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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
The environmental media-making involves students in at least two processes, searching their
particular interest and making a media presentation. I will start tracking students using their phone to
understand an emergence of EE in students’ learning activity.
4.1 Searching for the topic
When students went to the farm site the farmer told them his story and explained how he ran his
farm. Some students started to record his expression, some took notes while others used the mobile phone
to record the speech. Unfortunately on that day the famer felt unwell andhe could not show the students
around his farm so I invited students to walk in his fields as I had been to this place several times before.
Students walked through the farm, took photos, and took their notes. They discussed their assignment
while walking in the fields. Students went back to the farmer’s house, which was located at the front of the
farm, and asked the farmer questions about his practices. For the first time visit, they spent four hours
collecting basic information in order to plan their presentations. A pattern was developing in the
interaction among students, place, farmer, lecturer and learning tools such as books and technological
devices.
On the first visit, the phone impacted on the youth learning behaviors. Mobile phones were used to
collect information Figure 1.
Education and Leadership in Glocalization : What does “think globally, act locally” mean for education around the world?
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