Material-dialogic space as a framework for understanding material and embodied interaction science education

ABSTRACT

Background

This special issue offers a substantial contribution to the field, outlining how materiality and embodiment offer insights into science learning with respect to argumentation, use of diagrams and gestures to understand abstract concepts, the role of materiality in digital learning and the importance of material and embodied interactions in investigations, plurilingual settings and in the positioning and identities of learners of science.

Purpose

This paper responds to the special issue by outlining a distinctive theoretical framework for understanding materiality and embodiment in science education: a conceptualisation of material-dialogic space. Contrasting this framework with the multimodal, social semiotic and narrative ethnographic frames used in the studies in this special issue, this paper argues that by examining materiality as voices within a material-dialogic space, new insights into dialogic learning and ‘becoming’ in science are possible.

Discussion

In this paper, I discuss the papers in this special issue using the conceptualisation of material-dialogic space, grouped according to three areas of interest in science education: methods of analysing materiality, meaning-making in science through ‘doing’ and ‘thinking’ science, and science identities. A means by which material-dialogic space might be examined empirically is proposed, and how this enables an approach to think about thinking and doing science that focuses on the relationality of materials, bodies and language in science meaning-making is explored. The notion of becoming, changing and being changed through participation in a material-dialogic relational space is proposed as an approach to thinking about ‘being’ in science and science identities. The role of material-dialogic space with respect to spaces of science learning is raised as a key question.

Conclusion

This paper highlights the lively open questions in the field of materiality and embodiment in science education, whilst offering the concept of material-dialogic space as an important avenue for studying these questions.

KEYWORDS:

• Material-dialogic
• materiality
• embodiment
• science identity

Introduction

In this paper, I argue that the concept of ‘material-dialogic space’ can be used to reconceptualise the way in which embodiment and material interaction play a role in science education. This argument is made through extension and development of the concept of material-dialogic space within a material-dialogic framework (Hetherington and Wegerif 2018; Hetherington et al. 2018) using analysis and discussion of the research reported in this special issue, with respect to the key themes of research methods, science learning, and science identity. The analysis shows that using material-dialogic space as a conceptual framework foregrounds the importance of the relationality with materiality in science education and that this offers innovative insights for research in science education.

The role of the material in science education is an area of growing interest, with an increasing number of studies in recent years focusing on the role of the body and the material world in science education. These have approached questions with respect to embodiment and materiality in teaching and learning in science through different lenses and theoretical frameworks. The argument has been made that spoken language has been privileged in educational research, which ‘fails to fully account for the complex materiality of life’ (de Freitas and Curinga 2015, 249) and that the role of the material has been ‘too long ignored’ (Milne and Scantlebury 2019). Following the wider new materialist and posthuman ‘turn’ in education (Snaza and Weaver 2014), researchers in science education have begun to explore how new materialist and posthuman theories might be applied to research in science and environmental education (e.g. (Bazzul, Sara, and Shakhnoza 2019; Mannion 2020). Alongside this, multimodality has been an increasing area of study, drawing on the concept of social semiotics and non-linguistic modes to understand the role of bodies and the material in science education (Nielsen and Yeo 2022). This rise in interest has been highlighted in the publication of this Special Issue: International Perspectives on the Intersection of the Material and the Embodied in Science Education. This discussion paper, offered as an invited contribution to the Special Issue, draws on the empirical articles in this issue to reconceptualise material-dialogic space and outline how it might, be helpful to understand science education. I bring the theoretical framework of material-dialogic space (Hetherington et al. 2018) into conversation with the papers from this special issue with respect to three areas: materiality and multimodality with respect to methodology (how we explore science classrooms), teaching and learning (how we ‘do’ and ‘think’ about science in science classrooms), and science identity (how we ‘be’ or ‘become’ scientists in science classrooms). I begin with an outline of the concept of material-dialogic space before discussing each of the three areas described above in turn. I conclude with a summary of what this conceptualisation of material-dialogic space offers the field that is distinctive and outline the contribution it can offer to science education researchers interested in the three areas focused on in the paper, namely research methods, science learning, and science identity.

Defining and describing material-dialogic space

I begin by articulating a framework that explicitly draws the material nature of the world into a dialogic theorisation of teaching and learning. This is distinct from perspectives that view materials as a part of multimodal interaction in a dialectic sense, or alternatively a material-discursive approach. By focusing on what makes the relationship or interaction dialogic, this framework places emphasis on the emergence of new thinking or understanding through dialogue, which is understood as a way of being in the world: an ontology, rather than an epistemology (Wegerif 2008). This is fundamentally a perspective that is rooted in a relational ontology, in which relations are understood as key to the existence of the relata (the entities or objects that are in relation). In other words, the relations between relata are part of their very existence, as they would not be what they are without that relation (Spyrou 2022). Drawing on Rupert Wegerif’s articulation of dialogic theory inspired by Bakhtin (Wegerif 2008, 2011), I argue that in a dialogue, the relations between entities in that dialogue are generative of new thinking, understanding and ways of being, such that the participants in the dialogue are changed by the very fact of their participation. This is important when considering learning through dialogue and dialogic pedagogy, as the participants in the dialogue change others, and are themselves changed by their engagement. This dialogic framework is a dynamic and emergent one, in which dialogue is the driving force for education, if education is understood not only as learning for the purposes of qualification or socialisation but also for subjectification or the ‘coming into being’ of learners who are always becoming their new selves as a result of education (Biesta 2020).

Dialogic space

Wegerif develops the term ‘dialogic space’ as a means of thinking about how learning occurs through dialogic relations (Wegerif 2011). Space is used in this term not to indicate a physical space but to refer to a relational ‘space-time’ or ‘eventing’ or ‘chronotope’ (Bakhtin’s term, cited in Wegerif 2011) and is useful as it enables the idea of the expansion or enlargement of this relational space through dialogue or in other words, the expansion or enlargement of what is possible to think and do as a result of dialogic education to be imagined. Indeed, the phrase ‘enlarging the space of the possible’ has been used in complexity theoretical perspectives to think about emergence in similar ways (Sumara and Davis 1997). A dialogic space through which this emergent, dynamic and relational learning/becoming occurs is created when two or more distinct entities are in a dialogue together. It is crucial that these entities are different from each other since, as Bakhtin (1986) argues, a dialogue cannot occur unless there is a difference in perspective or an ‘other’. However, the entities must be able to ‘see from’ the perspective of the ‘other’ through a process described as a ‘dialogic switch’ (Wegerif 2011). Wegerif’s ideas about dialogic space offer a means of thinking about the nature of dialogue, in which not only are the participants able to switch perspective to that of the other but also to engage in and view the dialogue from the unsituated space of a ‘superaddressee’ (Bakhtin 1986, 126), or to put it another way, from within the relational dialogic space. Dialogic switching like this enables the dialogue to be viewed from both the ‘outside’ and the ‘inside’, invoking not only the here-and-now of the relationship but also drawing on space, time, culture and history as part of the relational construction of the dialogic space. This is a key point in the argument with respect to materiality as, again inspired by Bakhtin, from a sociomaterial perspective the voices in the dialogue are not only those of the human participants but can also be those of other entities such as texts or art works (Maine 2015). I argue that in the dialogue of science, these entities might also include experimental apparatus or, indeed, the natural world (Hetherington and Wegerif 2018).

Materiality and dialogic space

The role of the material in learning in science has been explored using a range of different theoretical perspectives, often drawing on object-led understandings of the relationship between the material, language and meaning. A dialogic approach, with its relational ontology, layers on the work in the special issue to offer a useful way of thinking about learning in science taking place with and through materials as an inherent part of the dialogue within a relational material-dialogic space (Hetherington and Wegerif 2018). Drawing on Barad’s (2007) to think with, a dialogic account of how meaning is produced in science education can be extended, particularly using Barad’s concept of the ‘agential cut’. Agential cuts are material-discursive practices that make (temporary) boundaries between phenomena as part of an intra-action, where both the material phenomena and discursive practices are mutually implicated. Barad (2007) uses the term intra-action to refer to a relation between relata that are created temporarily, as a result of the relation, in a dynamic, emergent fashion. This stands in contrast to an interaction, where the relation is between objects that exist prior to the interaction. Agential cuts enable some possibilities and constrain others, but the agency arises in the intra-action and is not a capacity of pre-existing interacting entities. Materiality is a crucial part of this, for Barad: ‘The point is not merely that there are important material factors to consider in addition to discursive ones; rather, the issue is the conjoined material-discursive nature of constraints, conditions and practices’ (Barad 2003, 823). This emphasis on materiality as always already part of an intra-action through which agential cuts take place is a useful point of connection to my consideration of the materiality of dialogic space: what happens if we see that materials are always already part of the relationality of dialogue?

Although they are distinctive theoretical frameworks, both Barad’s agential realism and dialogic theories rooted in the work of Bakhtin are essentially grounded in a relational ontology which enables connections between them to be made, with Barad offering a guide to help us to think about the nature of the material ‘voices’ within a dialogic space. However, although Barad’s work has been increasingly widely used by education academics, they do not explicitly discuss education within their work. Nor, indeed, do they consider dialogue, instead focusing on the discursive in the sense that discourse, or material-discursivity, is about defining what counts as meaningful in what emerges from a field of possibilities. It is challenging to find, in Barad’s work alone, guidance for understanding the processes of meaning-making in science classrooms: the work offers a useful language to think with, through the use of the terms phenomena, agential cut, agential separability, apparatus and intra-action, for example, all of which foreground materiality. Dialogic theory offers one way of digging into the role of materiality and embodiment in science meaning-making to offer a fuller understanding, going beyond are-description using the language of new materialism to de-centre the human. Previous articulation of this approach (Hetherington et al. 2018), however, did not explore in depth how a material-dialogic framework, and specifically the idea of material-dialogic space, offers insights into the processes of teaching and learning, or the detail of how agential cuts take place, or in other words, how the detail of material intra-actions enable and constrain what is possible, in a specifically dialogic relation. It is these previously under-developed areas of a material-dialogic framework that I explore in this paper.

Material-dialogic space, relationality and agency

Barad’s (2007) idea of the agential cut is focused on considering what happens in an intra-action that enables the temporary becoming of this but not that phenomena (where phenomena is used as a broad phrase to describe ongoing materialisations in the world to avoid using a term that describes something that pre-exists prior to the intra-action). We might consider phenomena to be people who are dynamically changing as a result of an intra-action or ‘things’ or ‘texts’ or ‘artefacts’. The agency arises through the intra-action rather than being a capacity of a pre-existing person, object or entity. Materials alone do not ‘have’ or enact agency in this framing but nor do people: agency always arises in the relation, which is ontologically prior. It is this point that I find useful to extend dialogic theory into specific consideration of the role of the material. In expanding consideration of the relations within dialogic space to include materials, bodies or the environment pushes us to analytically consider how these elements influence learning (as in, the making of meaning through dialogue and the changes made to the participants in the dialogue as a result). Paying attention to the learning taking place in a material-dialogic ‘space of the possible’ includes attending to what is drawn into the relation, what ‘cuts’ are made (this, not that), how these cuts are enacted and new possibilities enabled, and in particular, how we can explore and understand these processes with attention to material relations as well as those between human participants in the dialogue. The focus of analysis is on the relation itself not on the objects/humans. This raises some interesting considerations which I will explore using the papers in this special issue. Firstly, the process by which cuts are enacted through material-dialogic relations remains unclear. Secondly, referring back to Bakhtinian dialogic theory (Bakhtin, 1986; Wegerif 2011), the capacity to make dialogic switches (see or feel from the point of view of the other or indeed from the perspective of the ‘superaddressee’ or the dialogic space) relies on the quality of the relationship. A relationship where there is no ‘common ground’ would not allow for dialogue through a dialogic switch … nor would a relationship where there is no difference. This raises the question of how the quality of relationship with the other-than-human relata in a dialogic space might be understood. These two areas of question are the focus for my discussion of the papers in this special issue across three areas, with the aim of clarifying and extending what a material-dialogic theoretical framework, and the notion of material-dialogic space, can offer to science education research. It should be noted that whilst the discussion that follows draws on threads and themes that loosely connect the manuscripts in the special issue in relation to the concept of material-dialogic space, these are not sharply drawn distinctions and the intention is not to situate the papers in the issue in boundaried categories or to oversimplify the diversity of perspectives on the field offered by the suite of papers in this issue. Rather, the aim of organising this discussion around these threads of interest is to highlight what emerges from the issue with respect to deepening the notion of material-dialogic space and considering what it offers to the broader field as exemplified in this issue.

Exploring material-dialogic space: methodologies for researching material interactions

Exploring the role of the material in learning in science offers some methodological challenges: children and teachers using materials in their learning and teaching can be traced using observation, documentary evidence and video, but without audio recording and children’s verbalisation of their thinking, it can be difficult to ‘see inside the black box’ and identify how the materials are playing into children’s developing thinking and ideas. For this reason, research in this field has tended to draw on video data to explore learning with and through materials and bodies. Following this trend, papers in this special issue that have drawn on empirical work to investigate materiality and embodied interaction in science education largely draw on video, in combination with other approaches: some draw on video and audio analysis of pupil activities and tasks in lessons (Convertini, Arcidiacono, and Miserez-Caperos 2024; Ferguson, Xu, and Tytler 2024; Mortimer and Reis Pereira 2024), others combine video with case studies or ethnographic approaches drawing on a range of video, field observations, interview and documentary data (student and teacher materials) (Otrel-Cass 2024; Rahm 2024; Varelas et al. 2024; Wilmes and Siry 2024). The only paper that did not use video data used an audio-recorded think-aloud protocol with observation and interview (Impedovo and Cederqvist 2024). Although video as a data source is clearly key to exploring material interactions, how the data are analysed is based on different theoretical stances with respect to the core interest of material and embodied interaction in science education. Before considering the analytical approach we might use to explore and understand material-dialogic space, I outline what is afforded by the kinds of analytical approaches and theoretical frameworks already in use in the field and exemplified in the papers in this issue.

Social semiotics and multimodal interaction analysis

Grounded in Halliday’s work (Halliday, Michael Alexander Kirkwood 1978) the theory of social semiotics, which explores how meaning is made using multiple semiotic modes, is one of the ways in which analytical approaches to exploring non-verbal as well as verbal classroom interactions have been framed (Knain, Fredlund, and Furberg 2021; Tang 2016). In social semiotics, culturally shaped signs are used by social communities as tools to make meaning. Verbal language is one semiotic mode, but other non-verbal modes might include gesture or written text. Semiotic modes serve ‘three types of metafunctions: ideational (ideas), interpersonal (on social relationship) and textual (on organisation) (Tang 2024, 4).

The papers in this special issue show the utility of social semiotics for researchers exploring material and embodied interactions in science education across a range of contexts. Pre-determined categorisation of semiotic modes has been used to code video data in order to draw insights into how they are used in learning. For example, Tang (2022) draws on social semiotic multimodal analysis (SSMA) to offer an analytical framework for analysing video data to study how students make meaning in science. Digging into the processes used to make meaning with the ‘material mode’, he identified codes that can be applied to data as units of ideational meaning based on dynamic processes (representing action), relational processes (representing connections and components or representing properties) and existential processes (representing presence). Ferguson, Xu, and Tytler (2024) analysed their detailed data of students’ learning about the motion of the earth, sun and moon using sign types (icon, index and symbol), which enabled them to identify the bodily and material nature of student reasoning in this context alongside the verbal. Convertini, Arcidiacono, and Miserez-Caperos (2024) drew on different ‘semiotic resources’ (speech, gaze direction, gestures and position of physical objects) to explore how students and teachers drew on their bodies and material classroom resources to sustain and develop their scientific argumentation in the classroom. Mortimer and Reis Pereira (2024) used categories of gesture as semiotic modes to identify how recurrent gestures are used in chemistry classrooms to support students in learning abstract content. These examples all illustrate a means by which the way in which students and teachers use bodies and materials as part of regular patterns used in the discourse to represent particular concepts or processes in science, yielding insights into how interactions unfold and learning takes place.

Sharing theoretical assumptions with the social semiotic approaches described above, multimodality is focused on how meaning is constructed through multiple modes such as visual diagrams, symbols, gaze, gestures and handling of material objects, and not just verbal language (Kress and Van Leeuwen 2020). Multimodal interaction analysis (MIA) (Norris 2004) is one framework which has been used to explore material interactions in the science classroom (Tang 2024; Wilmes and Siry 2021). MIA defines a mode as a ‘heuristic unit that can be defined in multiple ways for the purpose of analysis’ (Tang 2024, 3), with the notion of modal intensity used to describe the extent to which a mode is foregrounded in an interaction. A mode can be categorised as embodied or disembodied depending on whether they are anchored to a human body, making their materiality particularly important and thus demonstrating the utility of this approach for the study of material interactions in science education. In MIA, mediated action as the unit of analysis, defined as ‘an action fluidly performed by an individual in interaction’ (Norris 2004, 14). In science education, Wilmes and Siry (2021) argued that in conducting MIA, watching video data without sound as well as with sound is crucial in enabling researchers to identify actions with materials. The value of MIA is further demonstrated in this special issue in analyses which show in-depth and rich descriptions of children’s sense-making, particularly highlighting transformations in the materials used and how this changes children’s conceptualisations (Tang) and the importance of embodied and material participation within open-ended pedagogical spaces for learning in early childhood (Wilmes and Siry 2024). This is particularly important where there are barriers to the children’s use of verbal language (Wilmes and Siry 2024).

Varelas et al. (2024) analyse their video of embodied drama performances, and other mixed methods data using a combination of theoretical frameworks rooted in multimodality and social semiotics alongside social practice theory and positioning theory. As with many other approaches in the field, including the majority of those in this special issue, this study uses theoretically driven analyses, in this case combined using a narrative storyline with focus lessons chosen to illustrate key ideas. Handling the richness and density of the data collected even in a single lesson using video has led many of these researchers to draw on a combination of theoretically driven analysis with the use of illustrative vignettes, lessons or cases to explain the findings to the wider field (see, e.g. Tang 2024; Varelas et al. 2024; Wilmes and Siry 2021, 2024). This is an important combination to note, as one might anticipate the choice of vignettes to be associated with a more grounded approach to coding of data than the more top-down, theoretically driven examination of data and analysis noted here. It is also interesting to compare and contrast this combination of coding and vignettes to the approaches to the exploration of materiality in education more associated with new materialist theoretical perspectives (see below).

The multimodal/social semiotic stance used in many studies exploring material and embodied interactions in science education is distinct from the material-dialogic theoretical framework described in this paper, as it does not have a clear relational ontology at its heart: the focus remains essentially on the human participant rather than on the relation itself. With respect to the development of a methodology to explore and understand learning and becoming in a material-dialogic space, however, the approaches to analysis described here have some interesting ideas to offer: for example, the idea of intensity of the take-up of entities in the relation, drawing on the idea of modal intensity in MIA, is useful to enable the researcher to focus on the level of involvement of the relata and the relationship. The question, raised earlier, about the importance of the quality of relationship in dialogic theory and how this could be included in an analysis of material-dialogic space, could be addressed using this key idea. Similarly, an analysis of what is happening in a material-dialogic space could usefully draw on a combination of coding or analysis that highlights changes to participants (the ‘cuts’ that are made, enabling new becomings as a result of participation in a material-dialogic relation) alongside changes in the relation (shown in the words and language used, gaps in utterances (Maine and Čermáková 2023), joint movements and changes in materials and bodies (Chappell et al. 2023)). As demonstrated in the different insights drawn from combining MIA and SSMA in Tang’s (2024) work, I argue that the process of the making of agential cuts (the first of the questions I raised in the introductory outline of the material-dialogic framework) could be understood by analysing, in parallel, both the changes to entities arising from the agential cuts made in the relation and the changes in the relation itself.

Ethnographic, new materialist and bricolage approaches

Although semiotic and multimodal analyses are common in the field and clearly illustrated in this special issue, other approaches are used by researchers interested in materiality in science education. In this special issue, these are particularly exemplified in the work of Otrel-Cass (2024) and Rahm (2024). These papers employ ethnographic approaches where the researcher/s participate in the study site: in the case of Otrel-Cass (2024), in classrooms using digital approaches to engage in asynchronous learning together with other children across the world as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and for Rahm, as part of a long engagement with a community organisation organising out-of-school science activities. Both ethnographic approaches involved the collection of a range of data types, including video, photographs, artefacts, interviews and field notes. As with Varelas’ approach in this issue, ‘storytelling’ and narrative approaches are used to analyse and synthesise the data. Rahm explicitly discusses this as a bricolage (Kincheloe 2001), which seems to be a helpful term to describe mixed data that is synthesised using a sense of story or narrative to explore change. In some work drawing on open and responsive approaches to data collection and analysis, coding is used (e.g. Rahm) whereas others, like Otrel-Cass, do not appear to ‘code’ the data but draw on it as part of the storytelling without an initial coding phase. However, within these more open approaches, the coding appears to be less structured and theoretically driven than in the social semiotics/multimodal approaches described in this issue, arising from the data itself (though Rahm does use guiding questions driven by new materialist theory to highlight ‘the body, material and affect’ and ‘emergent and displayed relations within activities pursued as a whole class, in teams and in part alone’ (Rahm 2024). In these papers, therefore, the materiality and embodied nature of the interaction is explored through attending to it as part of an open stance to the analysis and resulting from the research questions that guide the analysis. Building on the analytical stances such as those described by Rahm (2024), and elsewhere in the field of education, new materialist theoretical perspectives could potentially be drawn upon in science education with respect to material-dialogic space to‘de-centre the human’ and focus more fully on the material as an agentic actor (Wallace et al. 2022) or a ‘diffractive’ approach to analysis (Chappell et al. 2019). The influence of new materialism in science education continues to develop, as indicated by the inclusion of papers using these theories alongside other perspectives on materialism in science education at, for example, the recent ESERA conference (e.g. Chang and Joonhyeong 2023; Malm and Pia Günter 2023; Peters, White, and Raphael 2023). These approaches enable different kinds of insights into the role of the material in science education, including drawing on indigenous ways of knowing (Kayumova and Jesse 2019), and attending to the nature of the relationships between human and other-than-human in different ways that (in contrast to the social semiotics/multimodal approaches) attempt to avoid privileging the human in the relationship (Bazzul, Sara, and Shakhnoza 2019). Whilst these approaches offer a helpful starting point in researching material-dialogic spaces in science education, particularly given the use of Barad’s (2007) new materialism in the development of the theoretical framework described in this paper, we need to go further to gain insights into the processes of agential cuts in combination with rich and detailed exploration of the dialogic relation. The storytelling approach described by Otrel-Cass and Varelas et al. (2024) is, in both cases, inspired by Bakhtinian dialogue, and offers helpful ways forward in ensuring the temporal element of material-dialogic spaces are attended to. Drawing together inspiration from the range of approaches discussed, exploring science learning from a material-dialogic perspective could involve combining the strengths of approaches such as storytelling with a focus on identifying and understanding, in parallel, changes in both the relata and the relation through in-depth video analysis. Combining approaches to explore different facets of the material-dialogic relational space could then offer additional insights of use to researchers and educators.

Having considered in detail the ways in which material and embodied interaction in science education have been researched in this issue and more broadly, and the insights that might be drawn for research using the concept of material-dialogic space in science education, the next sections of this paper attend to two core areas that this special issue demonstrates are of key interest in the field of science education with respect to materiality: meaning-making and identity.

‘Doing’ and ‘thinking’ in material-dialogic space: science learning through materials

In exploring the role of material and embodied interactions in science education, in this issue and elsewhere there has been a strong focus on the role of materials and bodies in students’ thinking and reasoning (Kersting et al. 2023). Despite this drawing from different perspectives, the focus is essentially on what is happening in the students’ minds, and how the materials they are using ‘to think with’, their bodies and those of their peers and teachers, support, mediate and inform their construction of their ideas. For example, Convertini’s work on student argumentation shows how students ‘orchestrate’ material objects and, following Tang (2022) uses a framing of argumentation as ‘a chain of human-material interactions incorporating the role of physical things to construct evidence’. The agency, and reasoning, in this framing lies with the student. Similarly, Ferguson, Xu, and Tytler (2024) examine bodily and material ‘diagramming’ as a cognitive approach that draws on sensorimotor experiences of the learner to reason in the context of astronomy, and Mortimer and Reis Pereira (2024) draw on an embodied cognitive approach to understand how gestures enable students to embody and bring materiality to abstract chemistry content.

A material-dialogic framework and the idea of material-dialogic space offer a distinctive conceptualisation of the role of the material in learning in science, building and layering on the ideas shared in the papers in this special issue. In this conceptualisation, rather than focusing on analysis of the use of material objects and bodies as a means by which learners construct meaning (through experimentation and investigation with materials, use of diagrams, through gesture or through using objects as part of the construction of an argument), the focus of the analysis is on how materials and bodies are involved in the ‘doing of’ and ‘thinking about’ science in a material-dialogic space, which is to say, an expanding space of possibility arising through a material-dialogic relation.

What this might look like in practice is challenging to discern: Kumpulainen and Anu (2019), drawing on Hetherington and Wegerif (2018) argue that material-dialogic spaces are spaces in which a multiplicity of voices, including the material, co-mediate ‘joint attention, engagement and learning’ (Kumpulainen and Anu 2019, 353). They use the notion of ‘social objects’, a term they use to refer to material objects that are turned into social objects through interactions in which joint attention and social interaction occur about, around and with the objects. This seems to be rather similar to the way in which materials act as modes in reasoning and meaning-making in the studies referred to elsewhere in this paper, although drawing on sociomaterial and dialogic theory foregrounds the shifting, dynamic multiplicity of voices of the material alongside human voices in joint attention, engagement and learning, even suggesting that the voices of the material objects in their study at times undermined the voices of human others. However, this does not appear to fully connect with the kind of distinctively dialogic perspective on thinking and reasoning put forward by Wegerif (2011), which suggests that to think dialogically is to identify with the dialogic space itself and to be open to multiplicity and ongoing questioning. This can be identified in children’s talk when they consider the wider discourses within which their current specific inquiry is situated, to think as a group rather than an individual or participate in dialogic switching to suggest what others might think about the question at hand. All of these elements of dialogic thinking and dialogic meaning-making can draw in the material voices as part of this material-dialogic space and might be discernible through pupils spoken language and also the intensity of the material acting in the relation, the gesturing, the joint attention (as suggested by Kumpulainen and Kamalaa), the changes in the ideas articulated by individuals or groups, the changes in the materials themselves, the changes in the gestures used or the attention paid. In this way, material-dialogic frameworks and the notion of material-dialogic space shift analysis away from learning using objects to mediate and re-locate attention towards the relationality of the thinking taking place and the voices that are part of that relational thought.

‘Being’ in material-dialogic space: science identity

A second key strand of research appearing in this special issue with respect to materiality and embodied interaction is in the area of science identity or ‘being’ a scientist. This is a substantial and growing research field (Avraamidou 2023; Holmegaard and Archer 2022) which has, over the last 20 years, developed from initial conceptualising and operationalising of science identity to nuanced ways of exploring it through a range of sociocultural lenses and over different time-scales (Carlone 2022). In this research field, identity is typically seen as a process of becoming (see, e.g., Beauchamp and Thomas 2009), with the acknowledgement of multiple identities and the dynamic nature of identity regularly brought to the fore (see, e.g., Calabrese Barton et al. 2013), along with the consideration of efforts of identity-making connected to power and its action in the discourse, structures and communities (Davis and Schaeffer 2019). The role of materials and bodies is often included in discussions of identity work. Consider, for example, the classic ‘draw a scientist’ test often shows scientists drawn with the materials of science: the lab coat, goggles, test tubes and microscopes, revealing cultural clues regarding students’ perceptions of the community of practice alongside insights into their science identities (Farland-Smith 2017). The role of materials in everyday practices in science – items of clothing, apparatuses with which ‘scientists’ are familiar or need to become familiar, ways in which bodies are used – become important in both the dynamic development of science identities and the sense of participation in the community of practice that is science and, it has been argued, can lead to a sense of whether science is or is not ‘for’ a student (Madsen and Hjornegaard Malm 2022). Explicit rather than tacit interest in materiality as a facet of identity research has been developing in recent years. Godec et al. (2020) recently argued that ‘paying attention to physical and digital “materiality” enriches our understanding of identity work, by going beyond the spoken, written and embodied dimensions of identity performances that currently dominate the area of STEM identity scholarship’. This call is picked up in this special issue in Varelas et al’.s (2024) exploration of positioning as a facet of identity construction and performance in material entanglements in embodied dramatizing performances of science learning over a period of time. Rahm is also interested in the ‘learning and becoming’ taking place in a community organisation over a year long ethnographic study, in which the role of the entanglements of body-material-affect is seen as foregrounding differential asymmetric positioning within relationships. Although not explicitly situated as ‘science identity research’ Otrel-Cass argues in her study of the role of asynchronous digital storytelling in learning that ‘storytelling enables the body to share out conceptualisation of the world as matter – enabling others to make connections with their own body memories’ which are an essential basis of our experience of self and identity’ (Otrel-Cass 2024).

This developing field of research focusing on identy and ‘being’ is one in which the concept of material-dialogic space can offer useful insights, since the dialogic approach specifically focuses on ‘becomings’ and the change that occurs through the relation, including the materiality of the relational space. However, in this relational ontology, the ‘identities’ of relata can never be fixed as they only continue to come-to-exist as part of the relation. As Wilmes and Siry’s paper in this issue shows, Henry’s developing ‘science identity’ continues to become in relation with the materials with and through which he is learning, despite the plurilingual context in which he is learning. Each of these languages, material objects, other students and Henry are all voices in the material-dialogic space of possibilities that expands and develops as Henry ‘becomes’ something new, with new knowledge and also changed ‘science identity’. As Wilmes and Siry (2024) articulate, Henry was positioned by the education system as lacking as the language was a barrier to his participation. The material as part of the material-dialogic relation was seen in their analysis to ‘afford participation’. A material-dialogic analysis might go beyond this and see the dialogic relations as enabling more than participation, but also a becoming through identification with the material-dialogic space of possibility that is, in this instance, engagement in an ongoing dialogue of science itself.

Conclusion, significance and implications

The papers in this special issue offer an exciting view of aspects of the broad field of materiality and embodied interaction in science education. They draw together recent developments and offer insights into the role of materiality in science education with respect to meaning-making in science and how it can be explored analytically in a range of contexts, from argumentation to understanding challenging or abstract concepts to learning in digital spaces. They highlight the importance of material and digital resources in science learning in both formal and informal contexts and the contribution of these material and digital aspects in the relative positioning of young people and their developing science identities. The papers in this issue also demonstrate some of the ways in which these questions have been and might be explored and analysed.

By drawing on these papers as a springboard to explore the possibilities inherent in the conceptualisation of material-dialogic space offered here, in this paper I have shown that this framework offers a distinctive perspective on the field. The papers in the special issue show that there remain open questions for the field in relation to the role of materiality in science identity, in materiality with respect to digital spaces, in the role of embodiment and materiality in the accessibility of abstract concepts in science through gesture, diagramming and more, and with respect to the key field of science argumentation. Further research to explore these ideas using traditions drawn from multimodal and semiotic frameworks may yield important insights into teaching and learning in science from interactive, and human embodied cognitive perspectives. Similarly, further work drawing on storytelling and ethnographic approaches, and indeed, new materialist approaches, may expand the field in understanding processes of performative ‘material becomings’ in identity research and in seeing learning as material-discursive making of new matter-meaning (Barad 2007). I suggest that in addition, this paper raises further questions with respect to the role of materiality in science education from a dialogic and relational ontological stance, in particular with respect to the way in which both the relata and the relation itself change and are changed by the material-dialogic relationship and what this might mean for learning, doing and being in science education. I have shown how the concept of material-dialogic space, with its focus on the role of the material in a specifically dialogic relation, is a distinct theoretical stance that draws on materiality in ways that enable insight into the intra-active relation between materials, bodies, and talk, by focusing attention on that dynamic dialogic relation and what happens within it. Approaches to exploring this could build on the kinds of multimodal, semiotic and storytelling approaches outlined in this paper, for example, but with a shift in attention through asking questions of data that focus on the dialogic nature of material intra-actions in science education. In this paper I suggest that by focusing on the material-dialogic space that is the relation itself, the materiality of science meaning-making and science identity-becoming as part of the dialogic relation can be brought into the analysis, yielding different understandings. Given the research basis for arguing for the importance of dialogic pedagogy in education more broadly, such understanding could guide the development dialogic pedagogy in science education that attends to the important role of materiality and embodiment in this field, pertinent to both teaching and learning, and to ‘being and becoming’ in science education for children and teachers. Drawing on the approaches to analysis in this special issue, I argue that this would need to be achieved by analysing video data alongside a range of other data by looking in parallel at the changes in the relata (in other words, the changing entities that are in relation) and at the changes in the relationship (the language, gestures, attention, intensities, material actions and so on) to understand the processes by which these becomings in and of the material-dialogic space are taking place. The question of materiality in digital spaces, raised by papers in this issue, is of particular interest, as the role of the digital in dialogic education and what materiality means in, for example, virtual and augmented reality are open questions. Interestingly, the question of models and modelling was not explicitly raised in this issue except through the very specific consideration of diagramming (Ferguson, Xu, and Tytler 2024), virtual engagement in digital spaces (Impedovo and Cederqvist 2024) and in gestures (Mortimer and Reis Pereira 2024). Models and modelling as voices in material-dialogic spaces, including the digital and virtual, has not been addressed in previous research despite its importance as a research programme in science education, and this is therefore a key area which remains to be addressed.

Examination of the affordances of the analytical approach to material-dialogic space using empirical data is beyond the scope of this discussion paper for this special issue and will be taken up in future work. However, I believe the that the argument developed in this paper demonstrates the need for studies that use this approach to go beyond a constructivist and sociocultural models of learning and identity development that examine material and embodied interactions and that the conceptualisation of material-dialogic space offered is a significant contribution to enabling this expansion of the field.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to the editors of this Special Issue for inviting me to contribute this piece. Thanks also to the authors of the articles in the Special Issue for their interesting work which has invited and enabled me to develop the ideas presented here.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).