Coffee, Crisps, CAD: Sociomaterial entanglement in the Architecture studio

Over the last year I have taken thousands of photographs whilst observing students and tutors from Edinburgh University's Architecture programme. At the beginning of this exercise I was mostly interested in recording what took place directly around assessment: preparing the portfolio, presenting work in a review exercise, practices around marking and moderation. Over time though I have sought to capture a broader range of phenomena as I have looked towards sociomateriality as the critical lens for my Doctoral research. From initially focusing on the meaning making rituals of students and tutors around assessment, I have instead been looking to the ways that knowledge construction in the Architecture studio is a more complex entanglement of human, technological and other material interests. Or as Fenwick and Landri describe in their work around sociomaterial assemblages in education:

'sociomaterial orientations treat pedagogy as uncertain and heterogeneous assemblages, not as an identifiable or prescribable event, and certainly not as the exclusive concern of the teacher.’ (Fenwick and Landri 2012, p5)

If I was initially guilty of viewing assessment in an overly simplistic way, as a fairly clear-cut exchange between student and tutor, sociomaterial critiques of education have instead encouraged me to examine the messy reality of what takes in and around the classroom, where 'learning is embedded in action and emerges through practice, processes that produce the objects and characteristics of educational events.’ (Knox and Bayne 2013). In this way assessment can be seen as a performance that depends on the student and tutor, but also looks to the role of curriculum, technology, sound, light, clothing and other visible and invisible actors within an evolving pattern of materiality (Fenwick et al 2011:8).

What this has meant in practice is that, as well as continuing to photograph students and tutors in the Architecture studio, I have pointed my camera down at the floor and upwards to the ceiling. I have crawled under desks and balanced on chairs. I have photographed and recorded the sounds of ventilation shafts, data projectors, corridor conversation. I have attracted troubled glances from students unfamiliar with my research. Without having yet commenced my analysis of the gathered data, a recurring theme to emerge from my photographs and also my written field notes, is the way that food and drink seem to be an integral part of what takes place in the studio. Alongside the more recognisable tools of the architecture student we find snacks: pencils next to a packet of peanuts; chocolate alongside cardboard; Rhino with Red Bull. 

click on image to enlarge

Through the image above I have tried to show how my field notes and photographs resonate with some of the principle ideas around sociomateriality within education, in this case echoing work by Gourlay and Oliver (2014) where they offer a sociomaterial account of digital literacy practices:

'despite the ubiquity of the digital, it is also worth pointing out that these digital practices are always embedded in the material, with hunger, thirst, the desire for natural light, and other embodied needs' (Gourlay and Oliver 2004:5)

For the purpose of further illustration I have included below a small selection images which would seem to reiterate Gourlay and Oliver's call to remain alert to the way that our use of digital resources in education, for instance around assessment, is always and inevitably entangled with a much broader range of resources, influences, limitations and opportunities beyond the interests of the assignment task.

click on images to enlarge

References

• ​Fenwick, T. and Landri, P. (2012) Materialities, textures and pedagogies: socio-material assemblages in education, Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 20:1, 1-7.
• Fenwick, Tara, Richard Edwards, and Peter Sawchuk. 2011. Emerging Approaches to Educational Research: Tracing the Sociomaterial. London: Routledge.
• Gourlay, L. and Oliver, M. (2014) Why it's not all about the learner: a sociomaterial account of digital literacy practices. Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Networked Learning 2014, Edited by: Bayne S, Jones C, de Laat M, Ryberg T & Sinclair C.
• Knox, J & Bayne, S (2014) 'Multimodal Profusion in the Literacies of the Massive Open Online Course' Research in Learning Technology, vol 21., 10.3402/rlt.v21.21422

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See also:
Digital sociomaterial journaling
Camera, recorder, scissors, brush: ethnography in a pop-up exhibition
​Architecture, multimodality and the ethnographic monograph