Educational settings as interwoven socio-material orderings: an introduction

The special issue Educational Settings as Interwoven Socio-Material Orderings contributes to the advancement of context-oriented approaches to education, learning and development by combining thick descriptions and theory-dense analyses of concrete and eventually interrelated socio-material arrangements in and across a variety of educational and developmental contexts. We explore below two issues that seem to be central across the relevant literature as well as across the contributions by the authors of the special issue: (a) the notion of “individual” as a relevant unit of analysis and (b) the notion of “socio-material orderings” as another relevant analytical frame. The notions “individual” and “socio-material ordering” encompass all research participants and arrangements, including therefore the researchers and their everyday settings. The last part of our paper discusses the epistemological and methodological implications of this proposition.