Session Information
27 SES 05 C, Crafts and Vocational Teaching and Learning
Paper Session
Contribution
One important part in Swedish school subject sloydis to develop students’ ability to evolve ideas, consider different solutions and judging result by letting them engage in craft processes (Lgr11). Hence, in sloyd lessons, the students are faced with the challenge of accomplishing very practical and individual tasks. In so doing, students progress as participants of a specific sloyd education. From an educational perspective, developing the necessary habits to engage in the craft processes should result in self-independent students.
Sloyd teachers are reporting on the “what should I do now”-question as the students most frequent question during sloyd lessons. This is conceivable for vary of reasons. First, to be able to design and craft even the simplest of products students must rely on some very basic body techniques (Mauss, 1973). Carving, hammering, sawing etcetera is embodied knowing achieved and inhabited through hard and prolonged work consisting of encounters with material and tools, persons and purposes. Students are often lacking these essential techniques. Second, as the students are involved in different tasks, which uniquely transforms through the progressing work, there are no premade instructions of how to proceed. Even if a student knows about different techniques, she might not be convinced about when, or exactly how, to use them. Craft (as life in general) always contain an element of what might be called right-here-right-now - in situ – judgments and performance. Third, using the wrong tools or using the tools wrong, might result in breaking the product and loose hours of work. Or in worst case actually loose the product. Therefore, the question “What should I do now” are from a student perspective more preferable than “what should I have done”. In our analysis we approach this educational situation by following a sloyd teacher’s movements in the classroom through the lens of an action camera (mounted on the teacher). I.e. the sloyd lesson is viewed as and through a teacher’s orchestration of a batch of individual sloyd assignments.
Our theoretical approach is grounded in ‘body pedagogics’ (Shilling & Mellor 2007:533) and its overall aim to develop a general framework for analyzing the environments of embodied action (Shilling 2008). From ‘body pedagogics’ follows a concept of embodiment that suggest “the body is foregrounded as the subject and object of purposeful activity” (Shilling 2012:225). Embodiment is here connected to the concept of experience developed in Dewey’s transactional realism (Shilling and Mellor, 2010, see also shilling 2012:241-258). This is a theoretical stance not only grounded in the notions of an embodied mind (e.g. Lakoff & Núñez 2000; Gendlin 1997; Johnson, 2007; Clark 1998) but in the notion of the immediacy of experience. Dewey (1958) state that “fear, hope, rave, love and several other immediate experiences that defies definition point to the fact that we experiences thing in a way where they have a “brute and unconditioned ‘isness.’ Of being just what they irreducibly are” (86). If Dewey is serious about that certain immediate experiences defies definition then teachers and students are inevitably left with the challenge to create shared experience of the ‘isness’ of what is right-here-right-now. Therefore, we analyze how the sloyd teacher teach students to attend to the rhythm of doing and undergoing the immediacy of experience as they work on their encounters with material and social environment.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Clark, Andy (1998). Being there: putting brain, body and world together again. Cambridge: MIT Press, Cop. Dewey, John (1958). Experience and nature. New York: Dover Publication. Emirbayer, Mustafa & Maynard, Douglas W (2011). Pragmatism and Ethnomethodology. Qualitative Sociology, 34, 221-26. DOI 10.1007/s11133-010-9183-8 Garfinkel, H. (1967). Studies in ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. Gendlin, Eugene (1997). Experiencing and the creation of meaning – A philosophical and psychological approach to the subjective. Northwestern University Press. Goldman, R. (red.) (2007). Video research in the learning sciences. Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Heath, C., Hindmarsh, J. & Luff, P. (2010). Video in qualitative research: analysing social interaction in everyday life. Los Angeles: SAGE. Johnson, Mark (2007). The meaning of the body: aesthetics of human understanding. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lakoff, G. & Núñez, R. (2000). Where mathematics comes from: how the embodied mind brings mathematics into being. New York: Basic Books. Lgr11, (2011). Curriculum for the compulsory school, preschool class and the recreation centre. Stockholm: National Agency for Education (SKOLFS 2010:37) Mauss, Marcel (1973). Techniques of the body. Economy and Society, 2(1), s. 70-88. Mehan, H. (1979). Learning lessons: social organization in the classroom. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard U.P.. Shilling, Chris, Mellor, P.A., 2007. Cultures of embodied experience: technology, religion and body pedagogics. The Sociological Review, 55(3), s. 531–549. Shilling, Chris (2008). Changing bodies: habit, crisis and creativity. London: Sage.Shilling 2012:225 Shilling, Chris & Mellor, Philip A. (2010). Cultures of embodied experience: technology, religion and body pedagogics. The Sociological Review, 55(3), s. 531-549. Shilling, Chris (2012). Body and Social Theory. London: SAGE
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