Charting new directions: The Potential of Actor-Network Theory for Analyzing Children’s Videomaking

Abstract

This paper represents preliminary efforts to understand what Actor-Network Theory (ANT) might contribute to our interest in analyzing what we hope are enhanced educational practices for second language (L2) learners. This theory encourages us to examine more closely the things, the tools, the non-human actants that are active in particular educational practices, and how those tools and not others, “exclude, invite and regulate particular forms of participation” (Fenwick and Edwards, 2010, p. 7). We identify aspects of ANT that are relevant to our work on videomaking, describe our videomaking research and provide two illustrations of how we began to see what ANT might offer in analysis of our video data and to consider its potential for guiding our ongoing fieldwork. We argue here that ANT highlights the importance of paying attention to the production of networks between both human and non-human actors during the videomaking process to understand how these interactions shape the school experiences of language learners.