Brandon Sherman

In the field of education, some theories become a quotidian feature of the disciplinary landscape, embedded in teacher learning, licensure, professional learning, assessment, design, and practice. Such theories can become authoritative, iconic, set on a pedestal. Pedestals can be smashed. This paper introduces and illustrates a destructive/creative process of engaging with authoritative (or iconic) theory to open possibilities of thinking differently with them: Diffractive iconoclastic bricolage. This process entails encounter of a theory, identifying a specific critique of the theory to dismantle it (iconoclasm), reading it through another theory (diffraction), and assembling a new theory/illustration based on the result (bricolage). Bloom’s Taxonomy, as both a theory and an illustration of a theory, is presented as an example of an iconic theory. Arguably, the linear hierarchical pyramid of the six categories of the cognitive domain has an influence that has grown well beyond its initial intended design. In this example, the history and background of Bloom’s Taxonomy is described (encounter), the linear, cumulative, and hierarchical organization of the Taxonomy is critiqued and diffracted through complexity theory, and a new figure, Bloom’s Complexity, is produced. This new figure emphasizes potential of thinking of Bloom’s cognitive categories as dynamic, nonlinear, and nested in complex ecologies of learning. Diffractive iconoclastic bricolage is offered as an approach for scholars to find new possibilities in established theories in education.

Research on computer assisted language learning (CALL) and educational information/communication technology (ICT) often asks what a given technology is, what it can do, and what is it for. Answers to these questions, often following technological determinist or instrumental models of technology, center human agency in determining the function a technology has in the language classroom. Less commonly, CALL research focuses on how these questions are answered, on a daily basis, by teachers in classrooms, and how technologies themselves might influence classrooms in surprising, emergent ways. New materialist theory provides a different way of understanding the world, one that decenters human agency. This perspective allows for a different view of how ICT can impact language education. I revisit a study of language teacher understanding and implementation of ICT and re-vision it through a Deleuzoguattarian rhizomatic lens. This way of thinking provides insight into how these technologies operate within classroom assemblages to produce language instruction. I juxtapose an anthropocentric composite vignette with one seen through a rhizomatic lens, highlighting the transition from a traditional theoretical perspective to a radically different one. This theoretical perspective has implications for research and practice in the wider fields of CALL, and merits further exploration and experimentation.

As products of the Anthropocene, the epoch of human ecological impact, models of environmental and social sustainability have been rooted in humanism, centering human agency and taking humanity as the prime reference point in understanding the world. Discourses around sustainability pose questions of how we are trying to sustain our world and our central place in it. With these questions in mind, we examine the role of science education for sustainability and as a tool for enacting societal change and interacting with the world responsibly. Science education is particularly concerned with helping learners cultivate tools and develop scientific literacy for understanding and interacting with the world. This is key to the ability of current and future generations to meet the challenge of building and maintaining a sustainable world. Yet, these tools are rooted in anthropocentric and Western ways of understanding our relationships with and in the world, which maintains myths such as the neutrality of digital technology or linear forms of progress. We turn to posthuman perspectives to consider an alternative onto-epistemological stance that decenters human agency and foregrounds the co-constitutive and intra-active nature of the world. We argue that scientific literacy and science education for sustainability can act as channels for our species to move beyond ecological sustainability to an understanding of humanity’s entanglement with the world. Life in all its forms, from micro to macro is about relationships with cultural and natural ecologies. Any changes in these relationships can lead to the sustaining, altering, or threatening of these ecologies. In light of this recognition, we explore the implications of posthumanist thought for science education and literacy as learners seek a more sustainable world and a more harmonious place for humanity within it.

Teacher action and change is a complex and nuanced phenomenon that has been theorized across diverse literature in terms of identity, agency, and power. Drawing on this literature, this article offers specific articulations of teacher identity as interpretive framework, power as legitimate action, and agency as moral coherence. We posit a model of teacher agency understood in the interplay of individual beliefs, values, and ideals with institutional roles, authority, and institutional action, producing (or not producing) authentic action. This model draws a distinction between agency and power, and highlights dynamics of equilibrium and discord that may emerge between who teachers are and what they do. The agentive triad model serves as a theoretical tool for guiding or supporting teacher growth and agentive action, and for understanding the dynamics between institutionally legitimized roles and teacher identities.