Posthumanist new materialist pathways for reimagining music education research

Key Question Being Explored in This Insight:

How can embracing posthumanist new materialist perspectives revolutionize the way we understand and engage with music education research, by acknowledging the orchestration of human and nonhuman elements in creating novel educational encounters?

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Institution: University of Cambridge

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How can embracing posthumanist new materialist perspectives revolutionize the way we understand and engage with music education research?

Image courtesy of interviewee. December 13, 2024

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This video discusses the concept of posthumanism and its implications for education, particularly music education. The speaker frames education as transdisciplinary and interconnected with various fields such as music, arts, and sciences. They highlight that posthumanism challenges traditional views by decentering the human and acknowledging the roles of non-human entities and technologies in our creative processes.

A key point made is the idea of "distributed agency," meaning that creativity and learning occur in collaboration with digital technologies and non-human elements. The speaker advocates for recognizing artificial creativity alongside human creativity as essential in today's digital landscape.

The discussion extends to the importance of playful inquiry in education. The speaker describes an innovative project where sixth-grade students engage with younger peers to explore what playful inquiry means in music education, utilizing devices and photographs to capture their experiences. This video embodiment of learning culminates in creating an assemblage of ideas using various materials, enhancing creativity and critical thinking.

This video also emphasizes the significance of inclusivity in music education, noting that it should reflect diverse musical genres and forms beyond traditional Western frameworks, such as hip-hop. Ultimately, the speaker argues for a holistic approach to education that embraces creativity, collaboration, and the integration of multiple disciplines, encouraging vulnerability and new perspectives among learners.

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Here are five key points from the video:

1. **Transdisciplinary Research**: The discussion emphasizes the intersection of music and mathematics, highlighting the importance of a transdisciplinary approach in education that incorporates various fields such as arts and science.

2. **Posthumanism**: The concept of posthumanism is introduced, which extols the idea of recognizing the role of non-human elements (including technology and nature) in education and creativity. It challenges traditional human-centered perspectives and promotes the notion of distributed agency, where humans and technology co-create knowledge and experiences.

3. **Playful Inquiry in Education**: The video describes practical examples of playful inquiry within educational settings, especially in music education, where students engage with each other across different grades to explore creativity and collaboration using digital tools like iPads as part of their learning process.

4. **Assemblage as a Creative Process**: Assemblage is presented as a critical concept for making connections between ideas, materials, and experiences. It involves visually mapping and creating collective representations to foster new understandings and collaborations among students, allowing them to visualize complexity.

5. **Rethinking Music Education**: The video advocates for a broader understanding of music education that embraces diversity in musical forms, such as hip hop, and encourages the blending of disciplines. This approach aims to humanize education and reflect the varied expressions and cultural significance of music in contemporary society.

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Here are some key quotes extracted from the video that encapsulate its themes and ideas:

1. **On Transdisciplinary Research**:
"Research, transdisciplinary research, looking at music and maths, looking at arts, science nexus."

2. **On the Challenge of Posthumanism**:
"Not everybody digs posthumanism. Sometimes people just resist the sort of language of it, because it does involve a couple of new words."

3. **Decentering the Human**:
"Posthumanism, first of all says is there's more than just humans or in the making of things, in the thinking with things in the doing and being."

4. **Role of Technology**:
"We're influenced by the non-human, which is technology, but also the more than human."

5. **On Creativity in the Digital Era**:
"What does technology do to our creativity? Should we start thinking about artificial creativity and human creativity?"

6. **Assemblage and Co-construction of Ideas**:
"Assemblage is a bringing together, a collection, a connection... a mapping, sort of navigating a new space."

7. **Playful Inquiry in Education**:
"What is it to be a playful inquirer when you sit at an instrument, you know, do you make up your own music? Do you improvise on somebody else's?"

8. **Children’s Potential in Collaborative Learning**:
"It’s a beautiful thing to see a grade six sitting cross-legged, you know, right opposite a grade one student... children are amazing."

9. **Visualizing Ideas**:
"Assemblage is a sort of... material way of using materials... to materialize ideas in an assemblage that doesn't look amazing."

10. **On the Nature of Music Education**:
"Music education really should be called musics education, because there are so many musics out there."

11. **Connecting Knowledge Across Disciplines**:
"It humanizes...it's about us. It gets to the inner, the, you know, who we are as humans."

12. **Importance of Diversity in Music**:
"One of the books recently we've published looks at hip hop...they are assemblages, if you like, of words that are incredibly clever."

These quotes reflect the core ideas of posthumanism, the nature of education, the role of creativity and technology, and the emphasis on collaboration and diverse forms of expression in the arts, particularly music.

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Research, transdisciplinary research, looking at music

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and maths, looking at, arts, science nexus.

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So, although I'll be, you know,

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you've asked a question about music education,

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it relates to all of education.

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And, and when you say, what is it challenging?

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Uh, I, I I, I'm going to say very simply

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because it's quite a, you know,

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we've got books up here on post-human knowledge, you know,

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post-human pedagogies, post-human spaces.

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I mean, it goes on and on and on.

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But not everybody digs posthumanism.

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Sometimes people just resist the, the sort

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of language of it,

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because it does involve a couple of new words.

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Some people resist because it decenters the human

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and it actually acknowledges, like us.

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Today, we're here in this

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zoomie verse here, in this space

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where you don't even know if I've got legs, but I have,

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and also this thing that we're working with here,

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that we're responding to here, that we're engaging

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with here, including this camera that follows me around,

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they're all acting on me and I'm acting on it.

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So, what Posthumanism, first

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of all says is there's more than just humans

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involved in creativity

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or in the making of things, in the thinking with things

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in the doing and being,

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and that in a digital era, like we're in,

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we must start acknowledging more

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and more the role of digital, you know,

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ai, engagement with technologies

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and laptops and iPhones, and Google

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and chat g pt.

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Just to put into the mix a kind of, here comes a big word.

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Wait, wait for it.

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The distributed agency, you know that it's distributed.

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I'm not doing this alone. You are not doing this alone.

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You, you know, we are enabled by technology.

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Well, what does technology do to our creativity?

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Should we start thinking about artificial creativity

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and human creativity?

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We speak of artificial intelligence,

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but that question of artificial creativity is again, a kind

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of, provocation in terms

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of there's more than us.

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Plus there's not only more than us in relation

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to this beautiful thing we call, you know, technology

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and what's in front of us here,

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but we're influenced by the, the non-human,

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which is, you know, technology,

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but also the more than human.

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Hence, I bought some in from the garden,

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and they are amazing, aren't they?

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Look at these things. These are of course,

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incredibly mathematical.

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They show us ruptures.

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How the soil is a creative space where,

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where nature creates eruptions every time

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something comes up.

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And these eruptions are nature.

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We get it in the air, the soil, the, the rivers, the sky.

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Uh, and we acknowledge this in terms of

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climate crisis, climate, anxiety, sustainability,

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thinking of, of, you know, how we grow crops

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and how we sustain ourselves.

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Lots of SDGs with UNESCO and,

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and, you know, forward thinking visions

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for education to actually have young children

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thinking about how we should rethink, reshape,

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innovate, revision.

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What is education?

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Let alone music education,

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because we can now make music

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without having grade eight on piano, without,

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having, instruments, these objects, these of beauty

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that sound and play and, and vibrate

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and sound science.

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Posthumanism incorporates more than the human, as well

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as the human doesn't cancel the human.

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It just includes.

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And the materiality of that is

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the materials that matter.

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What are you playing with?

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What are you making with an assemblage?

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Is a bringing together an a, a collection,

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a a an assemblage of things.

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Now imagine you've got a large sheet of paper, white paper.

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We used to call it butcher's paper.

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It just click, you know, rolls of paper,

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roll it out on your, on your board table.

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You know, if you are into, you know, business

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and organizations which have those gorgeous long tables

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that, that have, you know,

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all important people sit around.

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Now, sometimes you'll have, you know,

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people get trained in serious play, Lego serious play.

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And you'll get at your thousand pounds worth

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of Lego serious play bits, you know, the, the bricks.

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And you'll play with these as metaphors for structures,

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organizational structures, models, weight concepts.

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And you'll use these to build kind of new, new ways

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of thinking to rethink whatever it is.

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Well, with an assemblage, that is the kind of assemblage

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of bricks, and you are putting them into different

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formations and reconfigurations, often in

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graphic assemblages

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and cartography, you know, is linked to mapping, you know,

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sailing, looking at the beacons, the red lights,

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the green lights, and, and,

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and sort of mapping, sort of navigating a new space.

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Then you can actually draw together, bringing

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Play-Doh, bringing Lego, bringing,

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words, just, just pepper them across this large page.

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And you end up with this assemblage of ideas

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and idea making.

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And with those ideas you make, with those ideas, so

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that the page starts to take a shape

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that is really co-constructed.

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I've done it with children. I'll give you a live idea.

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A a concrete example.

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I am a, a professor in residence at the University

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of Cambridge Primary school, where we are teaching children

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to be researchers in music education

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and in education generally.

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And we're looking at the issue of what is playful inquiry?

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Hmm? What is it

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to be a playful inquirer when you sit at an instrument,

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you know, do you make up your own music?

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Do you improvise on somebody else's?

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Do you bring your own voice to the piece?

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What do you play with when, when you play an instrument?

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Because that word play

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and playing is central to musicing, you know,

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to the music we make.

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So back to this school with playful inquiry,

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the children go off for five days, come back,

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we run this routine for five days

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where they go into grade one and two.

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They're grade six children

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and of them into different classrooms with an iPad.

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And they take photos of what they think is playful inquiry.

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And then in the break they sit

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with the children in that group.

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And it's a beautiful thing

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to see a grade six sitting cross-legged, you know,

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right opposite a grade one student, you know, child

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one interviewing the other.

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You know, this is the way it should be.

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'cause children are amazing

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and they'll ask, what's going on here?

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It, to me, it looks like playful inquiry,

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but is it, is that, what do you call this?

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Is it what's going on in here that's playful?

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What is going on in here? That's inquiry.

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So they gotta kind of unpack those words.

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Then they come back to the boardroom

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where there's a big piece of white paper,

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plain just stuck across the page,

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stand up their iPad with the one photo

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that they think really kind of really nails it, you know,

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for that morning's research.

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Plus they write around around it some ideas,

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maybe a couple of quotes they've remembered,

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or they're written down and they're repeating,

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and some concepts, some big words that sort of represent

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what they think this is.

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So then you end up with this sort of tree of iPads, 10

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of them with these words assembled, you know,

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around the iPad, but also an assemblage of 10 of them.

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So we've got sort of, we can start

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to see some patterns forming

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because then we get a big texture and we connect one iPad

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and their concept with another.

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And you end up with these crossed lines, like a mapping,

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you know, like a mapping.

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And where there's a cross line connecting.

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You've got this connectivity, this connection making,

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which is the sort of a mapping,

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and then a remapping, hence the cartography.

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And the assemblage is of just simply these ideas.

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Now, assemblage is the word.

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Assemblage has come from, guitar and ulus.

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It's their term. And, you know,

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they've written books on it that essentially,

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I'm distilling it, I'm probably destroying it.

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I'm sorry. Everybody that are experts out there in Ulus,

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and I'm just trying to be, you know, in 15 minutes.

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It is a bringing together an assemblage, a, a connection,

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a collection, you know, of really

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rupturing ideas that if you, to see them,

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to see the mapping, to see the line of flight.

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And that's another one of their words. I love that.

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Isn't that gorgeous? A line of flight

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that connects from one side of a boardroom to the other.

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One, one child's kind of sight of something,

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of identifying something, their idea, a big idea,

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connecting a big idea with another idea is magic.

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So the assemblage is a sort of, I think a very,

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friendly and kind of, material way

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of making these connections.

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You know, making connections with big ideas to make sense

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of complexity in a way that's visual, like a map is.

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Um, and,

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and that, really tries to rupture,

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indeed erupt,

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because when something erupts the landscape changes

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how we think about things.

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So it's a sort of bit of, it's a, it's a sort of,

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really significant

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but simple, embodied way of

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using materials.

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All sorts of materials can be used.

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Photographs, you know, material,

216
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you know, wool, bits, shapes,

217
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colors, felt, you know, anything to,

218
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to make visible the material

219
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and to materialize ideas in an assemblage

220
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that ends up, I, I've never seen one

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that doesn't look amazing, that doesn't look, you know,

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frameable, there's something about humans

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working together on their knees, you know,

224
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putting things together.

225
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They allow you to think differently.

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You know, they open the, out into new possibilities,

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ways of sort of taking your glasses off that always sees

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through and bringing another lens

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which opens, opens the field.

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And that's how I see at the moment, post-human

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and new materialism is helping me see differently, think

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of possibilities, new possibilities as far as music,

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education, music, education.

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You know, it really should be called musics education,

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because there are so many music out musics out there,

236
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like arts, education, arts.

237
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We refer to lots of different art forms

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and, you know, including digital art and visual

239
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and perform dance and, and drama and poem.

240
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What, what, but music, we've got kind

241
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of locked into this sort of western art kind of, you know,

242
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romantic view of what music is.

243
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And yet, one

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of the books recently we've published looks at hip hop,

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you know, and it's the most popular form of musicing,

246
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across the world.

247
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And because it's from the ground up, they are assemblages,

248
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if you like, of words that,

249
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that are incredibly clever in the way they, they rhyme

250
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and they make sense, and they,

251
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and they voice, you know, what it is to be

252
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18 in 2024 or 16 or even eight or indeed younger.

253
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And that's what education, whether it's music, arts,

254
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legal, education, you know, people going into law.

255
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I've work with people going into law

256
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and, how they see knowledge the way we know,

257
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what we know, how we come to know.

258
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And I love to rupture that, you know,

259
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and you can do it really beautifully using music and arts,

260
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because it, it sort of, it,

261
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it humanizes, it's, it's about us.

262
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It gets to the inner, the, you know, who we are

263
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as, as humans.

264
00:14:50.815 --> 00:14:52.645
Um, and, and it,

265
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and it also mashes up the disciplines in a way that

266
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gets people to just soften the edges

267
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and allow some vulnerabilities to, to come to the surface.

268
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And, and when that happens, you know, there's magic

269
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in the room.

Exploring Posthumanism in Music Education

00:00:00 - Research, transdisciplinary research, looking at music and maths, looking at, arts, science nexus. So, although I'll be, you know, you've asked a question about music education, it relates to all of education. And, and when you say, what is it challenging? I, I I, I'm going to say very simply because it's quite a, you know, we've got books up here on post-human knowledge, you know, post-human pedagogies, post-human spaces.

00:00:35 - But not everybody digs posthumanism. Sometimes people just resist the, the sort of language of it, because it does involve a couple of new words. Some people resist because it decenters the human and it actually acknowledges, like us. Today, we're here in this

00:01:07 - where you don't even know if I've got legs, but I have, and also this thing that we're working with here, that we're responding to here, that we're engaging with here, including this camera that follows me around, they're all acting on me and I'm acting on it. So, what Posthumanism, first of all says is there's more than just humans

Exploring Distributed Agency in the Digital Era

00:01:36 - or in the making of things, in the thinking with things in the doing and being, and that in a digital era, like we're in, we must start acknowledging more and more the role of digital, you know, ai, engagement with technologies and laptops and iPhones, and Google and chat g pt. Just to put into the mix a kind of, here comes a big word.

00:02:11 - The distributed agency, you know that it's distributed. I'm not doing this alone. You are not doing this alone. You, you know, we are enabled by technology. Well, what does technology do to our creativity? Should we start thinking about artificial creativity and human creativity? We speak of artificial intelligence, but that question of artificial creativity is again, a kind

00:02:45 - of there's more than us. Plus there's not only more than us in relation to this beautiful thing we call, you know, technology and what's in front of us here, but we're influenced by the, the non-human, which is, you know, technology, but also the more than human. Hence, I bought some in from the garden, and they are amazing, aren't they? Look at these things. These are of course,

Ruptures in Nature: Rethinking Education and Sustainability

00:03:16 - They show us ruptures. How the soil is a creative space where, where nature creates eruptions every time something comes up. And these eruptions are nature. We get it in the air, the soil, the, the rivers, the sky. and we acknowledge this in terms of climate crisis, climate, anxiety, sustainability,

00:03:53 - and how we sustain ourselves. Lots of SDGs with UNESCO and, and, you know, forward thinking visions for education to actually have young children thinking about how we should rethink, reshape, innovate, revision. What is education? Let alone music education, because we can now make music

00:04:26 - having, instruments, these objects, these of beauty that sound and play and, and vibrate and sound science. Posthumanism incorporates more than the human, as well as the human doesn't cancel the human. It just includes. And the materiality of that is the materials that matter.

Creating Connections Through Assemblage: The Art of Reconfiguration

00:04:53 - What are you making with an assemblage? Is a bringing together an a, a collection, a a an assemblage of things. Now imagine you've got a large sheet of paper, white paper. We used to call it butcher's paper. It just click, you know, rolls of paper, roll it out on your, on your board table. You know, if you are into, you know, business and organizations which have those gorgeous long tables

00:05:26 - all important people sit around. Now, sometimes you'll have, you know, people get trained in serious play, Lego serious play. And you'll get at your thousand pounds worth of Lego serious play bits, you know, the, the bricks. And you'll play with these as metaphors for structures, organizational structures, models, weight concepts.

00:05:58 - of thinking to rethink whatever it is. Well, with an assemblage, that is the kind of assemblage of bricks, and you are putting them into different formations and reconfigurations, often in graphic assemblages and cartography, you know, is linked to mapping, you know, sailing, looking at the beacons, the red lights, the green lights, and, and, and sort of mapping, sort of navigating a new space.

Playful Inquiry in Music Education

00:06:32 - Play-Doh, bringing Lego, bringing, words, just, just pepper them across this large page. And you end up with this assemblage of ideas and idea making. And with those ideas you make, with those ideas, so that the page starts to take a shape that is really co-constructed. I've done it with children. I'll give you a live idea.

00:07:02 - I am a, a professor in residence at the University of Cambridge Primary school, where we are teaching children to be researchers in music education and in education generally. And we're looking at the issue of what is playful inquiry? Hmm? What is it to be a playful inquirer when you sit at an instrument, you know, do you make up your own music? Do you improvise on somebody else's?

00:07:37 - What do you play with when, when you play an instrument? Because that word play and playing is central to musicing, you know, to the music we make. So back to this school with playful inquiry, the children go off for five days, come back, we run this routine for five days where they go into grade one and two. They're grade six children and of them into different classrooms with an iPad.

Embracing Playful Inquiry in Diverse Learning

00:08:12 - And then in the break they sit with the children in that group. And it's a beautiful thing to see a grade six sitting cross-legged, you know, right opposite a grade one student, you know, child one interviewing the other. You know, this is the way it should be. 'cause children are amazing and they'll ask, what's going on here? It, to me, it looks like playful inquiry, but is it, is that, what do you call this?

00:08:40 - What is going on in here? That's inquiry. So they gotta kind of unpack those words. Then they come back to the boardroom where there's a big piece of white paper, plain just stuck across the page, stand up their iPad with the one photo that they think really kind of really nails it, you know, for that morning's research. Plus they write around around it some ideas,

00:09:13 - or they're written down and they're repeating, and some concepts, some big words that sort of represent what they think this is. So then you end up with this sort of tree of iPads, 10 of them with these words assembled, you know, around the iPad, but also an assemblage of 10 of them. So we've got sort of, we can start to see some patterns forming because then we get a big texture and we connect one iPad

Mapping Ideas: The Power of Assemblage in Education

00:09:45 - And you end up with these crossed lines, like a mapping, you know, like a mapping. And where there's a cross line connecting. You've got this connectivity, this connection making, which is the sort of a mapping, and then a remapping, hence the cartography. And the assemblage is of just simply these ideas. Now, assemblage is the word. Assemblage has come from, guitar and ulus.

00:10:16 - they've written books on it that essentially, I'm distilling it, I'm probably destroying it. I'm sorry. Everybody that are experts out there in Ulus, and I'm just trying to be, you know, in 15 minutes. It is a bringing together an assemblage, a, a connection, a collection, you know, of really rupturing ideas that if you, to see them, to see the mapping, to see the line of flight.

00:10:46 - Isn't that gorgeous? A line of flight that connects from one side of a boardroom to the other. One, one child's kind of sight of something, of identifying something, their idea, a big idea, connecting a big idea with another idea is magic. So the assemblage is a sort of, I think a very, friendly and kind of, material way

Visualizing Complexity: The Power of Assemblage in Learning

00:11:21 - You know, making connections with big ideas to make sense of complexity in a way that's visual, like a map is. and, and that, really tries to rupture, indeed erupt, because when something erupts the landscape changes how we think about things. So it's a sort of bit of, it's a, it's a sort of,

00:11:54 - but simple, embodied way of using materials. All sorts of materials can be used. Photographs, you know, material, you know, wool, bits, shapes, colors, felt, you know, anything to, to make visible the material and to materialize ideas in an assemblage

00:12:26 - that doesn't look amazing, that doesn't look, you know, frameable, there's something about humans working together on their knees, you know, putting things together. They allow you to think differently. You know, they open the, out into new possibilities, ways of sort of taking your glasses off that always sees through and bringing another lens which opens, opens the field. And that's how I see at the moment, post-human

Exploring Diverse Musics in Education

00:13:02 - of possibilities, new possibilities as far as music, education, music, education. You know, it really should be called musics education, because there are so many music out musics out there, like arts, education, arts. We refer to lots of different art forms and, you know, including digital art and visual and perform dance and, and drama and poem. What, what, but music, we've got kind

00:13:34 - romantic view of what music is. And yet, one of the books recently we've published looks at hip hop, you know, and it's the most popular form of musicing, across the world. And because it's from the ground up, they are assemblages, if you like, of words that, that are incredibly clever in the way they, they rhyme

00:14:02 - and they voice, you know, what it is to be 18 in 2024 or 16 or even eight or indeed younger. And that's what education, whether it's music, arts, legal, education, you know, people going into law. I've work with people going into law and, how they see knowledge the way we know, what we know, how we come to know.

Humanizing Connections through Music and Arts

00:14:34 - and you can do it really beautifully using music and arts, because it, it sort of, it, it humanizes, it's, it's about us. It gets to the inner, the, you know, who we are as, as humans. and, and it, and it also mashes up the disciplines in a way that gets people to just soften the edges

00:15:10 - And, and when that happens, you know, there's magic in the room.

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