New Materialist Explorations into Language Education

ISBN-13: 9783031138461 / Angielski / Twarda / 2022 / 190 str.

Johanna Ennser-Kananen; Taina Saarinen

Opis

This open access book analyzes language education through a socio-material framework. The authors revisit their position as researchers by decentering themselves and humans in general from the main focus of research activities and giving way to the materialities that are agentive but often overlooked parts of our research contexts and processes. Through this critical posthumanist realism, they are able to engage in research that sees society as an ethical interrelationship between humans and the material world and explore the socio-materialities of language education from the perspectives of material agency, spatial and embodied materiality, and human and non-human assemblages. Each chapter explores language educational contexts through a unique lens of (socio)materiality. Based on how the authors conceptualize (socio)materiality, the book is organized in three sections that seek answers to the following overarching questions:

• In what ways do material agencies emerge in language educational contexts?
• How are educational choices and experiences intertwined with materialities of spaces and bodies?
• What assemblages of human and non-human may occur in language education contexts?

Each chapter questions, in its own way, the notion of the human subject as rational, enlightened being and sole possessor of agency, and offers examples of allowing for other-than-human agency to enter the picture. Together, the contributors exemplify how researchers who have been committed to social constructionist thinking for most of their careers learn to make space for new theories, thus inspiring and encouraging readers to remain open for new intellectual and embodied endeavors.

Spis treści

Introduction

Chapter 1. Towards Socio-Material Research Approaches in Language Education (Johanna Ennser-Kananen and Taina Saarinen)

Part I. Material Agency

Chapter 2. Telepresent Agency: Remote Participation in Hybrid Language Classrooms via a Telepresence Robot (Teppo Jakonen and Heidi Jauni)

Chapter 3. Changes in Language Assessment Through the Lens of New Materialism (Ari Huhta and Nettie Boivin)

Chapter 4. “I Have Karelia in my Soul” – Intra-Action of Students, Seniors and Artefacts in a Community-Engaged Service-Learning Collaboration (Anu Muhonen and Heidi Vaarala)

Part II. Spatial and Embodied Materiality

Chapter 5. The Personal Repertoire and its Materiality: Resources, Means and Modalities of Languaging (Hannele Dufva)

Chapter 6. Material Change: The Case of Co-Located Schools (Petteri Laihonen and Tamás Péter Szabó)

Chapter 7. The Socio-Material Value of Language Choices in Mozambique and Finland (Feliciano Chimbutane, Johanna Ennser-Kananen, and Sonja Kosunen)

Part III. Assemblages of Human and Non-human

Chapter 8. Rhizoanalysis of Sociomaterial Entanglements in Teacher Interviews (Tarja Nikula, Anne Pitkänen-Huhta, Sari Sulkunen and Johanna Saario)

Chapter 9. The Ideal Learner as Envisioned by Can Do Statements and Grammar Revisions: How Textbook Agency is Constructed (Taina Saarinen and Ari Huhta)

Epilogue

Chapter 10. A Diffractive Reading (Mel Engman, Johanna Ennser-Kananen, and Taina Saarinen)

Index

O autorze

Johanna Ennser-Kananen is Associate Professor of English and Academy of Finland Research Fellow at the University of Jyväskylä in Finland. Her work focuses on linguistically, culturally, and epistemically just education and teacher education, particularly as it pertains to the deconstruction of normative whiteness, the experience of students with refugee backgrounds, and the professional legitimacy of teachers from underrepresented groups. She is interested in New Materialism and Posthumanism, especially in so far as they intersect with critical, anticolonial and sociocultural theories. 

Taina Saarinen is Research Professor of Higher Education at the Finnish Institute of Educational research, University of Jyväskylä, Finland. Recently, she has focused especially on language policies and new nationalism in higher education, with a cross cutting interest on historical and political layeredness of language policies.