Being in the teaching laboratory

The laboratory has long been conceptualised as central for learning science in higher education. Students are provided with possibilities to learn content and develop skills, thereby gaining experience, practice, and confidence working in a laboratory. However, the affordances of the laboratory as a space where humans interact with each other as well as materials and technology are understudied from a learning perspective. By drawing on the post-phenomenological philosophy of technology, this study argues for including a sensitivity towards both the socio-cultural and socio-material in explorations of learning in the laboratory. To develop this argument, the article offers a qualitative study of instructors’ discourses and observations of students’ laboratory-based learning. Grounded in socio-cultural and socio-material analysis, I show how instructors conceptualise changes in student behaviour as a proxy for learning progression, as technologies become a part of their movement and of being in the laboratory.