Pedagogical provenance : Acknowledging the past, the present, and the future through things and thinking

• A new notion: The discussion in this presentation stems from a frustration regarding things, objects, actors, etc. and how perspective, such as ANT, STS, posthumanism or sociomaterialism can be useful when analysing educational process, and an analysis that, if possible, goes beyond the ontological. The frustration also stems from questions on how, if possible, the perspectives can deal with issues of inequality. But also, can issues on global movements, international trends and so called ‘universal truths’ be dealt with within the above-mentioned perspectives? This presentation suggests the notion pedagogical provenance as one way of open up the perspectives. It could also be a way to open up for future analysis in a more digitalised world, with the need to address issues of big data, storage and documentation, and moreover questions of equality and globalization. Hundred years ago, the organ in the classroom manifested and reproduced certain norms, the type writing machine did something for the way teachers worked. Today, the red mat influences preschool and the circle time. Building on Mol, I therefore assume things and objects as something of importance when thinking, teaching, or criticising. Pedagogical provenance: The word provenance is commonly used to express certain objects contextual and cultural circumstances, its history, birthplace and source. It can also deal with the sequences of ownership, custody and chain of custody, chains of storage, but also feelings and emotions that has been attached to the object. All these things aim to say something about the object’s authenticity, quality, its life cycle, value. Crucial in this process is documentation and narratives brought forward. To the word provenance, I add the word pedagogical, meaning that when talking about pedagogical provenance I will set the object’s provenance in relation to education thus acknowledging things and object as links in historical, cultural, emotional and discursive chains that interplays with and becomes outline in school. A STEM example: Let me give you a brief example from STEM: Science activities in classrooms can in many respects be seen as deriving from academic subjects thus translating academic knowledge into the world of schooling. The value brought into the classroom here through the microscope is authenticity, school science portrayed as a prototype of ‘real’, authentic science. The microscope thus belongs to a long contextual and historical chain of doing science with laboratory methods and documentations that encloses features of science, e.g. a white, male, western construct of the world. Like the Antique roadshow this involves feelings. When seeing a microscope, students at the teacher programme at Malmö University expresses feelings of e.g. inaccessibility, curiosity, excitements. Other words expressed are exploring, discover, cleanliness, purity, Einstein. As stated above, the word Pedagogical accentuate the relation to education, in this case this could be, building on Hultén, addressing school science as a separate and unique activity that has its own history and is subject to forces such as social and political influences. This opens up for analysis on who decide what becomes valuable in education, in what cultural and historical context? What is seemed as quality and authenticity? What and who can be part of science? It also opens up possibilities to do analysis on what knowledge to assess and document. And moreover, the storing of document and data, what, by whom and where? Will it be sold? By whom? To whom? Conclusion : When analysing objects in classrooms from a pedagogical provenance point of view, I believe it is possible to, as Isling Poromaa states, show materialities as structuring forces, crucial components that frame practices and produce values. Speaking with Popkewitz, they become inscription devices that translate and order norms, values and discourses not through the televisions show but through local classroom that can be linked to thoughts, actors and discourses far away, both geographically and temporally, which together produce and stabilize powerful figurations. This includes seeing education from a perspective where, as Fenwick and Edward claim ‘[t]hings circulate in a midst of connection, cultural histories and symbolic values, but they themselves also compel activity’. Things have provenance and exert it and, along with their owners, are put in a chronology of ownership and agency.

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