Power Up 4: Reach for the stars! Constellation analysis

Okay let's go so today I'm going to discuss constellation analysis so I first mentioned these ideas in the book knowledge and knowers and I've given couple of talks on a specific paper but it was only be when I began writing the book underway that I realized that they are well quite revolutionary really until now I don't think I've made made clear the significance of um Constellations I don't think it's been clear how constellational analysis can ease our pain uh or how it opens up a whole universe of possibilities what pain you might ask well we

know that P uh we know that practices matter and we know that many sociological approaches I mean psychological approaches do this the same do do this as well but they do it in a different way but many sociological Approaches uce practices to who is doing them they focus on who's speaking who's writing who's active in the classroom and so on and they ask about the social class and the gender and the ethnicity and the sexuality and the religion and so on and so on of those involved and back in the early n uh 2000s people

like myself and Rob Moore made this argument a lot saying we needed to analyze the nature of the practices themselves or often what was it was often called Knowledge we want to look at knowledge but the problem has been that we have not had the tools to do that that um let's consider the concepts we've had available to analyze the forms taken you pra taken by practice now I'm not talking of the organizing principles underlying practices which we can explore with legitimation codes I'm talking about analyzing the forms so not the angular organizing principles not

the DNA but the forms the empirical forms the morphology of practices what they kind of look like as it were analyzing what they cons constituents are how they might be arranged together how can we do that well we've got a large number of those typologies I've been using as an example as one way of do I may not need it to do that every time um we uh we have a large number of typologies yeah we'll have to turn that Up later huh um to choose from so let's take knowledge as an example it's not

the only kind of thing we have typologies as I said like biglin and c and we have Schulman we have Bloom and we have a lot of others um loads of them we have you know academic everyday and declarative procedural know that knowhow all sorts of things now as I discussed the other day these models have intuitive appeal people like writing them but the Pain starts when you actually try to use them on real world data in real world practice or research because no empirical data no complex empirical data from Real World practices fits into

any type let's take so I show I'm not being aggressively Us and Them and so on let's take Basil's Basel Bernstein's um model he divides I don't think I've written it down but he divides knowledge Into vertical and horizontal discourse and then he divides vertical discourse into hierarchical and horizontal knowledge structures so we've got a little sort of typology with a couple of subtypes and these concepts are meant to show the forms taken by practices they say effectively they say some knowledge is segmented and grows by the addition of a new segment like in sociology

we might add a new ISM a feminism or poststructuralism or Something and some knowledge he says is integrated and grows by embracing more phenomena within a smaller number of Concepts or ideas so you get something perhaps in a more often this is seen as being more scientific where Theory comes along and explains everything the old Theory did but it does it in a more elegant way now these ideas have been inspiration and that are really good for helping us think about things they make us think about knowledge they make us Think about how it changes

and they make us think about what its morphology might look like by which I mean what it what it shape might look like he has a little diagram of these segments and he has a little triangle for the other one one it's really inspiring I know I know Bernstein's framework really really well since I saw it on a on a badly about a 10th Generation photo copy in about 19 well and well when was it about 19 96 or no 1995 or something like that and I have analyzed many many thousands of class hours of

classroom practice but I have never seen real world data that fits into the types of vertical or horizontal discourse or hierarchical or horizontal knowledge structures never and it's the same for all typology so it's got me all excited it's got me thinking in the right way but nothing fits into it it's a same for all the typologies they make sense if you talk Rather vaguely or you cherry-pick examples to illustrate types but real world data is too complex for them they offer a very small number of categories and it's trying to like to fit everyone

into uh one of two pairs of shoes there may be of course the occasional lucky person but the rest of us are going to struggle to walk and what's more each type is a black box you can't see inside it there's no way of seeing how the Features that make it what the what are the features inside it and how are they arranged to make up this thing and there's more pain as I discussed previously they're static they cannot deal with change you can't capture how form of knowledge changes into another one uh you're stuck

with one type one side of shoe no no matter how your feet grow or change we know if you do analyze real world data you know that practices are Wildly varied the constituencies of practices the bits of them the how they come together the resulting forms they take these are incredibly diverse for example let's just focus on knowledge practices that could be the coordination of body movements in ballet that could be the articulation of sound their coordination of Sound and Music it could be the marshaling of Concepts and evidence and conjectures in scientific theories it

could be the intermeshing of Theories and practice in professions and on and on and on and on and on each of those they're just the constituents each of those can then be arranged in all sorts of patterns and condensed with all sorts of meanings and valued in all sorts of ways and what more all these diverse practices are in perpetual motion they're always moving the forms taught by the knowledge and take the forms taken by the knowledge taught in the classroom are Changing all the time for example new ideas are added new links are made

new mean meanings are given so though practices are infinite I hope this isn't giving you a headache so though practices hopefully it will and then it'll dissipate as I get onto the LCT and you will not realize so though practices are infinitely varied and changing the main tools we have to describe those practices are very limited very Inflexible and unchanging so we need a means of exploring the the shape of knowledge the shape of not knowledge the shape of practices including knowledge that's flexible enough to embrace an endless variety of constituents arrangements and forms and

that's fluid enough to be able to deal with change that's constellation analysis so that's what I'm going to do in this session before I do I should just mention very quickly constellations are not part of a Dimension they lie outside the dimensions I did int intr uce them with semantics as an example but that's they're not part of semantics they do involve the idea of condensing which affects semantic density but they do different things constellations and codes do different things constellations are descriptive Concepts they tell us what to analyze and how to think I'll return

to that later we can also use them to describe the forms taken by Practice we can use them to describe what they look like what features make them distinctive codes on the other hand are analytical Concepts they tell us the organizing principles undera underlying practice they don't tell us what the practices look like at all they tell us what generate them so codes lie under constellations metaphorically codes generate constellations that's what the word cosmology is for it just says what the what the that's the sort of General Name the group family name for the codes

that are underlying a constellation I'll get back to that okay so a good way of getting into constellations is to think about astronomy now I really feel I shouldn't have to say this but sometimes you have to because you never know who's reading or listening LCT concepts are not the same as astronomy Concepts and neither are these Concepts directly influenced by astronomy as I have had to read people Say things like the concept of waves in LCT comes from physics no it does not there we go imagine a clear light night without light pollution right

so you see an enormous number of sky stars in the sky this shows a small part of the sky at some point in history a small number of those stars were selected and arranged into a pattern with lines creating the constellation we now know as Taurus in the west which includes a cluster of Stars called pades over there so all of the of all all of all the stars that could be included and of all the ways they could have been arranged this is what we got only some were chosen they've then been condensed with

meaning for example for many cent Taurus has been associated with the image of a bll and then lastly these things can be charged in different ways positively neutrally negatively for example in modern astrology apologies for any Tans Taurus is associated with positive attributes like hardworking valuing honesty and consistency and negative attributes by like stubborn hedonistic and perfectionist now constellation that's that's astronomy okay A little bit of it and as astrology now constellation is not shared by everyone which stars are constellated what meanings are condensed What charges are given may vary depending upon time And place

none of this is controversial for example this is how that little bit in the middle is how Inuit culture see a constellation in that part of the sky this is a Korean version so it's different depending upon the culture for example and what you're looking at what part of the planet is standing on and meanings and valuations can also change this is the pades cluster in ancient Greece the pades were Seven Sisters transformed into doves and sent into the Heavens I can't remember exactly why it's usually something to do with some God trying to rape

them in Greek I'm afraid it's most of that it's most of the problems in the stories but that's what they were sent into the heavens to the zi people of New Mexico their seed stars that determine when to plant seeds and to car drivers they may be the car manufacturer Subaru whose advertising Associates the symbol with Notions like Reliability okay so astronomy is a weighin so if you ever lose yourself it's always so useful to come back to astronomy as the you know the kind of analogy but it's not LCT obviously and LCT Concepts have

their own meanings the main points to take away are any set of practices begin from an infinite number of potential cons constituents and arrangements and meanings and Values and in each case only some of those possibilities are chosen so there's a decision at every turn and something is generating those decisions a way of seeing of worldview and that's what we call a cosmology right so here are some of the key terms I'll be using and which I'll keep returning to so don't worry if they're not clear at first and don't worry if you don't write

them down quickly fast enough Um we'll figure a way of making the videos available to those who who are here and to only those who are here so you will be the select few chosen ones you have nodes they're like the stars they're the Stars they're the constituents of the Clusters and the constellations you have links what that's what connects nodes like the lines in in um in uh star sign um in a constellation clusters are distinctive Recognizable groups of nodes constellations are just larger groups of nodes and clusters I can also talk about condensing

which describes how all those things are imbued with meaning and charging which describes how they're given values and as I just said cosmologies is just the bunch of codes the under and codes codes and things like waves and tours that underly all these things they underly all those decisions of what gets selected how They're arranged what meanings they're given and what values okay so before I go through and explain all these there are two things you need to grasp if you want to unlock the Revolutionary potential of constellational analysis first these concepts are endlessly flexible

so we can use them to study anything so I'll be saying over and over again anything can be a node anything can be a link anything can be a cluster Nodes aren't just ideas is as I've already said they can be individuals they could be buildings they could be anything machine parts Financial transactions and constellations aren't just theories or parts of a curriculum or something they could be religions or technology they could be a football match a constellation could be a factory or a city and a constellation might combine all these different nodes in practices

You often include all kinds of different constituents so constellation analysis has radical flexib ility and the second point about this radical flexibility is in terms of scale there's no there's no fixed units for nodes clusters or constellations they're in relation to each other in terms of like that's a node compared to this cluster compared to this constellation a constellation is made up of nodes and clusters and clusters are Made up of nodes it's just there's no fixed point for these things in a study what's going to be a node or a cluster depends on your

problem a no in one problem may be a constellation in another I'll give an example if I can make this work without taking up too much time in the 1997 film Men In Black you might want to turn us up thanks thanks Michael in the 1997 movie Men in Black the two main characters spoiler are looking for What's called The Galaxy okay the Galaxy is supposed to be a source of enormous energy and the Galaxy is said to be on Orion's Belt right it turns out that Orion I'm really sorry if I'm ruining for you

but Orion is a cat and it's on the cat's collar right so here we go we get to see what what the Galaxy [Music] is boy when you want attention oryan that's a pretty name what's this [Music] wow okay so inside that node was a constellation well a Galaxy but you know what I mean and at the end of the movie oh now I'm going to do the other one I just realized sorry Michael the end of the movie It Go the sense of scale goes in the opposite direction so let's try this [Music] [Applause]

[Music] [Music] so constellation can be a node which can then be part of something else so in this case we're all just part of a game of marbles okay so let's get into it because that image these images really help me understand constellations and a lot of understanding from that uh of a lot of the concepts from that so I'm going to address these questions so I don't know If I've got a link for them no uh I'm going to address how does clustering and constellating work that's the first thing how does clustering and constellating

work that involves nodes links clusters constellations secondly I'm going to go how does condensing work and then I'm going to tell you how does charging work okay okay and I'm running out of time so I'm going to keep going quite fast so what's clustering and constellating well Consider this it's a node right that's a node that's a single thing it's a node it's called I'm calling it a could be anything an idea a gesture an institution sound a machine part anything node may become a may become linked to node B node B could be anything

including something different so a could be an idea and B an object a could be a person and B an item of clothing and so on and so on and so on now if this combination becomes Distinctive and recognizable and it persists over time for example it's repeated through a text or across contexts then it becomes a cluster okay and that cluster could come to have it a presence in its own right it could get named for example a c now it's become a cluster a recognizable grouping and then that cluster name actually could come

to Eclipse its con constituents that you might lose a sense Of what's in it it could obscure A and B and just be seen as a that's clustering easy isn't it it's all going to be like that now constellating is simply when that happens on a larger scale and it may involve several clusters for example this is a constellation I'll return to in this talk it shows a scientific explanation of the tides on earth a series of attributes of the natural World have been selected as nodes at the top for example we begin with two

nodes the Earth uh comprises water and solid components that's what that first one means and the moon has gravity which is stronger the closer things are to the Moon right that's just two things that have been isolated then nodes they've been mentioned and if you bring them together if you bring together the Earth is water and solid and the moon has gravity it means the Moon Moon's pull Imagine this is the Earth and there's the moon the moon's pull on the earth is strongest for the water closer to the moon less strong for the solid

bit and weakest for the water further away from the Moon right that's what that first two things coming together to go to the node Moon's pool don't worry if that doesn't make any sense although feels slightly ashamed because that's Secondary School science the point is that first two SNES Are linked together imply a third node right and this is how the explanation Works in this case this is a constellation and it works this way it brings together nodes to create implications so for example that the moons pull on more some parts of the earth and

less the moon pulls more on some parts of the earth and less on others and that implies that there are then bulges of water on parts of the earth closest and furest away from the Moon and we experience those as high tides and there are no bulges on the other parts of the Earth which are low tides and then that explains high and low tides right and then that becomes the first cluster in this scientific explanation of tithes we analyzed this in the book teaching science myself and Jen Doran and as I'll come back to

soon there are then further clusters now I've got to emphasize this is only one kind of Cl constellation for Several reasons first there are endless kinds of nodes right this example we've distinguished two kinds of nodes independent nodes that don't rely on others which we've made into squares and dependent nodes that are the result of bringing other things together we put those in circles this time but there could be many more broadly nodes don't have to be ideas in an analysis of ballet teaching Elena Lambrinos in phds on the web on on the website showed

how teachers constellate body movement locations in the room technical terms they're speaking gestures the pit rhythm of their voice and many other kind of nodes I'll give the all the references to everything I mentioned at the end there are many other differences we could explore for example it might be useful to identify nodes which operate as threshold concepts by enabling a Constellation to become visible or it could be nodes that we could consider core and nodes that are peripheral and many other things there are many ways of cutting this cake okay endless kinds of nodes

there there are endless kinds of links that we' have yet to discover this one I just showed you implied implication links so nodes implied other nodes but you could find classifying links where one node is a subtype of of Another you know there are planets Earth is a planet there's two nodes there and they're linked but that is a classifying link a sub type or compositional links you know where a node is where where something is described as part of something else or correlating links or oh on and on and on right there's so many

to be found for example in a study of texts in the humanities jagen Doran identifies links that attribute meaning to the perspective of someone links that Oppose meanings to each other and links that construct meanings as the same or similar an example of this which I've made up would be something like me saying or writing if I described a belief as a northern perspective and I claimed it conflicted with Southern perspectives and I declared it the equivalent of being capitalist I've just done all three of those I've attributed meaning to the perspective of someone I've

opposed it to something else and I've said it similar to something else so he just he he described the links as those type to try and understand what he was looking at there are endless kinds of clusters to be explored this should I hope become more liberatory than overwhelming right you're not trying to remember endless it's more you don't have to remember what I'm saying because they're end end L right there are endless kinds of clusters in the scientific explanation Of tithes we distinguish between base clusters and supplementary clusters so for example I showed you

this already okay it's the basic explanation of Tides but in the school textbooks and the classrooms we studied That Was Then built on with other clusters to explain more aspects of the of Tides first the teachers in in the textbooks added on a second a bunch of nodes to explain um day daily variation of Tides as the Earth moves through the through these Bulges of water I mentioned and then they added yet more to explain um what are called Spring and neep Tides so the way they taught it was that understanding the tides had a

base thing a base cluster that was the simple explanation and then elaboration and then further elaboration that's that's just one of many many many many many many different types of clusters we might find and the same thing holds with constellations too A common form a binary constellations where two sets of ideas are portrayed as being separated and completely opposed so for example in a study of secondary school teaching of history in Australia uh Jim Martin and I and um Erica where are you showed how a particular set of lessons created two constellations centered on the

terms nationalism and com colonialism and they were constellated with a range of of different terms and crucially they were Presented as separate and oppose in other words you can't mix them that's that's we called that binary constellations and there's been many examples of this um oh sorry that was that one you should have seen so you can see the kinds of nodes that the teacher kind of associated with each of these terms and also by the way I'm showing that you can just use a table if you're not interested in exactly how the links go

Together you don't have to do one with links don't feel you have to we weren't interested at the time don't think we created constellation diagrams then but you can still tables can still be helpful particularly if it's set up as two opposed things we find it all the time so another example is um Aden dorf and Blacky um uh who found that curriculum debates over decolonizing higher education constructed indigenous knowledge systems And modern Western science as binary constellations and they showed they argued that this constellation structure meant that the so-called debate was not really a

debate it's not very much of a genuine debate because they're always through this debate being constructed as completely opposed there are many other patterns we could talk for example about centralized decentralized constellations so C ones that have a central one and lots of Stuff come off it for example Esther senesh did an analysis of a Neo Neo-Nazi Manifesto um which had two really Central um two really Central nodes and a lot coming off them a lot of associated nodes so it's a kind of centralized constellation one of the things by the way that this study

shows is that beliefs we might think of as not normally going together like being focused on the environment and being Anti-semitic can go together in a constellation they did it in this Neo-Nazi Manifesto sort of eco- fascists are they are eof Fascist and you compare that say oh this by the way shows you that not always does it matter in what order or where on the page sometimes it does but in this case where these things are on the page is simply this is one of the few Arrangements that can make all the links Work

and all these links mean something by the way she's not just links mean something then she's not just putting and saying I think they vaguely connect she's done the analysis that shows each one of these lines are things that were linked together in the manifesto as being associated to each other but if you compare that to say the explanation of the tides there's no Center here this is a logical sequence that just goes from the top to the bottom so that's a Decentralized constellation right and that's just many of them to come there's many many

others another way in which they this is just going to be me saying every things different lots of things are different we can deal with it like for example um another way that they differ is how they're built that one was built in a linear incremental fashion through textbooks and teaching okay we called that assembling but other constellations Are built differently even very similar practices might be built differently for example in the same study we analyzed in the same textbooks in the same classroom we analyzed the scientific explanation of Earth Seasons at Secondary School right

that's the whole constellation I won't take you through it but I'll show you how it was built right how it was built in the texts in the classroom like for the tides it set out a base a base Cluster that's the simple version okay the teacher went through that set that out right brought together a whole bunch of things and implied the seasons but unlike the tides which went okay now the next now now the next bit this had two alternative Roots as such supplementaries right so we had one that focused on the length of

daylight and the role of the length of daylight on different parts of the earth and how that changed through the year and we had Another one that began from the same spot of towards or away as uh that basically means that the parts of the earth uh hemispheres that are towards the Sun and parts that are away from the Sun but building off the same starting point you got a second route that focused on the angle of sunlight on the Earth as it as and how that changes and then it was was all brought together

as a complete constellation so one built it by going a plus b plus C that was the Tides and then this one when here's a summary and then like oh here's one route to get to the destination that brings in one part of the explanation here's another route to get to the explanation and in fact the explanation is all those things we called that aggregating because it was like aggregating different ways of doing things but there's going to other ways of building constellations right these are all both Of those were in the book teaching science

but there's going to be other ways of building constellations too so my point really is that even within very similar topics there are different ways in which constellations are built and my constant banging out message is this unlike many existing ways of analyzing practices we can use this small set of tools to capture endless kinds of diversity endless kinds of nodes clusters constellations and the Way they change it's in infinitely flexible rather than just two or three boxes how are we doing yeah you following so far okay next question how does condensing work sorry I

have to go so fast but it just seems to be taking me longer than I thought so far I've raised difference in the forms taken by practice but that raises the question of how they change what other processes whereby they expand or contract grow or Shrink for example And this is what's called condensing and this happens in two main ways right I'll start with condensing there are two ways condensing happens they're called extensive condensing and intensive condensing first extensive condensing involves adding new links and new noes I'll give you an example the word gly is

a nonsense word I've made it up it has no links to anything right it has no reference it has no links to other words It's a singular node drifting in space but if I then declare there are two kinds of gly a land gly and an air gly remember gley doesn't mean anything by the way I don't know how you say how you can get gly across in sign language but they're amazing so they'll do something very amazing so if I say there's land gly and air gly I've added two new links and two new

nodes okay Two nodes and two links if I now state that when a land gly and an air gly are brought together they create a SE gly I've added a further node and links so far so obvious adding nodes and links adds new meanings or whatever they are to the emerging cluster but what may be less obvious is this this process extensively as we call it condenses more meanings into the existing nodes it's not just adding what's appearing new and new and new more is added to the Constellation than just or the the cluster than

just new parts to it new constituents As you move from the left to the right we don't just add land gly and air gly and sea gly we add to our understanding of gly we're condensing more meanings into the original node and when we keep moving further we add even more so if you get to the right hand side here gly now means something that has at least three kinds that has Features that distinguish between these three kinds we might assume that's something to do with L CNF there are features that are labeled with particular

names and that they can be involved in a generative process for creating a new form we know all that we may not have a clue what griffle is we already know that but they've all been condensed into that original node so we don't just add so you know meanings grow rapidly not only for the cluster as a Whole but for each of its notes adding new constituents condenses more into existing nodes and L links for example if I now said a land griffle implicates the possession of lakes I added meanings not only to L griffle

but to all the other nodes in that cluster because they're linked together whether they're mentioned or not even I don't have to mention them I say well you know langwies legs they usually have and that Now means for the original node of griffle one of its types might possess legs see what I mean clusters are linked in such a way that you add things to any of it you add to everything in it that's extensive condensation okay but there's another way of doing it as well intensive condensation Works differently if we take where we got

to if we then gather all these things up and condense them into a new node if we then pack them all up and shift them up A level as it were if we take them from being a cluster and turn them into a node that's intensive condensation so the example from Men In Black the Milky Way galaxy within a marble that's being used in a game with other marbles you know it went from the earth and it went out blah blah blah blah blah gets bigger and bigger and then it turns into a marble and

then it's part of a game that's a lot of intensive condensation going at that point towards the end a Constellation gets condensed within a mo a node so for example this is where we were if I describe all of that lot as grify right I've encapsulated all those meanings in that one term if I now start talking about or writing about gfy without mentioning any of the internal constituents none of the links none of the nodes in it now I just start saying gfy gfy blah blah blah graphology I would have condensed Intensively all those

constituents into a named cluster of its own but it doesn't end there because the cluster is now a node so it can become part of a new cluster combination look there it is now it's been condensed all that's been condensed into us a node now called graphology and I could link it to say LCT and sociology and possibility see so intens of condensing gathers Stuff up into a cluster or constellation and then sort of turns it into a singular item and then shifts the scale to turn it into a node and then it becomes part

of other things potentially like that we all get into the marble and then the Marble's part of a game with other marbles so it's two kinds of condensing and they can be combined I mentioned a study of ballet by Elena lambrinos I've taken a part of that study and I'm I reanalyzed It using this um and it's it's how an exercise is taught and it begins with the teacher instructing students to stand at the back of the room with their feet in first position and their arms by their sides there's extensive condensation going on right

add more add things add things okay but then she intensively condenses it because she refers to all of that as just feet in first position she uses the same term as one of the nodes but she's now called That cluster feet in first position okay so that's intensive condensation at that point she then switches back and she starts adding more nodes to it she she starts um she models a series of movements while saying 1 2 3 1 2 3 and sink and jump I'm not going to do it so that's extensive again extensive adding

things adding things adding things and then she moves back to intensive she takes the term jump and she describes its qualities as powerful And big with straight legs and pointed toes and then she uses jump from then on having intensively condensed she goes back into the node again she goes out says this node has all these things and then goes back into it again and then jump continues on and she doesn't say again powerful big straight leg pointed toes that's what jump now means so in this really short period of time the teacher shifts between

the two forms of condensing building a constellation of Meanings does that make sense now all of this can happen in Reverse by the way there's a mirror to condensation it's called rifac or rarify it's when you take stuff away for example if the teacher had said it's very if the teacher had said [Music] um students no longer need to start with feet in first position right she would have removed removed the cluster and the link and she said oh no We don't need to start with feet and uh first position now okay one two 3

one she's just taking that away that's rarify it's extensive rarify because she's just taking a thing and taking it away right instead of adding it it's just the opposite of extensive condensing and intensive rarify is where a node is exploded back into its constituents into the cluster or constellation that was previously Condensed within it so for example if the teacher had said the word jump was not useful and began referring instead to its four nodes instead she was saying powerful big straight legs pointed toes powerful big straight she's she's gotten rid of that condensation it's

intensively verified it and they can be combined as well okay so that's how condensing works are we all right because I have to keep going up speed I'm going to be late I don't want to get Overrun into your time if that's how things are added and removed to a set of practices then how about how they're valued this is called charging a charge is a node it's just another node but it's got positive neutral or negative valuation the valuation can be of any kind right it could be epist epistemological such as saying a knowledge

claim has greater explanatory power that's a charge or it could be axiological it could be saying something Is moral or beautiful that's an axiological Char that's a positive charge it could be based on financial value or on productivity it can be based on any way of valuing anything so charging is not just for those who who have used it already it is not only about axiological meaning such as moral political and ideas it's been written sometimes in that way um it's not it's about any way of valuing and it works the same way as Condensing

imagine evaluation such as Beauty right this is a charge it's just a node that has a positive or negative or neutral valuation at the moment it's not linked to anything it's just the word beauty right now if I said you are beautiful I'd link the charge of beauty to the node that's you you'd be valuated creating a Charged node this could be endless forms this could be uh a profitable company an insightful explanation it could be Smacking your lips whilst eating your food in a kind of kind of way it could be ticking an answer

it could be singing along in a kind of enthusiastic way to a song or smiling at a border col the charge nodes may not be one-offs they may not they may be one-offs sorry they may be one-offs that may just happen once right but if they keep happening over and over again to become distinctive and recognizable across contexts or across Um um um within a text for example this is called that sort of clustering idea already mentioned we've clustered the charge exactly the same way as I said before exactly the same as before but this

is one with the charge in it right and the point about this the interesting thing about this is when it gets named when it gets named often what's missing then I said that when it gets named as a cluster and you just start saying the cluster so when I said gy I was no Longer talking about the things inside it remember but if you do that with one of them's a charge then the charge vanishes and it's it's hidden from View and now you just assume that something's nice or nasty this is really important now

now I all I have to do is say you to also mean beautiful see what I mean this is really insightful at this point because it means you don't have to say something's good or bad if it's already been Pre condensed into a cluster now I should emphasize that charging focuses on whether the valuation is positive or negative and not what that charge is what I mean by a charge cluster is that if I say you are in beautiful and over a period of time I said you're beautiful intelligent wise radiant and so on I'm

repeatedly linking you to highly positive charging all of those things may be different but that's that's a that's a that's a a clustering Issue what's a charging issue is the fact that they're all really nice doesn't matter if the words change and that would be creating a charge cluster so if I said lots of nice things about you and then just said you that would be a charge cluster you wouldn't have one for each single thing it' be you know you wouldn't see the the fact that it's the same sort of it's it's about trying

to see the pattern of charge the positivity negativity or neutrality Rather than the specific way it's being expressed so for example a study of a critical reflection assignment in um social work uh shows how charging can be an invisible part of what's needed to succeed so they show that on the one hand the node of social worker enjoys a pattern of positive charging as being powerful and full of agency and that all the high achieving essays repeatedly charge that name with descriptions such as social workers work for social Justice or they advocate for the disadvantaged

and the marginalized or they work from an anti-oppressive stance and so on so the the word keeps getting getting um linked to uh other words that have a highly positive charge so it's getting repeatedly it's become a Charged cluster and on the other hand the notion of SC of the clients gets negatively he go all of these are different through an say but they all have a negative charge So you get this sort of thing whereby the um the high achieving ESS students writing these essays build up these charged clusters of powerful beneficent wonderful social

workers and these powerless needy clients right and by revealing these clusters this study reveals an otherwise invisible basis for success in an assignment that's not part of a rubric no one's got a rubric there saying you'd better make the social work workers look like a hero and the clients Look like kind of needy parasites that's a bit heavy the way I've put it but no one says that so it's made a part of the Hidden evaluation as it were visible and charging doesn't have to be explicit or direct I've said it quite I've used those

ones once some charged the cluster can persist without further explicit valuation I said NOS can carry a charge for quite a long time so we need to distinguish Between explicit charge in when the valuation is visible such as me saying you are beautiful from implicit charging with that valuation is visible is invisible because it's already happened even the neo-nazis in their Manifesto didn't feel that they had to say Zionism was bad all the way through the manifesto they did it a lot up front and then they kind of went you get it we don't like

them in effect they didn't do it every Single time or it could be not in a text but from a wider area a wider Source beliefs of a wider Community right from the end of the second world war to the rise of Donald Trump you didn't have to say that being a Nazi was a bad thing the negative charge was implicitly shared by anyone who wasn't nuts and that also highlights a second feature it might not be direct constellation share meaning among all their nodes that means that charges Can spread inside them along their links

right so we can distinguish direct charging when the valuation is directly at a node and indirect charging where valuation comes through other nodes that you're connected to in your constellation and of course you can have you know combinations of direct and indirect and explicit and tacit and so on so for example in most education research if you describe a framework as positivist you're applying negative Charges both implicitly and indirectly because positivist is associated with other terms in the constellation of educ ational research such as scientistic Colonial and so on so when you link something to

positivism you are linking it to the negative charges that that is connected to you don't have to do it directly you don't have to say positivism and that's bad people just kind of boo anyway I should add that none of this is To say that charges cannot change how long a charge last depends on all kinds of variables it might be carried for significant lengths of time or lose its strength in seconds it might travel many cont text or drain instantly the moment the thing is moved to somewhere else what's negative for one group may

be positive for another the parity of a charge if you're a doctor who fan the parity of the charge may be reversed so for example studies of you Sub cultures show that their members change the valuations of mainstream culture when they repurpose cultural products for their own ends the most famous one always people bring up is the safety pin in Punk charging is in the value of Eye of the Beholder as well so there may be multiple voices in a text you might need to be clear not only what's being valuated in the valuation but

also who's doing it and I've given an example that You can read for a number of examples of this but there's just one where y can analyzed a newspaper article and and it had all these different it mentioned this thing called a guide it mentioned Aboriginal people that that's the quote several commentators on the story there was all these different voices in the newspaper article and they were all valuing different things so sometimes that's useful to figure out what that is now charges can be added and charges Can be taken away and that's what draining

does it reduces charges I do not mean it takes it from a positive to a negative I mean it drains any charge so if something's neutral and it becomes less neutral that's draining that may make any sense because you think neutral how can it be it's even more if it's going somewhere else that would be charging it wouldn't it no it's draining if it's neutrality even if it's charging it with something else a positive one Can be drained to negative a negative can be drained all I'm talking about is it just reduces whatever the charge

is and it's the mirror of all this um charging it's just the opposite it can be explicit D implicit direct or indirect for example if we took a widely used Theory right and we showed that its explanatory value was limited we would be explicitly and directly draining its charge of explanatory power I can't talk about this I haven't got Time but one thing I will point out to is that a key issue here is always going to be recontextualization I think through time and space that when you take something that's got a nice heavy big

charge on it and then you move it to another context or another time that's you are reconsulting with other things and it's and its charge May drain it may be charged with new things but always watch out for when something moves from one Context to another or text to another or place to another or Through Time you know what it's like you read a book and it's got words in it that you would never use today you know because they're so socially inappropriate I must move on so to recap I'm running out of time I've

discussed a lot of things ah I'm not too far off okay i' I've discussed a lot of things what about the choice I said there's lot Of choices there's a lot of choices in a set of practice any set of practice as the result of a load of choices about which ones are brought in which ones are selected what meanings are condensed What charges are added or removed and cosmology which I've only got to now for the last couple of seconds is just that's the moment when we moved on to the analytic concepts you don't

need it necessarily I've done study with theen on teaching science as You saw we don't mention cosmology because looking at the codes wasn't of interest to us but you can go further if you want to look at the codes which we we call cosmology cosmology refers to the principles underlying the selection Arrangement condensation and valuation of nodes clusters and constellations and that's just looking at semanic gravity looking at semic density looking at seismic relations and so on okay and plane patterns and profiles and Pathways That's and then adding up whatever you've looked at that's the

cosmology so we describe practices as constellations and we explain how they're created and changed through cosmologies which we do using legitimation codes I hope that makes sense there so there are an infinite number of possible strengths for every single organizing principle right let alone the combined combinations into codes yeah infinite that means there's An infinite number of cosmologies so not one of you ever say anywhere there are two types of constellation or two types of cosmologies epistemologic I know most people talk about epistemological cosmologies that just means a knowledge code and axiological cosmologies that just

means to know a code but there are only two of so many if you added semantics you'd find a romatic cosmology or a worldly cosmology Or a sovereign cosmology in autonomy and so on and so on and I've never used the term I'll get into it afterwards if somebody wants to ask me a question if we have time I have never published or written and never will the terms epistemological constellation or axiological constellation appears nowhere and I have very good reasons for that and I don't have the time to tell you right now so what's

it useful for I am getting very close to the end don't Worry okay what's it useful for one thing is it helps us see what we're studying in particular ways right I've emphasized thinking this would should change your mind about LCT and you think no um no it should change the way you think for example it emphasizes social practices are not naturally occurring entities waiting to be discovered constellations ain't galaxies constellations are created maintained and changed by people who are engaged in Activities and making decisions this is a creative product constellations when we we look

at a set of you look at football it's not naturally god-given and just appeared somewhere someone discovered it under a rock decisions have been made all the way through secondly they're always situated there by people by located at a particular point in time and place you move around the planet the night sky looks different right We analyzed how tides are explained in secondary schools in New South Wales in Australia other countries other years research those explanations might look different third that constellations are multiple and contested for example the teachers constellations weren't the only one present

in the classroom we had all the kids they had their constellations going on as well and when the teacher asked students about the seasons to check on their understanding they Offered a series Ser of different constellations with from the Viewpoint of the teacher missing links and missing nodes and misunderstood nodes and links there's a bunch of constellations fourth they're dynamic they were they can unfold through time so you always need as I've said to before to think of practices as coming from somewhere and potentially going somewhere so you better think it's change of factor here

and lastly they Highlight that they're constructs that may not reflect an external reality the Stars we have in constellations in astronomy don't have any relationship to each other astrophysically they just look like they do from where we are and similarly you know like the constellations created by the science teacher might not be strictly accurate by the standards of Cutting Edge research but they look they make sense and they're useful from that Point for her which her purposes are okay so that's not all so basically the concepts remind us to think of practices as creative situated

contested and dynamic that's not all they do they offers ways of showing the forms taken by practices I'm coming back around to the start now in comprise to The Limited number of rigid categories offered by typologies which are barely able to describe the features of knowledge let alone any other practices constellation Analysis enables difference at every single level it is endlessly flexible endlessly flexible and that radical flexibility extends to how we can do it there is no recipe please don't take the ones I've shown you as the only way of doing it right how you

create constellations depends on your problem situation and whether you do it or not does as well if it helps to break something down into a constituents and their relations if that might help Constellation analysis might be valuable if it isn't don't do it the choice of which nodes which links which clusters which constellations to explore cannot be defined beforehand for example in Tides we looked at ideas we didn't look at the images in the textbooks or the font that they were expressed in or other things like that we focused only on a certain set of

meanings because that's what we were trying to solve we were trying to solve do the Meanings do the ideas change from the textbook to the classroom so we didn't need we didn't want to look at all these other things images was too much for us so we it's all driven by your question which nodes which links which things that you're going to look at and you don't need to do it all you may not need to look at condensing you may not need to look at charging we didn't when we looked at science um tides

and Seasons explanations we didn't look at those you Can stop anywhere along the way and whether you do change over time again the one of the Neo-Nazi Manifesto is a simple synchronic analysis it's not an analysis of how the the text unfolds it's mostly about seeing it as a whole and you don't have to use constellation diagrams often use tables just to be simpler endless flexibility and just lastly we can can use it for more than just research so we can use this as a way of mapping out Lesson plans or teaching designs there's the

tides again it's got three parts to it we could use that as a teaching Aid to make knowledge more explicit to the students highlighting the key ideas showing progress through the sequencing of that content showing How Far We've traveled we could use it as a way for students to demonstrate their understanding you draw one and then we notice oh dear the Earth doesn't seem to be in Here or the Sun or the moon there's no sun in this one actually that's uh Tides which one we on Tides yeah it's seasons for the Sun but you

know what I mean it's like something's missing and there's many many more so then she could have done she could have compared the students to her own and said right now we've got to revisit that part because all of you are missing out that bit about about the fact that the Earth Rotates so whether in research or practice on whatever the topic of problem we have barely even be done exploring the potential of these Concepts that's what makes me so excited about it with constellation analysis it does seem to be that the sky is the

limit thank [Applause] you there was more in that than I was expecting I'm afraid so come and ask me questions afterwards could you just wait For a moment we have some housekeeping hi everybody three things first of all there was a um some tablets left in b48 if those belong to you they're at the student helpers desk