The teaching apparatus: A material-discursive entanglement of tasks and friendship in the upper-secondary classroom

Abstract

This paper investigates the material complexity and relational emergence of ‘teaching’. Reporting on a video-based ethnographic study of an upper secondary classroom in Norway, the paper centres on the following research questions: Which material-discursive practices ‘matter’ in upper secondary teaching situations, and how are participants’ bodies shaping and being shaped by these practices? The paper combines sociomaterial practice theory with the agential realist concepts of material-discursivity and apparatus to trace the spatial and bodily enactment of a teaching situation. In the first part of the paper, I identify two material-discursive practices: the practice of tasks and the practice of friendship. Second, I examine the two practices’ material intertwinement, proposing that they entangle and coarticulate a larger material arrangement termed the teaching apparatus that regulates the possibilities and limitations for ‘doing’ in the classroom. The paper offers a perspective on teaching that increases our awareness of its interconnectedness and unpredictability, allowing for a more fine-grained understanding of the embodied liveliness and material complexity of everyday teaching encounters. Finally, I propose that thinking with a spatially, bodily and relationally produced teaching apparatus offers an affirmative and agential approach to discussing educational quality.