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ERIC Number: EJ1315303
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2021-Sep
Pages: 16
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-1871-1502
EISSN: N/A
Gardener-Becoming-Tree, Tree-Becoming-Gardener: "Growing-Together" as a Metaphor for Thinking about Learning and Development
Roth, Wolff-Michael
Cultural Studies of Science Education, v16 n3 p915-930 Sep 2021
The core epistemologies underlying science education have changed little over the past 40 years: whereas science educators tend to take constructivist stances, many or most teachers tend to be concerned with the appropriation and transfer of facts and theories mandated as outcomes in the curriculum guidelines of the relevant authorities (e.g., school boards, provinces, or nations). All of the going epistemologies, in and despite their diversities, have in common that they oppose the learner (subject, with identity) and the thing learned (object) and these are linked by the doings of the former (agency). The underlying master ontology is a Platonic one, in which entitative, self-identical things act upon other entities that are external to them. But is this the best way of thinking about how we know and learn? A radical (because incommensurable) alternative is a relational ontology of an organic type. Such an ontology has "flux" and "becoming" (as opposed to being) as its basic figures of thought, a way of thinking initially proposed by Heraclitus and later advocated by philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche, William James, Henri Bergson, Alfred North Whitehead, and (more recently) Gilles Deleuze. As a result, our educative and investigative concerns no longer are entitative things (students, teachers, identities, curricula, activities, conceptions) but interrelated lines of becoming. This is a view in which stable things are but abstractions from a world-as-event that is forever becoming. In this study, using material aspects of gardening, I articulate and explain a different way of theorizing and understanding the world. I use "growing" (vegetables, trees) as a metaphor because of its capacity to express the proposed organic ontology. In this case, the lines of becoming (or lines of flight) include gardener-becoming-tree and tree-becoming-gardener: the gardener grows as he grows plants. The metaphor of growing in the modality of growing-together troubles present discourses in the field of science education, which fail to acknowledge that flux of life comes with intransitive qualities and the quality of becoming is affected by all the other events that are cogredient with human lives.
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Evaluative
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A