Educational Philosophy and Theory

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Education as a mode of existence: A Latourian

inquiry into assessment validity in higher
education

Jonathan Tummons

To cite this article: Jonathan Tummons (2019): Education as a mode of existence: A Latourian
inquiry into assessment validity in higher education, Educational Philosophy and Theory, DOI:
10.1080/00131857.2019.1586530

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2019.1586530

Published online: 05 Mar 2019.

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EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY AND THEORY
https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2019.1586530

Education as a mode of existence: A Latourian inquiry into

assessment validity in higher education
Jonathan Tummons
School of Education, Durham University, Durham, UK

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

Within professional higher education, the construct of assessment Received 5 July 2018
validity is used to make assumptions about the extent to which Revised 25 November 2018
students are able to replicate in professional practice what they have Accepted 10 February 2019
learned during their studies through the provision of authentic simu-
KEYWORDS
lated opportunities to practice. Drawing on the work of Bruno Latour, Actor-network theory;
this article argues that the conceptualisation as well as use of the idea ethnography; higher
of assessment validity in theorising the assessment of simulation-based education; Latour; modes
learning in professional courses, in order to predict the future perform- of existence
ance of the student constitutes a category mistake that consequently
makes claims for assessment validity which are unfounded. The article
goes on to explore ways by which ethnographers of education might
use other elements of Latour’s work in order to generate rich, problem-
atising accounts of educational practice.

Introduction: reflections on a site visit

In May 2018, I was walking through a training hospital in Nova Scotia, Canada, with the research
team of which I am currently a member. Our project, Becoming a Professional Through Distributed
Learning: A Sociomaterial Ethnography, is exploring distributed medical education in Canada. As
we walked through the spaces where the students practice their clinical skills with medical simu-
lation dummies, we discussed the relationship between these practices, and the real-life experi-
ences that they would encounter when taking up their clerkships in geriatric or emergency
medicine, discussions that we returned to as we watched video recordings of the students as
they fitted foley catheters to the dummies. The behaviours of some of the medical students,
typified by comments such as ‘if this were real life, I would … ’ led me to consider the ways in
which such simulated environments might be considered authentic. How does practising on a
dummy help people learn in such a way that they can perform the procedure with a
real patient?
Such questions pertain to a variety of curricula, not just medical education, specifically to the
ways in which assessment within other professional programmes can be said to be valid.
Assessment validity is a troublesome construct. A critical explication of validity in assessment falls
outside the scope of this article: nonetheless it can be usefully defined as the extent to which a
method of assessment is able to capture the achievements intended from a programme of study,
and predict achievement in future practice (Messick, 1989; Newton, 2007). However, the warrant
that validity claims when derived in part from authenticity through simulation is highly

CONTACT Jonathan Tummons [email protected] School of Education, Durham University, Leazes

Road, Durham, DH1 1TA, UK.
ß 2019 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia
2 J. TUMMONS

significant when considering assessment in professional or technical curricula that prepare stu-
dents for specific occupations within which their future actions might make a material difference
to the outcomes of not only the profession, but also those people who use the service that the
members of the profession offer. The problem that emerges relates to the extent to which
assessment within a professional curriculum that rests on a simulated context is valid, if we
assume that validity in some way has something to say about the future performance of the stu-
dents being assessed. To what extent does doing well in a simulated assessment generate a war-
rant for future real-life performance?
The term ‘professional curriculum’ is widely used to refer to programmes of study delivered at
universities, at undergraduate or postgraduate level, to prepare students for a specific field of
employment. Examples include the healthcare professions, social work, and teaching. Such pro-
grammes are invariably endorsed by a professional body, and curricula are mapped onto rele-
vant professional standards, both aspects of quality assurance that render such curricula fit for
purpose, so that stakeholders – funding bodies, regulatory authorities, service users – can be
confident that those professionals who have successfully travelled through the curriculum have
sufficient professional knowledge and competence to be allowed to practice (Bourner et al.,
2000; Eraut, 1994; Taylor, 1997). As our medical education research is only at an early stage, the
empirical foundations of this article are derived from my previous ethnographic research into
teacher education (Tummons 2010, 2014, 2018). The theoretical foundations of this article are
derived from the work of Bruno Latour, and it is to an explication of this framework that I shall
now turn.

Latour: from actor-networks to modes of existence

Actor-network theory remains an under-used sociological/philosophical approach within educa-
tional research compared to Bourdieusian or Foucauldian studies: it has been employed to
explore a number of diverse aspects of educational provision, including university physics and
business curricula (Nespor, 1994), PISA testing (Gorur, 2011), teaching in nurseries (Plum, 2018),
professional standards for teachers (Mulcahy, 2011), the relationship of technology to theory in
education research (Thumlert et al., 2015) and – of particular salience to the argument that I am
constructing here – the construction of knowledge through ethnographic research in education
(Larsson, 2006). It has been described as: a component of ethnography that is concerned with
‘the processes of ordering that generate effects such as technologies’ (Law, 1994, p. 18); a ‘way
of talking … [that] allows us to look at identity and practice as functions of ongoing interactions
with distant elements (animate and inanimate) of networks that have been mobilized along
intersecting trajectories’ (Nespor, 1994, pp. 12–13); and a ‘sociology of the social and … [a] soci-
ology of associations’ (Latour, 2005, p. 9). It is a way of exploring how social projects are accom-
plished in ways that can be traced across networks of all sorts of stuff: stories, people,
paperwork, computer simulations, routines, texts and voices. It provides ways of thinking about
how networks or associations carry influence and influence each other, and foregrounds the
ways in which people as well as things are made to do things across boundaries of geography
or time or institutions.
Actor-network theory is now absorbed within a larger anthropological and philosophical pro-
ject, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence (AIME) (Latour, 2013). AIME constitutes an assemblage of
several strands of Latour’s work, including science and technology studies (STS), explorations of
modernism, geopolitics, semiotics, and philosophy (Conway, 2016, Delchambre and Marquis,
2013). AIME sets out to construct a systematic description of the different ontological systems
that co-exist to describe contemporary ways of being (Ricci et al., 2015). Elements of AIME have
begun to be employed through explorations of legal theory (McGee, 2014), politics and post-pol-
itics (Tsouvalis, 2016), and contemporary academic practice (Decuypere and Simons, 2016).
 EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY AND THEORY 3

Modes of existence are those social, technical, semiotic and material conglomerations such as
law, or technology or morality, that constitute the empirical multi-realist ontology that Latour has
concerned himself with. Modes of existence are identified through the use of a series of nota-
tions: thus, technology becomes [TEC], or morality becomes [MOR]. Subsumed within AIME,
actor-network theory is designated as [NET], now just one amongst fifteen modes. Whether or
not there might be more modes than those that Latour identifies is left unexplored (Edward,
2016). Perhaps there is such a thing as a mode of existence of academic practice, as suggested
by Decuypere and Simons (2016, p. 14), and perhaps others as well. Here, I draw on AIME to
illustrate how Latour’s multi-realist ontology can be used to explore the stuff of education more
generally, and validity in assessment more specifically, focussing on one small episode of educa-
tional practice derived from ethnographic research.

Generating inquiries about the world

According to AIME, one of the ways through which we can advance our inquiries about the
world we live in and the things we do, is through the identification, explication and avoidance
of category mistakes (Ryle, 1949). Category mistakes are ontological mistakes. When something
that consists of one property is presented as consisting of a different property, then a category
mistake in relation to the thing has occurred. It is by disambiguating the ways in which we
make sense of the phenomenon being discussed, that the category mistake can be resolved.
Ryle (1949, pp. 6–7) provides three examples of category mistakes, one being that of someone
watching a game of cricket for the first time who, after having paid attention to explanations of
the different roles of the fielder, the bowler and the wicket-keeper, complains that the explan-
ation has not encompassed the role of maintaining ‘team spirit’ or ‘the spirit of the game’. Any
subsequent correction of this category mistake would need to explore the difference between
the different roles that the players have on the field, and their wider, more collective role, in
playing the game in a positive, mutually encouraging manner. In this way, what Ryle posited as
the category mistake of Cartesian philosophy, the bifurcation of body and mind, can be over-
come (Ryle, 1949, pp. 9–13).
An example of a category mistake that Latour recounts is of Mont Aiguille, a mountain south
of Grenoble, France. If we want to know more things about this place, should we go hiking up
it, or study some maps, or both, or something else? (Latour, 2013, p. 69 ff.) In fact, we can do dif-
ferent things to intensify our efforts in knowing about Mont Aiguille: go on more extensive walks;
write more, richer descriptions of the routes and the rocks; and undertake more frequent geo-
graphical surveys with increasingly sophisticated measurement tools. In this way the steady accu-
mulation of maps, photographs, memoirs, diagrams, signs, and so forth that allow us to ‘see’ and
to ‘know’ about Mont Aiguille – without even needing to actually go there if we can’t manage it
– becomes stronger and richer. However, the ontological bifurcation between the map and the
mountain needs to be remembered. To forget this would not only do a disservice to the many
people and things or immutable mobiles (Latour, 2005) who have gathered and been gathered
together over time to help us know more about the mountain (the terrain, the geology, the his-
tory, the environment), but would also lead to a category mistake: a conflation of the mountain,
with what we know about the mountain. This is not to defend or even to propose a constructiv-
ist or postmodernist epistemology: there is no hyper-subjective collection of multiple truths con-
cerning Mont Aiguille. We do not all get to construct our own ‘truths’ about what Mont Aiguille
is, not least because common sense would render any outlandish statements as nonsensical
(Latour, 2013, p. 59). Rather, we want to be able to agree that Mont Aiguille is what it is: we
want to be able to say ‘true’ and ‘accurate’ things about it, to create faithful accounts or object-
ive knowledge (Conway, 2016). And we can do this through our inquiry. But our true and accur-
ate accounts are not the same thing as the mountain itself.
4 J. TUMMONS

Category mistakes occur when we mistake actual things in the world (it might be a mountain,
but it might be an institution, or a building, or a group of people, or a process) with the ways in
which we write or talk about them (or make images of or about them, or sing about them). To
put it another way, through introducing two further modes of existence to this account, we
might instead say that when we confuse or conflate real things or beings, which are referred to
within AIME as beings of reproduction [REP], for the ways in which we write and talk about them,
which are referred to within AIME as building up into chains of information and understanding
or reference [REF] that we have established in order to bring those same beings into view, a cat-
egory mistake of the [REP-REF] type is introduced. Category mistakes of this type are paradig-
matic of the Cartesian epistemology and ontology of ‘modernity’ that, following Ryle, Latour is
concerned to unravel (a broader element within AIME as well as Latour’s wider body of research.
The conflation of a being or a thing [REP] with the way that we write or talk about it, the way
that we create inscriptions and descriptions of it [REF], is just one of the ways by which the
Moderns (to borrow another item of Latour’s terminology) have sought to establish apodictic
statements relating to the world. One of the aims of the Inquiry, therefore, is to unravel the
Moderns’ cartesian (mis)understanding of the bifurcation between the world, and the things that
are known about the world.

Category mistakes within professional higher education

How might an ethnographer of education (Latour describes AIME as the work of an
‘ethnographer’ or ‘anthropologist’ – here I use the term ‘ethnographer of education’ to reflect
this as well as my own academic work) make use of these ideas, and specifically the notion of a
[REP-REF] category mistake? In order to place this discussion within empirically recognisable con-
texts, I draw on prior research in order to generate an example that demonstrates how the [REP-
REF] category mistake can be employed to disrupt taken-for-granted notions. The example that I
discuss here relates to validity, as earlier defined, within the assessment of reflective practice
within teacher education. Specifically, it is important to note that assessment validity within pro-
fessional education in part entails the construction of models of assessment that are sufficiently
realistic and/or authentic, that consist of processes, tools, procedures and environments that are
sufficiently closely aligned to the actual professional contexts that students are studying towards
(Klenowski, 2003).
Challenges to the ways in which assessment theory and practice are defined and operational-
ised are far from uncommon. Indeed, it might be suggested that spending time explicating, let
alone critiquing, matters such as these is moot. However, to fail to provide at least some sense
of the complexity that lies behind and underneath such discussions would be to risk reinforcing
one further aspect of the Moderns’ repertoire: the idea that information (about assessment,
about Mont Aiguille, about anything that we might wish to explore through our inquiry) is ‘pure’
or ‘unchallenged’ (Latour, 2013, p. 93), that it can be presented immediately, unproblematically,
and without mediation (Conway, 2016, p. 7). Latour uses the analogy of accessing information
on a computer to illustrate this problem, contrasting the need to account carefully for our chains
of reference [REF] with the immediate delivery of information that we might receive, sat in front
of our laptop computers, from double-clicking on a mouse button. Thus, the double click mode
[DC] constitutes the antithesis to the inquiry presented within AIME, namely that there are no
such things as facts that speak for themselves (Latour, 2013, p. 137). My argument, therefore, is
that the validity of assessment in reflective practice (and perhaps in other educational contexts)
is too often treated as knowledge of the double-click mode, which is labelled as [REF-DC], lack-
ing a careful account as to how it is arrived at, leading to a category mistake of the [REF-REP]
type that leads to claims for the validity of the assessment process that cannot be sustained.
 EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY AND THEORY 5

Teacher education, reflective practice, and validity

Within the dominant discourse of teacher education (Gee, 1996), reflective practice is reified as a pro-
fessional attribute, a characteristic of professional activity that is required in order to enter the teach-
ing profession and maintain good standing within it. It is expected that both trainee and experienced
teachers engage in reflection on practice as part of their professional repertoire. As such, it needs to
be included within teacher education curricula, where it remains more-or-less unchallenged, although
there is considerable debate relating to different models of the assessment of reflective practice, and
the knowledge (professional, experiential, propositional or otherwise) that reflective practice serves to
help (trainee) teachers to construct. If we assume that the assessment of reflective practice is valid,
however, then we have to assume that assessors are able to infer that what students are doing is,
indeed, ‘reflective practice’. The validity of this assessment rests on two dimensions: first, that the way
in which reflective practice is understood by students and assessors is aligned; second, that the evi-
dence that is gathered from the assessment process is sufficient for assessors to make their infer-
ences. The inference to be made in this context is in relation to the extent to which the assessors
can judge that the student has learned about reflective practice through completing a variety of
reflective assignments, and will in turn become a reflective practitioner in the classroom.
Remembering that it is the assessment of reflective practice that is of concern, not the prac-
tice of reflection amongst teachers and trainee teachers more generally, it is straightforward to
identify literature that seeks to critique the assessment of reflective practice before looking for
ways to enhance or reconstruct it in such a way as to enhance validity. Pertinent examples
include calls for more clarity and rigour in constructing reflective practice assessment frameworks
in order to enhance validity (Collin et al., 2013; Smith and Trede, 2013), as well as calls for innov-
ation and development within the construction of assessment methods in order to facilitate
more meaningful and authentic reflective practice, again enhancing validity (Barton and Ryan,
2014; Stupans et al., 2013). Analyses such as these share a concern to correct or otherwise ameli-
orate the validity of an assessment process that, precisely because it is currently tolerably valid
and might be rendered more so, can therefore with a degree of certainty predict that those
trainee teachers who have successfully completed these assignments will acquire the habits and
mindset as well as techniques of reflective practice and draw on these when they enter the pro-
fession. And it is validity that constitutes the element of assessment theory through which what
might be termed an epistemological and ontological bridge between reflective practice within a
teacher education programme and reflective practice within the teaching profession, is posited.

Locating the category mistake

My argument is that the agglomeration of research into reflective practice within professional educa-
tion has served to construct this powerful discourse surrounding reflective practice, which has been
able to persuade many people that if only we get the teacher-education assignments ‘right’, we can
engender reflective practitioners. If only we adjust the construction of the portfolio or allow the use
of different writing models or allow trainees to select their preferred approach from a menu of
reflective writing models, then the authenticity and validity of the reflective assignments will be
enhanced to the extent that we can make more confident claims about the reflective practice habits
of the newly qualified teacher. In this sense, the construct of ‘assessment validity’ constitutes know-
ledge that has become ossified, with the tenuous chains of argument, of choices and of inquiry that
led to the settling of the notion of validity, lost sight of. Or, to use the terminology of AIME, ‘validity’
has become knowledge of the Double Click mode [REF-DC] (Latour, 2013, p. 128). The complex
chains of reference [REF] through which conflicting ideas about ‘validity’ have become established
(McGee, 2014, pp. 101–102), but by no means agreed upon, have been usurped by a definition of
‘validity’ that assumes not only that it is possible to have such a construct in the first place but also
that the definition of such a construct can be agreed on and then operationalised, fixed into the
6 J. TUMMONS

assessment criteria of teacher-education curricula and embodied within and through the actions of
external examiners, moderation reports, professional standards, and assessment theorists.
And so, we find teacher educators running reflective practice sessions for their trainees that
encompass a range of activities. Trainees engage in reflection on teaching practice sessions
which have been observed by their mentors, write reflections relating to their own week-by-
week progress, and include reflective elements within academic essays, gathered together in a
portfolio (MacLellan, 2004). Teacher trainers grade the portfolios, hold moderation meetings, and
attend examination boards where awards are confirmed. The boundaries between grades are dis-
cussed, sometimes – though by no means always – through reference to institutional standards,
and external examiners scrutinise these processes, reading samples of student work and check-
ing to see that moderation processes have been followed, remembering that such processes,
and the social practices that envelop them, are invariably specific to the institution in question
(Hudson et al., 2017). I have explored these practices in my own prior ethnographic research,
informed by actor-network theory (Tummons, 2010, 2014, 2018). For this inquiry, it is sufficient
to note that the assemblage of practices that I have described can be understood as constituting
an actor-network, designated here as [NET] (Latour, 2013, pp. 61–62).
Within this [NET], the [REF-REP] category mistake of assessment validity is located. The domin-
ant discourses (Gee, 1996) of higher education assessment practices operate with sufficient political
power (I shall return to politics later) so as to persuade a sufficient number of actors that ‘validity’
has been constructed in such a way that it can be taken for granted, a form of construction about
which The Moderns would permit a critique within strictly defined parameters: a critique that
allows – indeed, fetishizes – multiple interpretations, but loses sight of the tenuous network of
events, practices, people and artefacts that allow ‘validity’ to be constructed in the first place
(Edwards and Fenwick, 2015; Latour, 2007). With ‘validity’ formalised in such a way as this, it is a
simple operation to allow this construct to explain how requiring trainee teachers to complete
their reflective assessments and portfolios leads them to become (with a tolerable degree of vari-
ation) reflective practitioners after qualification. ‘Validity’ is so strong, so well entrenched within
the politics of assessment and of professionalism, that reference to it in the [DC] mode permits
actors to lose sight of the ontological and epistemological differences that distinguish the trainee
in the university classroom from the qualified teacher in the classroom. These are two different
spaces or places – two different institutions. This does not mean that these two institutions are
bifurcated, however. The crisscrossing of activities across the institutional, geographic or temporal
spaces that allow us to see the differences between these two institutions is so copious that any
notion of a boundary between them simply does not make sense (Latour, 2013, p. 30). But they
are different nonetheless, and the ‘validity’ category mistake attempts to join them together so
that unsettling questions about the validity of the assessment of reflective practice can be side-
stepped. We lose sight of the differences between doing reflective practice assignments and being
reflective practitioners just as Ryle’s (1949) fictional interlocutor loses sight of the differences
between the technical role of a specific member of a cricket team and the broader philosophy of
fair play. The assessment of reflective practice and the practice of reflection are joined by docu-
ments, books, people, forms and more: chains of reference [REF] that allow us to move between
them in just the same way that Mont Aiguille is joined to our knowledge of Mont Aiguille through
maps, cartographers, the stories of fellow hikers and so on. The assessment of reflective practice
and the practice of reflection co-respond in the same was as Mont Aiguille co-responds to the map
of Mont Aiguille (Latour, 2013, p. 86). They co-respond, but they are different.

The politics of assessment validity

I need to draw on another mode of existence to begin a wider discussion concerning assessment
and reflective practice, a discussion that has been closed off by the [REP-REF] category mistake.
 EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY AND THEORY 7

Specifically, I need to consider the organisational and institutional politics [POL] that have,
amongst other things, eschewed the unpacking of this category mistake in favour of a genre of
discourse that Latour refers to as straight talk (2013, p. 127). It is through straight talk that know-
ledge of the [REF-DC] kind is explicated, discussed in meetings, seminar rooms and corridors.
‘Interlocutory situations’ (Latour, 2013, p. 125) such as these serve many functions. But it is the
function of persuasion, of generating a sense of adherence to a particular course of action, pro-
cess, or way of working, that renders such situations political in the way in which Latour pro-
poses the politics [POL] mode (Latour, 2013, p. 134). Any collective situation has the potential to
generate activity in the [POL] mode, the activity that ensues whenever some people meet and
discuss things that they might want to do to shape or adjust the world that is around them
(Tsouvalis, 2016 – though see also the argument that Latour pays insufficient attention to the
theorization of ‘power’ and how it might be enacted in political, as well as other, contexts
(Kipnis, 2015).
As with any mode of existence, [POL] needs to be considered on its own terms. Each mode
has its own way of working, of talking, that needs to be considered in its own right. Thus, we
find that political speech constitutes a way of talking about things, of arguing, making state-
ments, establishing knowledge and so forth, that leads to political institutions making statements
regarding ‘truth’ or ‘falsity’ that are quite distinct in how these are done in comparison to other
modes such as religious institutions [REL]. In just the same way as we want to be able to say
‘true’ things about Mont Aiguille, so we might want to be able to say ‘true’ things about politics,
or about religion. But the ways in which these ‘true’ things are established are distinct to each
mode: a mode has a unique type of veridiction (Latour, 2013, p. 53) in order to establish its feli-
city and infelicity conditions. For Latour, modes of veridiction pertain specifically to each mode
of existence. Thus, we might draw on any number of modes of veridiction depending on the
nature of our inquiry, so long as we subscribe overall to the multiple ontologies of the AIME pro-
ject (a commitment that I return to below).
We can now position the consensus that has grown up around the validity of the assessment
of reflective practice [REF-DC] in terms of politics [POL]. We can see the network [NET] of people,
routines, policies and objects that have been associated sufficiently strongly to gain a degree of
permanence; and we can see how the assemblage within this [NET] coalesces around the con-
struction of assessment validity within the dominant discourse of teacher education that I out-
lined above. This dominant discourse, or straight talk, is advantageous precisely because it
discredits other ways of speaking about something, a process that is accomplished through
bringing knowledge of the [DC] mode into politics, as [POL-DC]. Just as [DC] knowledge denies
the hiatuses, exigencies and discontinuities that in fact underpin knowledge of the [REF] type, so
[POL-DC] straight talk maintains plausibility through presenting as ‘true’ things that might well
have been established as ‘true’ but which rest on chains of reference [REF] that are characterised
by those same hiatuses, exigencies and discontinuities. Whilst knowledge of the [REF] mode not
only acknowledges those tribulations but also foregrounds them, knowledge of the [DC] mode
assumes that we can enjoy direct access to unmediated knowledge, promulgated through the
use of straight talk within any political [POL] situation.

Conclusion: generating accounts of assessment practice

AIME is an empirical inquiry, looking at different courses of action within different domains, inter-
related but nonetheless distinct. Through this inquiry we can generate robust, pluralistic
accounts of the world. These accounts are rooted in the empirical, and it is through ethno-
graphic research that the present account has been realised, through which AIME can proceed.
An inquiry into any course of action – such as the course of action that leads to the establish-
ment of a dominant discourse of assessment validity in higher education – starts with the
8 J. TUMMONS

identification of the things, processes and people who are involved in allowing this course of
action to come to pass, enrolled within an actor-network or [NET]. The explication of a [NET] can
start at any point within the network – such as the assessment of reflective practice within a
teacher-training curriculum – and from that starting point the ethnographer can travel in any
number of directions, so long as they continue to trace the connections, leaps, and movements
that the things and people enrolled within the [NET] pass through (Latour, 2005). From here, the
ethnographer can look for those category mistakes – such as mistakes of the [REF-REP] type that
conflate being a reflective practitioner with assessing reflective practice – that are lost sight of
by our informants (who, in line with the principle of symmetry which is characteristic of actor-net-
work theory, can be both non-humans as well as humans). Such mistakes lead to knowledge of
the [DC] type, such as the way in which assessment validity is rendered as [REF-DC] knowledge,
sustained by straight talk within a political space that sustains this knowledge [POL-DC] in a
manner that focuses solely on the results of the tenuous chains of reference [REF] that allow us
to make statements about things that might be ‘true’ or not, rather than also focusing on the
ways by which those chains are brought and then held together in the first place.
How, then, might we proceed with the present inquiry, that has begun to unravel the ways in
which assessment validity on one teacher-training curriculum might be talked about and under-
stood? There are two complementary ways to proceed that I would wish to consider. The first is
to continue our research in a manner appropriate to educational or social research more gener-
ally, to draw on theoretical generalisation to inform our empirically as well as theoretically
informed reading and research into other reifications or instaurations (Gobo, 2008; Latour, 2013,
p. 160) of reflective practice and of the assessment of reflective practice, and to look for other
category mistakes. And the second is to widen the horizons of our inquiry into other areas of
education: education consists of heterogeneous practices that are hardly ill researched, but
which, I suggest, might benefit from an inquiry of the AIME type.
At the same time, we have to avoid charges of theoretical essentialism and/or an uncritical
adoption of AIME. In keeping with actor-network theory [NET], AIME thus far eschews direct dis-
cussion of methodology. In the case of actor-network theory, this has allowed for the emergence
of a range of approaches that can be conveniently described in terms of social research, includ-
ing (but not restricted to) ethnography (Fenwick and Edwards, 2010). This broad approach to
research is in turn adopted by AIME (Berliner et al., 2013). Like its predecessor, AIME is performa-
tive, permitting some ways of viewing the world whilst restricting others (Law and Singleton,
2013), reflecting the epistemological politics of ethnographic research more widely (Atkinson,
2015). Indeed, a critical reading of AIME foregrounds the problematic that surrounds the poten-
tial for contradiction between AIME’s claim to be a venue for multiple ontologies on the one
hand, and Latour’s sweeping critique of Durkheimian and Wittgenstinian sociology on the other
(Delchambre and Marquis, 2013, p. 570–571). The politics of representation as well as of method-
ology both, therefore, need to be critically attended to in a manner that Latour does not
address, but which we can find addressed within ethnographies (of education) more broadly
(Marques da Silva and Parker Webster, 2018; Smith, 2005; Tedlock, 2000). With these caveats in
place, we can proceed to our inquiry.
Latour defines a mode of existence in terms of four aspects (for what follows see Latour,
2013, p. 488–489). First, we need to consider the course of action being followed – the trajectory
of the social phenomenon that we are concerned with – and look for the hiatuses that the
course of action has to overcome. The course of action that I have explored here is of assess-
ment: the hiatus is the establishment of validity. Second, we need to consider how this mode
establishes ‘true’ and ‘false’ statements – the felicity and infelicity conditions: here, it is through
examiners, handbooks, routines and criteria that ‘true’ statements about assessment have been
established. Third, we need to explore the beings that the mode institutes: here – remembering
the principle of symmetry – we might explore teachers and students, organisations, buildings,
and texts of all kinds. Finally, we consider the otherness or alterity of the mode: here, those
 EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY AND THEORY 9

aspects of the stuff of ‘education’ that generate an ontology distinct from another mode. There
are other hiatuses to consider of course, just as there are any number of other trajectories within
the practices of schools, colleges and universities that might engage us as ethnographers. There
are more felicity and infelicity conditions to identify, more types of beings – non-human as well
as human – established through educational processes, and more kinds of otherness to describe.
With further empirical inquiry, it would be possible to describe the chains of reference that bind
and surround educational processes with sufficient detail, depth and rigour to be able to identify
education as a mode of existence in and of itself, to which I shall tentatively ascribe the nota-
tion [EDU].

Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Oakleigh Welply and Rille Raaper, fine researchers and colleagues, for their helpful advice dur-
ing the thinking about, writing, and revising of this paper. I would also like to thank my medical education
research colleagues: Rola Ajjawi, Paula Cameron, Olga Kits, and Anna MacLeod.

Notes on contributor
Jonathan Tummons is Associate Professor of Education at Durham University, UK. He is an ethnographer of educa-
tion and sits on the committee for the Oxford Ethnography and Education Conference. As well as his inquiry into
using Latour, Jonathan is currently researching the ways in which people and technologies work together in dis-
tributed medical education programmes.

ORCID
Jonathan Tummons http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1372-3799

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