Education and Leadership in Glocalization : What does “think globally, act locally” mean for education around the world?
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Environmental media-making as a technological effect: Actor–Network Theory ANT interpretation
SunisaKongprasit
Thaksin University, Phattalung Campus, Thailand kssunisahotmail.com
,
Sunisatsu.ac.th ,
Abstract
This paper provides a critique of environmental learning processes and the roles of media technology
for environmental science students in environmental education, by applying Actor Network Theory ANT.
ANT is used to analyse the learning network’s formation. I will show how ANT can be used to
explore the constitution of a particular environmental education learning network and its effects. The
investigation will examine the student’s activities. Environmental science students from Thaksin
University, Phattalung campus, went to the rural community and used media technologies creating
VDOs, radio spots, vinyl posters, books and nature trails. They used several kinds of devices, such as
digital cameras, recorders, mobile phones and iPads to collect information and data. By using ANT I
highlight hybrid relationships between human and non-human actors in producing those media. ANT
shows the ways in which technology has an effect on students’ environmental learning processes by
producing environmental media.
Keywords: environmental education, media-making technology, Actor-Network Theory,technological
effect
1. Introduction
An environmental education EE subject was established as an elective subject for the third year
environmental science students of Thaksin University, Phattalung Campus, Southern Thailand. A major task
for the subject requirement was the creation of media technologies without any guidance. Media is defined
as, “the main ways that large numbers of people receive information and entertainment, that
istelevision, radio, newspapers and the internet”Oxford, 2005, p. 953. Media-making was a
semester assignment aimed at promoting the environmental awareness to the audiences because
“the media provides a crucial avenue for environmental education”Pearson, Dorrian,
Litchfield, 2011, p. 751. Twenty six students were enrolled in the subject and they were divided into six
groups to create the environmental media related to the community. To achieve this objective, a lecture
was organized in Buddhist agriculture using the local community as the place of study. Students, therefore
had to create their environmental media to stimulate the audience using a farm’s circumstances as a case
study one group had to create one media. This was a three month long project. It began in
December 2013 when the lecturer first invited studentsparticipants to the Buddhist farm to search for
their chosen media. Students travelled 60 kilometers distance from the University. The lecturer planned to
go to that farm three times.
On the first visit students were introduced to the place and were informed about Buddhist agriculture.
The objective on this visit was to identify which media topic they were interested in. As a result, students
decided to create five types of environmental media topics including VDO, radio spots, vinyl posters,
books and nature trails.
On their return to the University, each group presented their media outline in the classroom.Their
peers and the lecturer also added comments and suggestions.
Data was collected on the second visit in January 2014. However, some students needed more time for
their data collecting sothey made another appointment with the farmer to fulfill their media- making at the
weekend. Students presented their work at the university prior to showing it to the farmer.
The last visit was in February 2014 when they presented their work to the farmer and details were
confirmed with the farmer. The final version of the media program was
checked and approved by the lecturer.
2. The method
This study was conducted in the context of local learning at the Thaksin University and at Tamot
community, Phattalung Province, Thailand. Short 2009 in his study on the role of EE in the
environmental action prompted on how the EE educators can know when their efforts have been
effective in environmental promotion. Taking his concern, I therefore have two aims of this study,
firstly is to investigate the role of technological devices in the environmental learning process and
secondly, to understand an environmental education learning process for the younger generation. This
qualitative study deployed two types of research techniques to produce data, observations and
document analysis. Participants were given pseudonyms to ensure that all information gained
remained anonymous in any of the reports. The study adopted an Actor-Network Theory ANT approach to
Education and Leadership in Glocalization : What does “think globally, act locally” mean for education around the world?
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2014
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investigate relationships between human and non- human actors in the environmental learning process
and shows how the students developed and used technology to engage in environmental education and
complete their work. The results are based on field work observations which were made on the three farm
visits. Photographs were used to monitor the students’ learning activities. I also drew on students comments,
field notes and their works both in the field and in the classroom in order to describe network relationships.
3. Actor-Network Theory
Actor-network theory ANT has been used in social science research for more than fifteen years in
areas such as sociology, technology, feminist studies, cultural geography, organization and management
studies, health care and environmental planning Fenwick Edwards, 2010. John Law, Bruno Latour
and Michel Callon are among the more prominent scholars associated with the development of this
approach. ANT is “a disparate family of material semiotic tools, sensibilities and methods of analysis
that treat everything in the social and natural worlds as a continuously generated effect of the webs of
relations within which they are located” Law, 2009, p. 141. Both human and non-human entities can be
conceptualized as actors that do things Latour, 1992, p. 241. To understand the effect of
technological devicesactors in EE learning process, ANT will help to investigate the education and
learning process in which learning is a process and it is a relation of material, people and place Mulcahy,
2011. Barnacle and Mewburn 2010 in their Ph.D. study found that the study product, thesis, was an
effect of heterogeneous network:
the thesis is not merely the product of the candidate, but a network of relations of
which the candidate is a significant, but not solitary, part p.441.
Taking Barnacle and Mewburn 2010,a media making process can be regarded as an effect of the
heterogeneous networks including socio-technological relations of which it emerges. In other words, media is
not merely the product of the students, but a network of relations of which the students are significantly
related to
. As a result, questions will be asked in this
study and includes what is the EE media making network and how the media-making occurs.
To investigate the media-making process, how and why the students learn through engaging the
technological devices, Latour 2005 recommends ways to apply ANT in the research. ANT requires
researchers to carefully and thoroughly investigate as he provides examples “ANT prefers to travel slowly,
on small roads, on foot, and by paying the full cost of any displacement out of its own pocket” p.23. My
entry point will be the mobile phone. The phone is a technology in which Nespor2011 called “a device”.
Jan Nespor in the organizational study insisted that devices influence the organizational change:
organizational change processes initiated by work on the devices played out in non-
linear waysacross the decades-long careers of their makers, and that to understand them
we not only have to look across such extended time frames, but must also
consider how agency and identity positions emerge and shift over time through the
mediation of devices Nespor, 2011, p. 15.
Considering the role of devices and their relationships in a context of the EE learning process, it
is interesting to note on the role of the mobile phone. How does the phone support the learning
process?Does it make a change for the learning process particularly for the environmental media-
making process? Using the phone as well as iPads to promote an environmental action may possibly be a
controversial issue in the environmental learning process. In Thailand, the mobile phone is normally
banned in classroom learning. Yet, in this outside classroom lesson, the lecturer allows students to use
them, not for normal functions like talking or chatting, but as a learning tool.
4. Following the mobile phone
