“How do we pack the world into words?” Examining the collective of humans and non-humans in the science classroom

Abstract

This paper uses Bruno Latour's framework of a “collective of humans and non-humans” to consider how to construe the non-human objects of learning and their role in classroom knowledge construction. This is done by considering materials and reports from a form of a “construction site” for science: the implementation of laboratory science in a high school chemistry classroom. The paper considers how the collective operates in three domains central to the learning sciences: learning environments, discourse, and identity. Implications for the relation of this to other ways of considering artifacts and inscriptions, including material feminisms, and for the for the role of phenomena in learning are also discussed.