In The Mangle of Practice, Pickering examines scientific practice through his lens of "the mangle," which he defines as the reciprocal interactions between "human and material agencies" in the mutual transformation of each other and scientific culture (23). He derives this concept from his argument for the performative idiom. In contrast to the representative idiom, which believes scientific knowledge needs to identically mirror nature, the performative idiom looks at scientific knowledge as it is produced in specific material, social, and historical contexts.
I found much of Pickering's argument pretty difficult to understand, and based on his description of Chapter 2, I wish I could have read that to get a concrete example of his theory at work. In lieu of that, I thought about his theory as it relates to Wertsch's writings about mediated action in Mind as Action. Wertsch argued that the social world could only be understood through an analysis of an agent acting in the world through their agency (which for him meant their use of cultural and material tools). Wertsch helped me make Pickering's talk about mutual transformation of human and machines more salient, as Wertsch similarly argues that the agent and mediational means are both redefined through the action, and one cannot be defined without its relation to the other. I'd like to hear how others made sense of Pickering's "mutual transformation," and what you understood this to mean.
Another author I thought about while reading Pickering was Gee, who differentiated "big-d Discourse" from "little-d discourse." For Gee, discourse is a social language (with its own vocabulary, syntax, colloquialisms, etc) that is situated within the associated Discourse (the socially accepted ways of communicating, acting, and believing that mark one's membership in a community). I feel like Gee's distinction is analogous to Pickering's of scienctific practice ("Practice" - the "extension and transformation [of scientific culture] in time") and practices ("practice" - the "activities on which scientists rely in their daily work" to produce knowledge). In this respect, I am puzzled by where Pickering is placing modeling. The NGSS seems to place modeling as a practice,while Pickering (despite the fact that he calls it a "process") seems to regard modeling as Practice, essential to the way the imagined future is brought forth in the transformation of the presently-existing culture and scientific goals. What does Pickering understand modeling to be? How does his vision fit into our discussions of computational modeling with NetLogo?
I found a few models that I think would work well in a high school physics classroom. I was browsing the library with the lens of a New York State teacher, where state-wide standards are established for physics students and assessed through a Regents exam (part multiple choice, part short answer). In New York City, these standards are rigorously planned out in a city-wide scope and sequence, which states what each unit consists of and how long each unit is. In the state-wide curriculum, Standard 6.2 is devoted exclusively to modeling - but since Standards 6 and 7 (which deal with STEM themes and problem-solving, respectively) are not mapped onto the state assessment, they are frequently overlooked in the classroom. Teachers instead focus on Standard 4, which defined the physics concepts students will be assessed on. Some models that I thought would work well with these standards in mind were:
- All of the NIELS programs, which are on circuits (ex: NYS Physics 4.1.viii-xiv, HS-PS3.C)
- GasLab Single Collision, which would be useful for momentum and energy conservation (ex: NYS Physics 4.1.v and 4.5.xii,, HS-PS2.A)
- N-bodies, for planetary gravitation (ex: HS-ESS1.B)
Jenna I think you are right when you stated that modeling is a Practice with a capital p because Pickering views it to be essential for understanding and observing scientific phenomena. This viewpoint is clearly seen in play in the Nersessian article where the researchers had to come up with computational models to make sense of certain concepts that they could not otherwise observe or understand. Pickering makes certain statements in his book regarding scientific phenomena and states that people constantly have to cope with "material agency, agency that comes at us from outside the human realm and that cannot be reduced to anything within that realm" (6). And the way that we "cope" is through machines (as Pickering terms it) like computational modeling. This is why they are so important, because without them, we would not be able to make sense of phenomena. To me, at least, Metlogo fits into his article because it is a god computational modeling database. It provides many models for various phenomena that students can manipulate and make sense of one their own. Furthermore, many of the models could not easily be observed through experiments or in other scientific ways, showing this critical nature of computational modeling.
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