New biological rationalities in education

The relationship between biology and education has been one that is long-standing and always fraught with danger and possibility. In many Western democracies, yet not reducible to such, the discipline of biology has been a key part of educational research focused on learning, especially in the area of evolutionary psychology such as cognitive load theory (e.g. Paas, Van Gog, & Sweller, 2010). Conversely, academic biology has had a much more difficult relationship with sociological educational research dedicated to equality. From phrenology, to genetically deterministic accounts of aptitudes, skills and professional life, to beliefs in family transmission of intelligence and the quantification of an intelligence quotient, to the globalization of eugenic discourse, to the racialization of who can attend a school driven by White assessments of ‘primitive’ and ‘Black’ bodies as ‘adolescent races’, to the sexualization of morality, to the hunt for disability, whatever has been designated as ‘bio’ has already been critiqued for the ways in which it legitimates and authorizes particular prejudices and preferences for extant ontological hierarchies (Baker, 2002; Chitty, 2007). Across the early nineteenth century, throughout the twentieth and ongoing, much of the response to ‘biology in education’ has thus followed other disciplinary trends in arguing that what looks like biology is socially constructed, historically specific, unevenly operationalized and not universal.

The first decades of the twenty-first century have, however, seen something else play out that is, perhaps, not entirely reducible to the preceding debates. Some of the notions that were disputed by the social constructivist move, for instance, are being reworked both within and outside the academy. Contemporary societies are constituted by and contend with new forms of, or claims made about, the potentialities of biological thinking (Carey, 2012; Doidge, 2007) that are connected to the period after the human genome was completely sequenced (Meloni, 2016). Fields such as epigenetics and neuroscience are part of the possibility that ‘biological life can be purposely directed’ (Mansfield & Guthman, 2015, p. 12, emphasis in the original). While these fields are generating new incitements to discourse that animate older divisions around the for/against mentality in regard to biology, in some cases claiming to inform and converge with education’s purposes (Ritchie, Bates, Der, Starr, & Deary, 2013) and in others being perceived as old threats packaged in new, shiny technologies (Gillborn, 2016), there are other dimensions to the incitements and engagement that we believe are not reducible to or purely explicable by past–present–future spatializations or for/against mentalities. Something else is going on that is difficult to put the finger on; that generates reverberations, celebrations, repulsions, worries, concerns, excitement at new possibilities, joyful inventions, fears about what is to come and confusion about the order of things, the hierarchy of disciplines, the very nature of the human, of being and the continuity of existence.

It is against this backdrop that this Special Issue explores the emergence, impact, place, effects, paradoxes, potentials and challenges of new biological rationalities in education policy, practice and research. As whatever is designated as bio, as being biological, or as a biological rationality arises only in specific cultures, only amid some vocabularies, only at certain nuanced timespaces, the aim of this issue has not been to legislate, universalize and totalize such renditions, but to gather together scholarship that takes seriously the proliferation of discourses now circulating under the term bio and that are now travelling with new force, intensity, spread and effects. This orientation requires engagement and study, a refusal of totalizing tendencies, a willingness to contest seemingly foundational terms, such as ‘biological’, via varied thought experiments that examines closely and cautiously whatever now falls under such labels.

While it will be clear from the issue that there is as much ‘old’ as there is ‘new’ in the links between biology and education, the title of this Special Issue, ‘New Biological Rationalities in Education’, is intended to highlight how the range of research articles presented here grapple in different ways with the following, at times contradictory, problematics: first, the issue does not assume that the bio-trail in education across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has already somehow been dealt with, overturned and ‘disciplined’ into greater awareness of how provincial assumptions and uneven power relations operate in the guise of scientific facts (Poovey, 1998) – what, then, are the implications for contemporary educational researchers in taking new ‘discoveries’ in fields such as epigenetics, neuroscience or even information technology as more insightful, as permanent, as more ‘real’ or enduring than something else?; second, the issue has invited the complexity of political connections to be brought forth, enabling insights into how intellectual and social movements, from social constructivism to social justice, have engaged in a relative suppression of the contributions that the discipline of biology could make on that basis for several decades – in opening education up to the recognition of what was previously made, at times necessarily, impossible to think?; and, third, the issue invites rethinking of an assumed or an initial bio/social binary and all that that entails, suggesting how the perceived re-entry or re-animation of the ‘bio’ is ambiguous and not knowable in advance. The re-entry of the bio is not, for instance, a sign that a particular ‘purification’ process in regard to pernicious discourses has been fully undertaken. It is also not a sign that bio-discourses around ‘non-determinacy’ and ‘plasticity’ should be shut down or could not provide another avenue into justice moves – what would it take, then, to enable something beyond the staid intractability of repetitive nature/culture dichotomies?

While such points and counterpoints are imbricated in this special edition, and certainly we are cognizant of these problematics, it would also not be the whole story of the issue. Rather, we have drawn the title from the constellation of approaches now emerging in the discipline of education, the flashpoints they suggest and the ethical issues they flag anew. The categorization below is our reading of the themes of the papers, the three distinctive yet interrelated flashpoints that we think the papers in the issue revolve around and that take on the new biological rationalities from very different vantage points. What each paper does, we think, is to signal new iterations of education fields (plural both times) that are taking seriously a discourse before dismissing it; investigating a new conglomeration and researching its complexities; actually trying unfamiliar discourses out in experimental designs; or, coming to learn about the potentialities of interdisciplinarity from within and without, rather than automatic a priori dismissal from a static point of view. What we outline below are some key flashpoints and the parameters, possibilities, limits and elisions within Western systems of reasoning that the papers collectively underscore, expose, and raise and that are pertinent, if not urgent, for education fields to consider.

Flashpoint 1: Is there such a thing as ‘biology’? Strategies and tactics of truth-production in regard to being

It is hard to hear the word biology today in educational settings and not group it immediately into conceptual clusters with associated terms for or analogues of ‘the body’. The papers that we think engage Flashpoint 1, however, do not automatically presume that something so radically different has gone before to make the new the new, nor that the biological can so easily be distinguished from other kinds of rationalities, nor that the bio is an automatic reference to a mind–body distinction.

The papers that engage this flashpoint offer historicizations of how ‘biology’ becomes thought of in specific sets of discourses and the politics of onto-epistemology that ‘it’ moves within and shifts. For example, Andrés Haye, Claudia Matus, Pablo Cottet and Sebastián Niño’s paper notes how one of the concerns when ‘biological’ and ‘neuroscientific’ insights lead to explanations of a lack of motivation or low school achievement, with no connection to social and cultural insights, is the re-inscription of discourses about the normal that risks minimizing uneven and unequal learning opportunities and sociocultural factors. They historicize how this could come to be, how conceptions of autonomy in particular have been part of what could constitute discourses labelled as biological from Kant to contemporary transdisciplinary systems theory, and that these ‘feed contemporary discourses of self-regulation inhabiting sociology, psychology, and education’.

The analyses in the papers in this Flashpoint move across at least four different geopolitical regions – Europe, North America, Asia and South America – signalling the importance of the way in which ‘place’ operates to de-naturalize biology. It does seem that geography matters here, outlining the means by which whatever has been designated as biological has clustered around particular strategies of local and global truth-production, reinforcing as Said (1983) noted, how discourses and terminologies travel, only to be re-appropriated differently upon landing. Sunhye Kung’s paper examines how only some discourses travel, however, both ‘within’ place and to it. Her analysis of the ‘ontological shift in Koreanness-as-race from blood-tie (biology-as-nation-race) to label-based codification (biology-as-biopolitical species)’ traces the stronger emergence of equality-based and excellence-based discourses in popular Korean newspapers at the turn of the twenty-first century before and after a notorious national financial crisis. Kung details how ‘biology’ is subtly redefined and operationalized in both the face of painful memories and in political orientations that stereotypically seem oppositional.

The papers engaging this theme also join forces with other analyses that have marked the idiosyncratic ways in which ‘scientific medicine’ rewrote biology around a particular conception of ‘the body’ and against other long-standing views. As Bivins (2010) notes:

From a western and twentieth-first century perspective, twentieth-century orthodox medicine –  …  ‘biomedicine’ – looks both powerful and long-established. It is apparently a monolithic system, holding a monopoly supported by a potent combination of laws, regulations, state and commercial interests, cultural beliefs and popular expectation. Biomedicine claims unique, exclusive, and absolute knowledge about the body in sickness and health, knowledge that is universally valid and ostensibly independent of cultural or social constraints or meaning. As a society, we accept these claims largely because we believe that biomedical knowledge is based on rigorous and objective scientific investigation of the natural world. Yet the sweeping cultural authority currently granted to science is, in historical terms, fairly new. (p. 4)

Bivins’ analysis of Western scholastic medicine, Ayurveda and Chinese medicine acknowledges the deep cultural differences that subcontinents, histories and specific forms of institutionalization make but also recognizes a surface similarity. To the extent that the bio is informed by the medical, the way of approaching diagnosis, whether illness or ‘learning difficulties’, historically hinged on different markers. In the scholastic west, for instance, diagnosis hinged in particular on the seasons, the weather, the exact nature of your social interactions and the motions of the heavens at the time of your birth and during any medical encounter. Elite healers in Western scholastic medicine were not marked out by hands-on knowledge of human anatomy or physiology but grounded in astronomy, rarely touching the body, diagnosing instead of the basis of astrological charts, visual examination of bodily fluids and social position (Bivins, 2010, pp. 8–9).

Therapies were intended to heal through altering the entire corporeal system simultaneously and health depended on maintaining the balances of the four constituent substances called humours which existed in dynamic equilibrium with each other and external influences like climate, seasons and celestial spheres. What is striking in regard to possibilities, limits, parameters and elisions in what the special edition has elicited, then, is the abjection of such counter-memories that made ‘texts’ like the sky, planets, stars, sun and geography matter to analysis, to diagnosis, to concepts of improvement whether conflating education with medicine or considering education ‘alone’ as managing a child’s trajectory or ‘knowing Thyself’. The forgotten aspect of using systems of correspondence (which elevated astronomy and astrology in regard to children’s births and experiences) – a way of thinking and analysing that endured longer than any other system of reasoning in the west – is part of what ‘the biological’ now gets to build upon and play within. For example, Bernadette Baker and Antti Saari’s paper examines the conditions of possibility for looking for the source of one’s problem only in the mind–body complex:

Today, widely adopted mindfulness discourses in education rest upon certain truths that locate mindfulness practice in the experience of the mind, which has neural correlates that testify as to how it works. These truths stand at the crux of heterogeneous developments that enabled particular technologies of self, microstrategies of conversion, forms of rationality, the neuro turn and the contemplative turn to meet. Making mind the object of analysis and brain its home was not an inevitable or natural event. The meeting of neuro and contemplative turns in the twenty-first century especially required not just shifts in technologies of self out of ancient ‘pagan’ and Christian heritages into post-Cartesian scientific ones, but a culture of human dissection, the formation of a medical gaze, a problematization of teachers as stressed and education as broken.

In the papers in this Flashpoint, then, the trajectories of analysis on, in and within ‘the body’ are not agreed upon but are significant; ‘the body’ as a discrete, as a material or as an entified ‘thing’ is examined as part of the discourse networks that both abject and elevate ‘it’; and a mind–body problem so central to education’s existence becomes bio-related out of something else, against or alongside other possibilities, appearing as part of historically inflected and philosophically specific belief systems. Moreover, whatever earns the label biological is positioned as temporary, as arbitrary, as a discipline, as a shifting set of discourses. It is as provisional as sociology, as constructed, operating today as yet another system of reasoning, yet not necessarily within a flattened plane of equal possibilities for authorization or legitimation.

Flashpoint 2: Sociology meets biology: Affirming and leveraging the biosocial turn

The papers in this section relate to biological rationalities as historically independent of the social, and respond positively to the effort now to integrate what is seen as two different sets of rationalities into the biosocial (Youdell, Harwood, and Lindley; Aronsson and Lenz Taguchi). These papers could be construed as part of a project that is well enmeshed in the call of Rose (2013) for an affirmative project between the life and social sciences.

An affirmative relationship is one that seeks to identify and work with those arguments that recognize, in whatever small way, the need for a new and non-reductionist biology of human beings and other organisms in their milieu, and which can thus be brought into conversation with the evidence, concepts and forms of analysis developed in the social and human sciences. (p. 24)

The papers in this section, while drawing on social theory and sociological categories, differ from what has constituted the sociology of education in the last 20–30 years. The papers’ starting points, for example, are not necessarily an engagement with the spectres of racism, sexism, ableism and class per previous sociological analyses of inequality. A biosocial orientation that acknowledges the fundamental inseparability of the biological and social (and psychic and cultural) is seen as essential, if we are to effectively interrogate the folding together of the social, cultural, biographical, pedagogic, political, affective, neurological and biological in the interactive production of students and learning (Roberts, 2015; Youdell, 2017). This work, that has spanned the move to new materialisms (Coole & Frost, 2010), and social and anthropological biology (Ingold & Palsson, 2013), has been centrally concerned with the idea of reconfiguring the human, to the challenge not just to the ontological basis of the human, but to the consequences to the non-human – climate change, mass extinction, etc. – of human practices. For Frost (2016), this move to rethinking the human is to couple the term ‘biocultural’ with ‘creatures’. The latter is to collapse the distinction of humans from non-humans, and to show how ‘humans, like all other creatures, are alive and are able to stay alive because they are embedded in and draw manifold forms of sustenance from a habitat of some kind’ (p. 4). Here, the ‘biocultural’ while related is somewhat different from the ‘biosocial’ in that it aims to ‘[encapsulate] the mutual constitution of body and environment, of biology and habitat that has been so central to the challenge to the category of the human’ (p. 4). This mutual constitution remains an important part of the papers in this Flashpoint.

In education, this has been taken up in emerging work that comes from the overlap of the sociology of education with biology, particularly molecular biology and the new fields of epigenetics. Youdell, Harwood and Lindley suggest in their paper on stress, learning and education that, in contrast to other work on biopolitics, new approaches in bioscience might provide something new and productive to sociological thinking:

In order to enable this consideration, the paper holds a distinction between bio-knowledges – the findings being generated in new biological sciences and bio-rationalities – the political and pedagogic discourses in which elements of these findings are deployed. While these are not neatly divisible and the space is not easily held, working with this distinction provides space for analytic experimentation with the multiple ways in which bio-knowledges can be deployed and their multiple productive potentials.

In this Flashpoint, we can see the ways that biology can be a means for extending a concern with institutional and classroom practices, pedagogies and subjectivation to incorporate a wider set of forces in the overlap between molecular biology, and the brain in work on neuroscience and education. Neuroscience has become constituted in the public and policy imaginaries as ‘brain’ science (Broer & Pickersgill, 2015), with the claimed capacity to observe the ‘mind’. Pykett (2016) has argued that what we are seeing is the dominance of ‘brain culture’ where the ‘social’ aspects of neuroscience are becoming a form of scientific authority in social and political life, and ‘are increasingly shaping our relationship to ourselves, the world and to each other, in ways that are manifest in policy and practice’ (p. 8). In Aronsson and Lenz Taguchi’s paper, this relationship is driven by practitioner interest in what neuroscience may contribute to early childhood and literacy education. In this paper, the authors outline a project that emerged from a focus on a ‘shared concern’ to contribute not only an investigation of neuroscience in education, but a methodological contribution based on a collaboration between researchers and practitioners to attempt to see what would emerge from this shared concern. The paper outlines a ‘methodology [that] is about materializing theories of science and learning in a way that is situated and closely connected to the practices and the practitioners’.

Together, the papers in this Flashpoint provide a new set of foci on what biosocial education might be said to do, where ‘education’, ‘pedagogy’, the ‘teacher’ and the ‘learner’ are treated as phenomena produced through a diverse field of forces that includes the mechanisms and functions of the molecular body (Youdell, 2016).

Flashpoint 3: The changing meaning of life and purposes of education: From biocentrism and bioprospecting to the algorithmic and informational

The papers in this section play their analyses out on broad horizons rarely engaged in educational research, particularly around areas of post-human, computational and algorithmic life, and the realms of the human/inhuman in the overlap of the life and computing sciences (e.g. Pedersen, 2010). These papers posit that the nuts and bolts or mechanics of this technology are not to be celebrated automatically as sites of seduction but as markers for deeper, wider and more complex ethical issues that potentially reformat the very social compacts within which they arose. How does the meaning of Life as it intersects with the purposes of education amid a perceived biosocial turn begin to redefine the site of the political? For Gulson and Webb, this is a question about what we mean by ‘life’, and drawing on Weinstein and Colebrook’s (2017) notion of ‘critical life studies’, they look at what different ideas of life mean for both understanding and enacting education policy. The paper suggests that:

… advancements in life and computing sciences will not only demand the critical rethinking of the residual historical images of biology and education, but these may further demand new concepts and thinking through ideas of life for understanding and doing educational policy and practice.

A problematic yet necessary arena to investigate is what education’s role will be in a techno-future, and to begin to grapple with whether this is different from previous technological and knowledge changes. As Williamson, Pykett and Nemoran note in their paper, ‘[t]echnologies inspired by the human brain are becoming a pervasive presence in everyday life’. This paper aims to explore a particular instance of this to see how these technologies are being taken up in education. Specifically, how:

Brain-based forms of ‘neurocomputation’ … can be understood as ‘biosocial’ technologies designed to function according to neuroscientific understandings of the plasticity of the brain and biological understandings of epigenetics, and are intended to impress themselves on the cerebral lives of learners.

We also need to see that it is not merely a matter of seeing how ideas from the life sciences are ‘imported’ into education, but rather how these knowledges, techniques and methods may constitute and be constituted by educational research. This includes the role of biotechnology, which Liz de Freitas’ paper examines, and that highlights how biometric data can provide a new avenue of relational and material educational research that challenges the primacy of the ‘lived experience’ mode of inquiry. de Freitas contributes new conceptual developments:

with particular focus on how new biotechnology might be used to study a more-than-human worldly sensibility. Specifically, the main aim … is to show how biosensor data might serve in further developing post-human theories of learning. The term sensor technology is used to reference all technologies that produce sensory data about the body or the environment (movement, temperature, air quality, arousal, light, etc.). While avoiding techno-fantasies, either utopian or dystopic, the aim is to trigger imaginings about the potential use of biotechnologies in education research.

These papers thus consider the broad horizons upon which the parameters and definition of Life and the systematicity of compulsory education are being rewritten. The questions we might ask are of what ‘shared values’ around the invention and maintenance of compulsory schooling are assumed to be in a computational, biometric and algorithmic production of reality? And who will be involved in defining these? It would seem that we have no choice but to struggle with these questions as they unfold, for as William Gibson (2003) has noted, ‘the future is already here, it’s just not very evenly distributed’.¹

Conclusion

The above Flashpoints have indicated how there is an ‘amalgamation’ or ‘assemblage’ of biology and education that is redefining education and not only in one direction, and not only cynically. The papers collectively recognize that there are many claims to reality, inside and outside the geopolitics of Europe, representing what Deleuze (2003) calls substantive multiplicity. Substantive multiplicity is opposed to the arborescent thought that brings everything back to the root of the tree, calling something a contradiction arises in arborescent thought as the only form of critique, as an ill that goes against the root. In this modality of analysis, so many branches of the tree say basically the same thing. Collectively, the contributions in this special edition push us away from arborescent thought, off the branch and away from prior deeply held and cherished automatic theoretical camps, moralities, ontologies and hierarchies. They are engaging with substantively different fields, diverse intersections of cultural forces within and outside formal schooling, a variety of incommensurable theoretical frames, a slough of institutions, an array of personal and professional practices, and in a field – marked by multiple stakeholders, federal and state laws, professional development responsibilities and diverse research interests. One of the strengths of this Special Issue is, we think, the way in which the papers are considering competing ways of constituting truth, rather than eschewing that complexity in advance or seeking new a priori’s or universals out of interdisciplinarity.

The questions remain, however: Why and so what? What is at stake in the new biological rationalities of education? The questions we are left with that are raised by the papers in this collection are many and interrelated. We recognize that the contributions and our framing are instantiations of the possibilities and limits of ‘Western thought’. We also recognize that race especially saturates biopolitics, the long-term imbrication of race and biology, painful memories, systemic marginalization, historical practices of genocide and extinction, and fears over who owns the technologies being circled around and responded to, change ‘the future’ imagined or mapped, for whom, by whom and that this continues with new and old biologies (e.g. Meloni, 2017). That said, it seems unlikely that already existing problems in education will somehow be solved by a refusal to understand, to study, and to cautiously and deeply think through and democratically discuss the new classificatory regimes, the categories and the technological shifts regardless of how new biologies unfold. As Rabinow (1992) has argued, ‘these older cultural classifications will be joined by a vast array of new ones, which will cross-cut, partially supersede and eventually redefine the older categories in ways that are well worth monitoring’ (p. 244). Amid such calls for vigilance further questions remain, however, such as whether ‘solving’ or ‘reform’ is the sole purpose of educational research? If so, is taking something on in order to better understand or monitor what is emerging automatically giving energy to it, reinforcing its acceptance, including its new problem-making potentials and its subtle historical baggage? Is there anything beyond to ignore, to walk away, to be positioned by or to engage?

We undertook this special edition in the spirit of engagement as dangerous and good, as ultimately better than not engaging and occupying the role of passive recipients. We believe that the innovativeness and depth of the papers offered here sustain and fulfil that hope that lies at the heart of research and systematic investigation – that the papers in this issue provide a diverse, provocative, thoughtful and rich springboard for asking, raising and answering the question of what is at stake.

This Special Issue is thus more than an opening and simultaneously not a distancing – it could not announce itself or operate as an automatic celebration or denigration of new biological rationalities, yet this does not mean that our position is neutral – or eternal. It honours a space for engagement that enables each contribution to weigh differently the balance between embrace and critique, old and new, past–present–future, human/non-human/inhuman and more. As such, our call for papers was an invitation that ended up pointing in multifarious and unexpected directions, the content of which could not have been predicted in advance, where the advent of ‘old’ and ‘new’ discourses (contesting even that divide) co-existed, competed and amalgamated amid the extant hierarchy of disciplines and education’s historically ‘lower’ position relative to the biophysical sciences.

We especially wish to note here, then, how our orientation and this Special Issue relates to the re-combinatorial potentials that change the very possibilities for inscribing what can count as a site of ‘action’. Before the call for papers for this issue, we could not only not have predicted the analyses we received, but what we received says something profound about what educational researchers are both confronted with and confronting as sites of action: the what and where of Life, truth-production, what is meant by child, by self, by biology, by brain, by nation, by autonomy, by computation, by stress, by mind, by system. This is an enormous range, a high-stakes range, and such sites of action are not amenable to simplistic, singular, mutually exclusive ‘ethical’ for or against takes – in families’ decision-making, in school community-building or in broader social policy innovation. Far from nihilism or relativism, the shifts in discourse and new assemblages bring with them a mélange of potentials which remain to be seen in each case. Researching that shift and that mélange, inviting broader discussion, inspecting the nature of our ‘own’ attachments and checking our ‘own’ moral formatting at the door are the ethical orientation and the ethical quandary. We are grateful, then, for the depth and breadth of our contributors’ willingness to engage in thought experiments and interrogations that push the boundaries of the acceptable and the real with a spirit of responsibility that includes and exceeds ‘the human’, and we hope that the papers collectively invite broader input and more consideration of their contested terms, their sensitivity to the specificity of spatio-temporalities, their overturning of banal binaries and their interdisciplinary dynamism in the twenty-first century.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Gibson’s use of this line is multiple. For example, see the interview in The Economist, 4 December 2003. For an interesting investigation into the origin of the quote, see http://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/01/24/future-has-arrived/.