"Peeling an onion”: Layering as a methodology to understand learning as an embodied assemblage of practices

This paper considers science learning as an embodied assemblages of practices and seeks to propose a methodology to systematically analyze the multiple layers that shape how students’ do and learn science. Science learning as an embodied assemblage of practices sensitizes us towards the dimensions of learning that are grounded in the body. These assemblages can be found by e.g. considering how laboratory science equipment physically configure lessons and in doing so, become part of epistemic configurations, or how bodies and movement not only pertain to different modes of communication, but also in relation to identity and well-being afford different kinds of experiences of learning situations to students.

To encompass the multilayered nature of embodied assemblages of practices I propose to look at interactions as essentially an onion, where each layers provides a particular theoretical insight. This is done by looking at video-captured interactions from a Year 8 physics classroom though different theoretical lenses, yet using the previous lens as a point of departure for the next lens. With an embodied focus inherent to this particular study, the analysis was build up around moving bodies, which meant first looking at interaction without sound, then adding sound, and from there move onto to look at the environment and how the students made sense of the environment by aid of interviews.

By looking at one layer at the time, and progressively build up the onion layer by layer, I found that I was able to not only draw together different and distinct research areas, but also capture nuances of the interaction that would otherwise have been lost. An example of this can be seen in how movement analysis creates a backdrop against which to understand the meaning that is afforded through more traditional interaction analysis (talk and still frames)