Education As A Mode of Existence: A Latourian Inquiry Into Assessment Validity in Higher Education
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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