What is "Materiality" in Pedagogy?

According to the Critical Theory (Frankfurt School), things deeply influence the processes of human education, socialization and learning and by this our behavior. For the most part we are surrounded by artifacts; and human cultures are largely constituted by things in the sense that it is culturally important where a thing is situated and how one deal with it. Things signify psychological as well as social realities, whereas they are intertwined, and things function as means for the reproduction of these realities. To think this the other way round, persons are sujet-subjects (Meyer-Drawe 1990). The impossibility of a complete autonomy is entangled to their possibilities to reveal and analyze the diverse layers of their heteronomy. Materiality in pedagogy, and here I will focus on teaching and learning in school, usually refers to the action of “showing” (Prange 2007). Focusing materiality, “showing” is not only meant in the sense of the pedagogical practice of explaining something definite and distinct to somebody, but also in the sense of a “surplus of sense(-making)” (“sinnerzeugender Überschuss”, Böhm 2007) that lies beyond language: something shows something. In my contribution I will go deeper into the notion of “it shows” (in German “es zeigt sich”, so to say “it shows itself”). I will work out the kind of showing that is meant here. Here, it comes into sight, how verbal-discursive structures are confronted with non-verbal, imaginary and bodily realities. By figuring out different kinds of “showing”, I will build up a concept how to explore material dimensions in pedagogy in an empirical way. Here, I will give an example of an empirical study on the topic of “it shows”