barad in conversation with Kleinmann 2012: 77)

If we see people, animals, objects, nature, discourses, and so on, as all material and proceeding together in relation to and with one another, we see the world (which includes humans) as ‘a dynamic and shifting entanglement of relations’ (Barad 2007: 35). Barad stressed that in the quantum physics experiments she considered, observers and their instruments of observation were entangled with that which was being observed, and reality was continually created anew in events (which she called phenomena or spacetimematterings). Rather than looking at separate ‘things’ in interaction with one another, Barad suggested we might instead examine phenomena, arguing that ‘phenomena are the ontological inseparability of agentially intra-acting “components”’ (Barad 2007: 308–9). Similarly, Pennycook (2016: 5) argued that a posthuman perspective shows us that ‘there is no longer a world “out there” separate from humans and represented in language but rather a dynamic interrelationship between different materialities’.

While post-modern and sociocultural theorists have emphasized that human identities arise in diverse social relations and social practices, and many applied linguistics scholars have enthusiastically put to work the idea of variability in human identities, as we have seen, new materialism wants to trouble the concept of individual identities in general, claiming that humans and non-human things do not have separable identities, as they are always in changing relations with one another. Sociocultural theory rejects binaries like self/society and individual/culture but retains its primary focus on human interactions and intentions, with the non-human usually seen as context and/or mediations for human activity (Kirschner and Martin 2010). A sociocultural perspective claims human persons are situated (and sometimes, agentially situate themselves) in differential positions in social/historical/cultural collectives, and use mediations, sometimes physical but also what Vygotsky (1978) called ‘psychological tools’ like language, mathematics, and so on, to accomplish their objectives. New materialism invites us to regard tools not merely as mediations for human intentions but, in intra-action with humans, they are also active and changing parts of assemblages and as anthropologist Ingold (2018: 24) put it, together with other entities they can be ‘agencing’ or ‘becoming agent’. For him, ‘[J]ust because not everything happens according to one’s own volition does not mean that someone else is in charge, or that agency is more widely distributed’. Rather, he argued that agency is not prior to activity or held by any one entity in an assemblage but is ‘forming and transforming from within the action itself, so we should talk about “agencing” or “becoming agent”’. The notion of identity is troubled not only by a relational ontology but also by the notion that agency is not an attribute of anything, but as ‘ever forming and transforming from within the action itself’.

In summary, new materialists wish to see ontology (human as well as non-human) not so much about being as it is about becoming; people, discourses, practices, and things are continually in relation, intra-acting and changing together, becoming different from what they were before. Recognition of the complexity and evanescence of assemblages also means that their change directions are unpredictable and indeterminate, particularly because observers’ observational instruments as well as the observers themselves are entangled in whatever phenomena are of interest. Accepting an ontology of becoming also disrupts our understandings of knowing and knowledge of those phenomena.

New materialist epistemologies

The Cartesian claim for the immateriality of the rational mind (or soul), which can think and direct human action in isolation from the irrational and animalistic material body, was dominant in Western understandings since well before Descartes. Making boundaries between humans, animals, objects, nature, and so on, and seeing humans exclusively as producers of knowledge are also certainly part of Western-shared assumptions about the world. Barad (2007) and others, however, have argued that entangled entities create entangled knowledge and that we should see knowing as not only a ‘human practice, not simply because we use nonhuman elements in our practices but because knowing is a matter of part of the world making itself intelligible to another part’ (Barad 2007: 185). A relational ontology that sees things in the world as having porous boundaries and being/becoming in myriad relations with other things (including human observers with diverse observation apparatuses) proposes then, a knowing that is different from Cartesian understandings: this is a knowing that is, in itself, an entanglement that is mutating, indeterminate, and unpredictable. As philosopher Greco (2005: 24) wrote, knowing the world in all its becomingness is an impossibility, ‘not indexed to the limits of perception or to the development of technology but rather intrinsic to the complexity of objects or processes themselves’. New materialists claim that not only is knowledge-creating an entanglement but knowledge itself also is always provisional, situated, and to be created anew.

Ingold (2014) explicitly considered the question: How do we come to know the world? He argued that, in anthropology at least, knowing came not from attempting to keep oneself separate from that which or those whom one was trying to understand but from direct experience, and corresponding with that which or those whom one endeavors to learn, ‘coupl[ing] the forward movement of one’s own perception and action with the movements of others’ (Ingold 2013: 389). He argued that corresponding entailed attending to the phenomena one was trying to learn about, and that knowledge came from ‘skills of perception and capacities of judgment that develop in the course of direct, practical and sensuous engagements with our surroundings’ (Ingold 2013: 5). For Ingold, as for Barad and many others, attempting to remove oneself from the world to observe or learn was a fundamental misunderstanding of the world and how we learn from it. The dispassionate mind unencumbered by emotion, prejudices, interests, or other bodily affects, using instruments of observation that played no part in assembling the phenomena, were for both Ingold and Barad fictions. Rather, observer bodies, emotions, memories and interests, microscopes, measuring devices, field notes, videorecordings, and other observational apparatuses are intra-acting with the bodies, affects, memories, and so on of that which and those whom we observe. Again, this view sees knowledge therefore always as provisional, situated and to be created anew.

New materialists (as well as many others) claim that knowledge is embodied, and that learning involves the body in important ways. The concept of affect has been helpful to many as it references ‘autonomic responses that are held to occur below the threshold of consciousness and cognition and to be rooted in the body’ (Ley 2011: 443). Dahlberg and Moss (2005: xxiii) stated ‘When the logic of affect is activated it gives rise to collective experimenting, intensity and unpredictability. It functions like a sort of contagion that people get involved in, or rather “hooked on”’. Affect and desire reference embodied learners who are multiply entangled, and who yearn to more fully engage with the world, rather than remove themselves from it.

Instead of seeing learning as a passionless, cerebral, and disinterested activity, new materialists stress the materiality of learning, arguing that learners are ‘passional… compositions of desire’, and that learning assemblages cannot ‘exist without the passions the assemblage brings into play’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987/2005: 399). Desire in new materialism is seen as a force that is distributed, circulating, and productive or destructive (or both). Like Foucault’s (1979) power relations, desire is not rational or coherent but rather an ‘ontological drive to become’ (Braidotti 2013: 134). Early childhood scholar Olsson (2009: 4) described desire as eagerness to experiment, to extend one’s capabilities. Using the examples of learning to walk or learning to surf, she pointed out the joy that accompanies increasing one’s body’s capacity to move: ‘you have joined other forces and together with these your body is capable of doing more’. Deleuze and Guattari (1987/2005) offered the concept ‘assemblages of desire’ to reference how desire is a force happening among and in-between assemblages and is always experienced in the body.

Sociocultural theory and poststructuralism also reject the notion that a researcher can remove herself from the world to observe, so as to provide unbiased, dispassionate, objective representations of that world. These theorists saw researchers as situated in personal histories, gender identifications, and multiple other identities, so that their views are necessarily selective, partial, and interested. New materialism does not deny these aspects of situatedness, but they also call attention to the apparatuses we use to understand phenomena, and to the entanglement of the phenomena of interest, the material apparatuses and the bodies, and the changing ideas/memories/affects of entities. This entails the recognition that multiple representations (or ‘documentations’) of any event are inevitable, given different apparatuses of observation, other objects, humans, locations, times, and so on, in unique and changing assemblages. It also means that our expressions of knowledge, our research products, cannot be seen as faithful mirrors of the world, but are rather potentially useful assemblages for ongoing learning.

The onto-epistemologies of language/languaging

For new materialists, seeing abstract language systems as being acquired by individual learners leaves out not only the constant change in these systems in use but also all languages’ entanglements with the (moving and changing) bodies of their human and non-human companions, and the objects and the spaces where language use occurs (Kell 2015; Pennycook, 2016; Canagarajah, 2017). Education scholar MacLure (2013: 663–664) pointed out that we need to find ways of ‘researching the materiality of language itself—the fact that language is in and of the body; always issuing from the body; being impeded by the body; affecting other bodies, yet of course, always leaving the body, becoming immaterial, ideational, representational, a striated, collective, cultural, and symbolic resource’. MacLure used ‘striated’ following Deleuze and Guattari (1987/2005) in the sense of regulated, repetitive, necessarily delimited ‘spaces’, which refer not only to places or geographies but also to intra-actions in assemblages. Deleuze and Guattari contrasted striated with smooth: striated spaces constrained thinking, moving, being, to the habitual, the already-known. On the other hand, smooth spaces allowed for ‘lines of flight’, experiments with the new, the untested. For Deleuze and Guattari the binary—striated and smooth—is abstract because ‘we must remind ourselves that the two spaces exist only in mixture: smooth space is constantly being translated, transversed into a striated space; striated space is constantly being reversed, returned to a smooth space’ (p. 474). MacLure observed that language is both striated (with particular grammars, semantics, and phonologies) and smooth (the creative, divergent, or ‘wild’ ways people actually use language), and that like life, language is at the same time abstract, ideational, material, and embodied. As philosopher Colebrook (2006: 137) put it (in discussing mind and matter), ‘we need to see life both as thinking and as embodied, with neither attribute being less important or subordinated to the other’.

The involvement of the body in language use has been seen for some time as paralinguistic, as a kind of second track in communication, modulating, modifying, contradicting, or intensifying words spoken (i.e. language) (Birdwhistell 1970; Streeck, Goodwin and LeBaron 2011). de Freitas and Curinga’s (2015: 250) concept of language is seemingly similar with their urging for observers to pay attention to the many material factors that ‘operate outside or alongside language’. However, they also argued that language is an entanglement of human bodies and vocal musculature, intensity—‘the tone, the rhythm, the variation of emphasis, the loudness, the changes of pitch, the mode of attack, discontinuities, repetitions, gaps and elisions, and the never absent play of musicality of utterance that makes human song possible’ (ibid: 3). For them, ‘language’ is an assemblage not only of words, grammars, phonologies, meanings and gestures but also of human and other material bodies, amplitude, and so on.

Language use may be understood as a song, but deaf communication research reminds us that it is also more or less a dance. Linguistic anthropologist Kusters (2017) described how hearing and deaf persons (people with ‘sensorial asymmetries’) use gestures, signs, writing, mouthing, lipreading, and other modalities to communicate with one another. In the cases Kusters and her colleagues examined, language use is seen as a multimodal doing and as a ‘language-creating’ assembling of diverse semiotic resources to meet unique conditions. They showed how gesturing, for example, was created on-the-spot, in the midst of activity, when deaf persons purchased goods from hearing persons. Language-creating was a common necessity in such situations (there were no striations to follow), but the particular ‘work-arounds’ used in these situations may not have been used again, or have been helpful, with other intra-actants.

Language-creating or languaging has been considered by applied linguists García and Wei (2014: 8):

Language is not a simple system of structures that is independent of human actions with others. The term languaging is needed to refer to the simultaneous process of continuous becomings of ourselves and of our language practices, as we interact and make meaning in the world.

Similarly, Pennycook (2010: location 120) observed, ‘The notion of language as a system is challenged in favor of a view of language as doing’… ‘as a material part of social and cultural life’. The verb form, languaging, may be more appropriate for a view in which language users (all of whom are material) are in intra-action with many other materials, all of whom are intra-acting and becoming.

For Deleuze and Guattari (1987/2005: 93), language understood as a system was that which perdures and which is striated:

Utterances do not come from inside an already-constituted subject. Language, already collective, social and impersonal, pre-exists us and my voice comes from elsewhere; ‘the collective assemblage is always like the murmur from which I take my proper name, the constellation of voices, concordant or not, from which I draw my voice.

Their discussion of voice as both individual and collective resonates to some extent with literary critic Bakhtin’s (1981) notion that individuals appropriate words from others as they (and the words) are always in processes of becoming. Kusters’s (2017) research showed specific on-the-spot assembling of diverse semiotic and other material resources to meet unique conditions, but the argument could be made that at least sometimes all speakers and listeners need to create language (or voice) in diverse ways, using resources of all kinds (material and immaterial) in the midst of engaging in activities (also material and immaterial). Language/languaging involves material people (and, as many have reminded us, other species), other material things, places, and media.

Education scholar Mazzei (2017) has specifically considered ‘voice’ from a new materialist perspective, drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s (1986) notion of utterances being most productively seen as ‘collective assemblages of enunciation’. Deleuze and Parnet (2007: 51) later argued: ‘It is always an assemblage which produces utterances… The utterance is the product of an assemblage—which is always collective, which brings into play within us and outside us populations, multiplicities, territories, becomings, affects, events’. Mazzei (2017: 5) noted that such a view necessitated a ‘shift away from the individual as the unit of inquiry to inquiry that presupposes the subject as a relational process’. Socioculturally and poststructurally informed analyses of language and identity in applied linguistics certainly moved us from seeing individuals as having infinite degrees of freedom in their language use, to seeing individuals as situated in social relations of power with others. The new materialist perspective urges us to consider more than human entities in these relations and to see materiality as more than a landscape or stage on which humans perform (MacLure 2013).

Conceptualizing both language and learners as assembled phenomena, rather than as distinct and individual entities, has not characterized much language and literacy education literature to date (with some exceptions already cited). This might not be surprising, given the preoccupation the field has had with discovering universals: teaching practices that do or do not ‘work’, ideal orders in which to teach elements of a language’s grammatical structures, personality traits of successful and unsuccessful learners, the best social relations for language learning, and so on. A new materialist view would hold that discovering universals can only be done by reducing phenomena to static, dead, and determinable things. Seeing languaging as an activity involving vocal musculature or fingers and hands, lungs, air, eyes, faces, bodies, memories stored in identifiable parts of brains,⁶ and semiotic resources of many kinds, will have major implications for pedagogy and research. I now discuss some of that research and then some of my own research, all of which have been enhanced by consideration of new materialist concepts.

New materialist research on pedagogy

While scholars in feminist studies, anthropology, history, geography, sociology, philosophy, and science and technology studies have been drawing on new materialist and posthuman concepts for some time, investigation of how those concepts might contribute to applied linguistics is relatively recent (Bhatt and de Roock 2013; Toohey et al. 2015; Pennycook 2016, 2018; Canagarajah 2017; Toohey 2018). However, Swedish early childhood education scholars have been thinking, researching, and acting with new materialist concepts for some time (Dahlberg and Moss 2005; Dahlberg et al. 2007; Olsson 2009; Lenz Taguchi 2010). Reading Reggio Emilia-influenced early childhood education practices through texts of Deleuze and Guattari, Olsson (2009) observed that classroom phenomena are entanglements of material people, objects, discourses, the environment, and so on, which are becoming together in relation to and with one another. Knowledge is created as teachers and children collaboratively construct problems or questions, and then experiment with changes in entanglements. A central Reggio Emilia practice is pedagogical documentation wherein teacher–researchers document children’s ongoing processes of coming to the problems or questions motivating their activity and learning. Pedagogical documentation is aimed at following the children’s thinking, through their representations of their learning, using any of the ‘100 languages of children’, including drawing, writing, dancing, singing, and so on (Edwards et al. 1998). With what they learn from this documentation, teachers experiment with providing children with various other material and immaterial resources that might encourage the children themselves to keep experimenting, continue learning.

American university professor Kuby and grade school teacher Gutshall Rucker (Kuby and Gutshall Rucker 2016) described their thinking with poststructural and posthuman concepts as they documented and experimented with literacy activities and materials in classrooms of young children. Their attempts to document the children’s learning and then follow the children’s ‘literacy desiring’ were aimed at providing children various assemblages of people, spaces, time, material objects, discourses, and so on. In so doing, they attempted to provide what Deleuze and Guattari (1987/2005) called smooth spaces for the children to experiment with the new, to take lines of flight. At the same time the researcher and teacher recognized their responsibilities to ‘curriculum standards’, the striated discourses of educational agencies that require the transmission of the already-known, the given. Deleuze and Guattari’s observation that smooth and striated spaces are continuously in relational exchange describes a familiar tension to educators: not all education can be about lines of flight but nor can it be only about transmitting the already-known.

Literacy scholars Ehret et al. (2016) examined assemblages of bodies-materials-place in a school in which young people were making digital videos of books they had read. The researchers showed how boundaries between media-based and book-based videomaking ideas were constructed in assemblages that included the spaces in which the students worked, and how these ideas became differently valued with movement (e.g. from a classroom to a playground). They observed that teachers might well pay close attention to how spaces and movement intra-acted with students’ learning. More recently Ehret (2018: 57) urged attention to pedagogies of affect that recognize the always ‘becoming-ness’ of students and as he put it, ‘Affective pedagogies require attuning to the singularity of movements where bodies, in relation to each other, affect a feeling that their shared experience is something more than what it is… [As a teacher of a hospitalized child, he was] attentive to what assemblages had energizing impacts on our bodies and moved us to continue making, doing and learning’.

Those scholars cited above have put new materialist concepts to work in considering pedagogy and learning. Common among them are conceptions of learning that entail phenomena of becomings, as people (teachers and students), objects, discourses, spaces, time, the environment, and so on intra-act and collaboratively produce problems or questions. As Kuby and Gutshall Rucker showed, they usefully experimented with providing resources that they hoped would encourage students (and themselves) to keep experimenting, follow ideas, and continue learning. And new materialist pedagogy/research is attentive to affect and, as Ehret (2018: 57) put it, ‘to what assemblages had energizing impacts on our bodies and moved us to continue making, doing and learning’.

The stories told by these researchers are not centrally concerned with language learning per se (although Ehret’s and Kuby’s and Gutshall Rucker’s work focused on literacy learning), and there is not much work concerned with children’s additional language learning from a new materialist perspective. In the next section, I describe research stories I have told and show how in the first case, a new materialist approach to what I observed might characterize these events more or less differently from the sociocultural theory perspective from which I then worked. These stories also might suggest varying pedagogical implications.

Becoming in kindergarten

In a project published almost 20 years ago, I described my observations in an ethnography of a group of initially six and finally four learners of English as an additional language over the 3 years from the beginning of their kindergarten year to the end of Grade 2, with descriptions and transcripts (Toohey 2000^,, 2018). Because the research ethics protocol at that time was to destroy data from studies 5 years after their completion, my published descriptions and transcriptions are what remain, along with my memories of events in those classrooms. The theoretical frame I used to conduct my research was sociocultural theory, and I have been interested in exploring what if any new insights might be produced by examining the same data with some new materialist concepts.⁷

This class was composed of 20 children in total with 7 identified as English as second language learners. While I observed the children playing with and/or using classroom materials and their behavior as enabled or constrained by architecture, furniture, or the like, the sociocultural educational theory on which I based my work saw materials mediating (as we have already seen) human learning and behavior, the main areas of interest. Although ethnographers have always paid attention to what was often called in anthropology ‘material culture’, the sociocultural educational literature I read in the late 1990s focused less on materials as on what human beings were doing and saying (sometimes with materials). My sociocultural theory-influenced analyses focused on language and interactions among children and their teachers, and on how classroom practices had effects on individual children’s identities. From this perspective, I saw children as attached to their school identities, and I speculated about how teachers might change classroom practices to influence those identities and social relations among the children.

As I now review my descriptions and transcriptions through concepts from new materialism, I see, of course, that an identity-focused analysis is not the only way to describe events, or to suggest effective pedagogical practice. Evident to me now are the entanglements of children-teachers-researcher-things-place-rhythmic chanting-recording apparatuses-weather- and more. My attention is drawn to how important, among other things, classroom objects were in the children’s communications with one another. I note, for example, how children who did not speak English at all at the beginning of kindergarten nevertheless participated in thing-centered play. A Cantonese-speaking girl, Amy⁸, for example, initially silent in kindergarten, was a frequent participant in imaginative play with other children in assuming the baby role in the Housekeeping Center, wearing the baby bonnet from the Dress-Up box, and pretend crying. With the assemblage of Amy’s small stature, her frequent smiles and her acceptance of the baby role (and the associated ‘petting’ of her by other children), she was able to participate, long before she began to speak English words. The Housekeeping Center was a space that elicited a great deal of language from the other children, and their play was not scripted or predetermined. The Center could be conceptualized as a smooth space that could, in Ingold’s (2018: 4) words, result in ‘commoning’: making an ‘imaginative effort to cast my experience in ways that can join with yours, so we can—in a sense—travel the same paths and in so doing, mak[e] meaning together’. Had I been experienced in pedagogical documentation, I might have attended more carefully to what was becoming in these intra-actions and to have talked with the teacher about my observations and about what we might have provided so that the children’s learning, their desiring, and the problems/questions they were interested in might have been extended.⁹

A Punjabi-speaking boy, Randy, was also initially silent with the teacher and his peers, and he usually played with blocks or puzzles by himself, to the point that in November his kindergarten teacher wanted to refer him to the school district psychologist. However, before the referral process was completed, Randy began to participate in plastic dinosaur model play with other children (usually English-speaking boys), play which initially involved crashing the models into one another and making ‘bashing’ noises and its volume sometimes elicited the teacher’s reprimand. The boys’ noises and crashing movements were accompanied by what looked to me like glee, and they sought out each other often for a time to continue this play. Not only did the coordinated movements of the boys’ bodies to crashing the dinosaurs and the crashing noises permit Randy to be present and a participant in play but within this assemblage as well was the time explicitly dedicated to play (and the directive in then-current kindergarten curriculum documents to provide time for play). Again, the dinosaurs provided a smooth space for the boys to participate together in communicative intra-actions that became over time, more verbal. As well, careful attention to what the boys seemed to be interested in in this play might have suggested the introduction of new resources to extend their play, follow their interests, and encourage them to keep learning.

Events in smooth spaces were of course not the only intra-actions that occurred in the kindergarten. At ‘Circle Time’ every day the teacher led the children in songs and rhythmic counting of the number of days of school along a number line, and chanting the days of the week and months of the year. I observed the English language learners participating very minimally in these choral activities at the beginning of the year, but over time their verbal participation in these repeated rituals became more and more active in the ‘choir’ of the teacher and children. I believe the volume of these songs and chants became louder and louder over the year, and I sensed children’s pleasure in ‘belting out’ these songs and chants. These striated speech acts (in that they were pre-given, habitual and allowed of no or little improvisation) provided spaces for the children to produce and enjoy rhythm and melody, and as Lenz Taguchi (2010) pointed out, they provided familiar, safe, and ordered spaces for children. And they clearly offered the second language learners’ safe space for learning languaging.

The dinosaur models and the Housekeeping Center (and the bonnet) made Amy’s and Randy’s non-verbal vocalizations meaningful and appropriate. The children could self-select (within the constraints of the materially consequential micro-politics of the classroom) their companions and their play materials and participate to whatever extent they chose to or were allowed in the ongoing life of the classroom. The intensity and volume of the singing and chanting engaged in initially by the teacher and English-speaking children permitted the English language learners to participate minimally until they were able to participate more ably. We might understand what the children were doing as something like what Ingold (2013: 389) called corresponding—‘coupl[ing] the forward movement of one’s own perception and action with the movements of others in the course of direct, practical and sensuous engagements with our surroundings’. It seems to me that the focal language learners were coupling their perceptions and actions with the movements of others and coming to ‘voice’ in their classroom in so doing. This was, as Mazzei argued, a ‘collective’ voice, accomplished by the classroom participants together.

In these examples we see that children’s bodies, other material objects in the classroom, vocalizations, the kindergarten curriculum, and other entities came together sometimes to allow these students to be present in intra-actions with others more experienced in English languaging. What pedagogical implications can be gleaned from these analyses? First, we might reflect on how these engaging intra-actions allowed the second language learners to participate (‘perform’) before they were ‘competent’. Together with those more experienced in English languaging, in the kindergarten they were often able to ‘common’¹⁰: using the linguistic and other resources they had, they could join with the other children and the classroom materials (and, and, and…) and in so doing, make meaning jointly. Second, if the myriad entangled entities involved in these intra-actions (time, curriculum documents, play materials, songs, rhythm, children’s bodies, the teacher’s and the researcher’s bodies, classroom architecture, my video recorder, and so on) had been different, or assembled differently, different phenomena would have occurred. Recognition of these potential differences might convince language educators and researchers to abandon efforts to articulate or implement ‘best practices’, or concrete pedagogical suggestions, as the singularity of phenomena would preclude such. In any case, like the concepts of sociocultural theory, new materialist concepts have the potential to ‘educate the attention’ of educators and researchers. Ingold (2013) used Gibson’s (1979) phrase to draw attention to how concepts as well as other people and the environment teach novices how to notice, what to pay attention to, as they become more expert participants in the world. New materialism may direct our attention to aspects of pedagogical phenomena that we have not otherwise noticed and might lead educators and researchers to new insights, new practices, and further experimentation.

Research in Grade 4 videomaking

In another more recent project, my research associates and I observed older English language learners (9 and 10-years old) making videos in groups with iPads (Toohey et al. 2015). We used traditional ethnographic research apparatuses of video and audio recordings, field notes, and observations, and our research report draws on transcripts and descriptions. In one group Kiki, a Japanese speaker, was more often than not seemingly alienated from the group. Despite teachers’ and several researchers’ gentle encouragements to ‘let everyone have a turn’, the two boys in the group dominated the driving of the iPad, and Kiki rarely got her hands on it. The desks the children usually worked on had fixed chairs, making it difficult for the children to be in close proximity with one another, and it was especially difficult for all children to have equal access to the iPad. The boys sometimes shared a desk seat, albeit awkwardly, but this bodily collaboration (and four hands) made their possession of the iPad secure. We observed that Kiki often disengaged physically and verbally from the videomaking. However, on the last day of videomaking while they were completing their videos, the children worked at the corner of a table and were huddled closely with one another. Kiki was close enough to the iPad at one point to extend her finger and click on the ‘themes’ template in iMovie, which the iPad played. This music was recognizably that of ‘breaking news’ and both Kiki, the other girl and one of the boys seemed excited and amused by this. They chanted the rhythm of the music after it had stopped playing and snapped their fingers, smiling widely. This seemed to me a dramatic example of affect and desire, and after the music had played, Kiki and her female classmate worked on revising the script and the storyboard—two print literacy tasks in which they had not shown much interest earlier and urged the boys to add a newsy introduction to their video and to frame their video as a breaking news story. The boys agreed after hearing how Kiki’s new voice-over introduction to the video did not cause timing difficulties in the video they had already edited. Recruiting news story music changed the languaging the children recorded.

Educational research is often closely tied to pedagogical prescriptions or suggestions. A critical poststructural/sociocultural analysis of these classroom events might have characterized the boys’ dominance of the iPad as a pedagogical problem the teacher needed to pay attention to. Analysis might also have focused on the children’s behavior, their identities, and the politics of the classroom such that Kiki and the other girl were denied access to the means of production. Such an analysis would also perhaps have focused on Kiki, with respect to the language she produced, her agency, her ‘investment’ in the activity (Norton 2014), and on the collaboration of her female groupmate. In concentrating on the human agency and language interactions involved in this event, such an analysis might have led to the conclusion that if the teacher wished the girls to have increased autonomy in this classroom, and in classrooms in general, they should focus on relations among individuals and groups of children, especially girls, and on boys’ domination.

On the other hand, our analysis that put new materialist concepts to work on these phenomena offered the critique that poststructural concepts of the individual identities of persons, constructed in discourse, see the material world as ‘merely the inert scenery against which the humanist adventures of culture are played out’ (MacLure 2013: 659). We did not deny the usefulness of this human-centered analysis but claimed there were more ways for researchers to think about how material relations in classrooms are assembled: how the furniture in the classroom, the architecture of the iPad and iMovie, gender relations among the children, the ‘breaking news’ music, and so on were entities in an assemblage that together made participation in the activity (im)possible. Olsson’s (2009) discussion of the joy that accompanies ‘joining with other forces and together you are capable of doing more’ seemed a good description of what we observed in these events: how the iPad, the iMovie musical template, the arrangement of the furniture, the children’s bodies, the script, the storyboard, the desiring of Kiki and her classmate, and many more entities were forces that joined together (intra-acted), and something different occurred. And of course, no one of these entities was responsible on its own for the something different, but this analysis might then have elicited different pedagogical experimentation.

Because the two teachers in this project were inexperienced with iPad videomaking, the research group (professors and graduate research assistants) provided instruction and was involved in conversations with the children to an extent perhaps seldom seen in ethnographic projects. According to Barad (2007: 49), ‘knowing does not come from standing at a distance and representing but rather from a direct material engagement with the world’. Eschewing the notion that ethnographers should participate as little as possible in the contexts in which they observed, Ingold (2013: 5) also thought knowing was ‘inhering in skills of perception and capacities of judgment that develop in the course of direct, practical and sensuous engagements with our surroundings’. Seeing participation and observation as equally important practices, he saw learning as ‘joining in correspondence with those with whom we learn’ with ‘interventions, questions and responses of our own’ (Ingold 2014: 387).

Responding with interventions and questions to that which and those whom we observe and write about is a stance that is not unknown in applied linguistics, but it is a position that is different from claims to represent reality in our ethnographies of language learning and teaching. Like Ingold, Barad (2007: 827) believed that we have a ‘responsibility to intervene in the world’s becoming’, and it may be that in new materialist research we will need to experiment with intervention and try to understand our research sites in new and expanding ways.

New materialist language education research practices might also aim at producing documentations (and perhaps, multimodal documentations as in the Reggio Emilia pre-schools) of events in particular sites with a view to regard them not as faithful reports of what really went on, but as assemblages, as educator Margaret MacDonald put it, ‘of our knowing (holding power in the moment of coming together) and in the moments of being shared out at a conference or holding meaning for others as it is interpreted in a journal… Representation may may be seen as a useful part of the continual (ongoing) learning journey or a way to reach a higher level of understanding’ (in Smythe et al. 2017: 84–85).

Conclusion

I began this discussion with Chepximiya Siyam’s description of ceremonial Salish blankets as merged objects. The concept of ‘merging’ seems productive as we consider language learners, learning, use, and pedagogy as assemblages. If languaging is a relational process that merges the material and the immaterial and occurs in the merged body-minds of learners, who are entangled in many other relationships with things and other humans at the same time, our pedagogies and research practices will need to acknowledge these complexities and be alert to the lines of flight learners are taking and the languaging they are desiring. Observing and listening to materials and recognizing our own merged body-mind involvement in pedagogical events and desiring will not give us certainty about what is going on, but ‘instead [may give us the possibility] to wonder, to enquire with grace into some temporary states of mind and feeling’ (Wien et al. 2011: np).

Philosopher Whitehead (1925/1997: 52) pointed out the ‘fallacy of misplaced concreteness’ that has led educators to objectify processes like languaging, learning, learners, literacy, knowing, pedagogy, and so on. Concreteness implies separable identity as well. This objectification and lack of attention to entanglements has led to increasingly positivist and method-driven educational research such that we think we can measure such ‘things’ as literacy, learning, and knowing. It is difficult to think of these as material entangled processes, as we are so accustomed to our usual ways of thinking and speaking about them. However, as we have seen, new materialist implications for applied linguistics pedagogy and research encourage us to ask new and different questions of the educational worlds we try to understand. If applied linguistics has experienced stasis as Pennycook claimed in 2016, new materialism might offer concepts that encourage us to ask new questions, and be alert to innovate, experiment, and learn new ways of teaching, researching, and being. For space reasons, I have only touched on some of the rich concepts new materialism provides and have not written much here about the ethical implications of a new materialist stance, except to point out the myriad social, environmental, and other problems we and our students face. However, I think this perspective requires us to aim in our pedagogy and research to do something (something new) about these problems. As Barad (2007: x) put it:

[Justice] entails acknowledgement, recognition [and]…the ongoing practice of being open and alive to each meeting, each intra-action, so that we might use our ability to respond, our responsibility, to help awaken, breathe life into ever new possibilities for living justly.

Footnotes

References