Paper Short Abstract:

This contribution focuses on the infrastructural processes of academic knowledge in higher education courses that take place before the actual event. This builds on approaches from Scientific and Technical Studies, Material Culture Studies and Sensory Ethnography which can provide impulses for cultural perspectives on learning and education.Using a praxeographic approach, this article analyzes the processes of teaching input at the university and the emerging «love» for the «Plato» input mask.

Paper Abstract:

Cultural perspectives on teaching and learning in Higher Education focus not only on the content presented in seminars and lectures, the performances in situ of the classroom or on how students and lecturers act together, but also on the long process chains that pre-produce, organize, and infrastruct this knowledge. There are aspects of knowledge infrastructuring within the classroom, but this paper focuses on the fact that there are also practices and dispositifs that organize and shape the «content» beforehand.

As a concrete field, I use a praxeographic approach to examine the process of teaching input of Empirical Cultural Studies at a Swiss University and how I as both, a practicioner and researcher at the same time become familiar with Plato – the input mask — or one might almost say: enter into a Platonic Love. Dealing with technologies always has a multisensory and sensual side.

This reflection may show sides of such knowledge processes in academic teaching and learning, that often are administred in a less self-reflected way. The (technical) things are part of this co-creation as well.

This paper wants to dicuss how far a researcher must go to analyse such infrastructuring processes that formate the finaly presented knowledge. Further it aims to reflect how Science and Technology Studies, Material Cultural Studies and Sensory Ethnography may provides impulses for contouring Cultural Perspectives on Learning and Education.