Doing time and motion diffractively: academic life everywhere and all the time

This article offers a diffractive methodological intervention into workplace studies of academic life. In its engagement of a playful, performative research and writing practice, the article speaks back to technocratic organisational and sociological workplace ‘time and motion’ studies which centre on the human and rational, and presume a linear teleology of cause and effect. As a counterpoint, we deploy posthumanist new materialist research practices which refuse human-centric approaches and aim to give matter its due. As a means to analyse what comes out of our joint workspaces photo project we produce two ‘passes’ through data – two diffractive experiments which destabilise what normally counts as ‘findings’ and their academic presentation. The article deploys the motif of ‘starting somewhere else’ to signal both our intention to keep data animated, alive and interactive, and to utilise visual and written modes of seriality as enabling constraints which produce a more generative focus on the mundane, emergent, unforeseen, and happenstance in studies of daily working life.     

Inclusive practice within the lived cultures of school communities: research case studies in teaching,learning and inclusion

This paper provides an account of a teacher's use of theory as a tool to develop inclusive practice through a social studies programme in a new entrant class. The account illustrates the ways in which the teacher drew on research to assist in the facilitation of an inclusive educational environment. Presented are research case studies the teacher encountered in an in-service teacher education programme, and the ‘social constructionist’ and ‘personal tragedy’ models that were used as theoretical tools to assist the teacher's planning and teaching practice. Mounted cameras, broadcast microphones and pre- and post-unit interviews with the teacher and students were used to explore the lived culture of the classroom, and the nature and effectiveness of the strategies the teacher used. An ‘interrupted narrative’ methodology engages the reader in the interplay between research and theory in the research case studies. Four major strategies used by the teacher have been identified and these are presented as theoretical tools for other teachers and teacher educators to use, critique and develop to support inclusive practice in their own contexts.     

Educators,learners and active learning methodologies

Picking up from a previous publication in IJLE, the primary objective of this article is to engage in a critical analysis of the concept and practice of ‘active’ (including ‘participatory’) learning as well as the usefulness to educators of ‘active learning methodologies’. Through a review of relevant literature and research, highlighting problems in theory, and an analysis of examples of active learning in practice, the article addresses a number of issues raised by previous attempts to promote active learning. It argues, in conclusion, that while promoting active learning is generally a good thing, the success of an active learning methodology depends not on methodology alone but, ultimately, on the constantly‐evolving, dialectical relationship between methodology and learners, mediated by the educator. Practical implications are that educators need not be over‐obsessed about questions of methodology, though it is important to experiment with new methods and make them a constant focus of discussion between educators and learners; further research could focus on the extent to which (and under what circumstances) educators and/or learners might change (or already have changed) their perceptions about different ways of teaching and learning.     

Diffraction or reflection? Sketching the contours of two methodologies in educational research

Internationally, an interest is emerging in a growing body of work on what has become known as ‘diffractive methodologies’ drawing attention to ontological aspects of research. Diffractive methodologies have largely been developed in response to a dissatisfaction with practices of ‘reflexivity’, which are seen to be grounded in a representational paradigm and the epistemological aspects of research. While work on ‘reflexivity’ and ‘critical reflection’ has over the years become predominant in educational and social science research methodology literature, our reading indicates that there is still important conceptual work to be done putting these two practices – reflection and diffraction – in conversation with each other and exploring their continuities and breaks as well as examining the consequences for research methodologies in education. This article raises important questions about how the concepts of diffraction and reflection are defined and understood and discusses the methodological implications for educational research.     

Making and being made: wise humanising creativity in interdisciplinary early years arts education

This paper focuses on how wise humanising creativity (WHC) is manifested within early years interdisciplinary arts education. It draws on Arts Council-funded participatory research by Devon Carousel Project and University of Exeter’s Graduate School of Education. It is grounded in previous AHRC-funded research, which conceptualised WHC in the face of educational creativity/performativity tensions. WHC articulates the dialogic embodied inter-relationship of creativity and identity – creators are ‘making and being made’; they are ‘becoming’. The research used a qualitative methodology to create open-ended spaces of dialogue or ‘Living Dialogic Spaces’ framed by an ecological model to situate the team’s different positionings. Data collection included traditional qualitative techniques and arts-based techniques. Data analysis involved inductive/deductive conversations between existing theory and emergent themes. Analysis indicated that ‘making and being made’, and other key WHC features were manifested. We conclude by suggesting that WHC can help develop understanding of how creative arts practice supports the breadth of young children’s development, and the role of the creativity-identity dialogue within that, as well as indicating what the practice and research has to offer beyond the Early Years.     

Action research,stories and practical philosophy

This collaborative piece written by a philosopher/action researcher and an action researcher/philosopher explores the use of practical philosophy as a tool in action research. The paper explores the connection to be made between what we refer to, roughly, as ‘theory’ and ‘practice’ (while never losing hold of either). The connection is made around ideas of ‘practical philosophy’ and social justice. The authors suggest that ‘practical philosophy’ might develop as a ‘philosophy in human practices’. It begins from the understanding that philosophy is rooted in social practice, with philosophy in educational practices being rooted in educational practice. The paper goes on to explore the use of ‘little stories’ as a way into the diversity of significant particularities. Finally the links are drawn with action research. It is argued that the process of reconceptualisation is itself an action that will make a difference as part of a series of action research cycles.     

007 Spies,surveillance and pedagogical middle leadership: for the good of the empire of education

ABSTRACT

This research critically examines the role of pedagogical leadership as it is distributed amongst middle leaders. It seeks to better understand the playful utility of a popular culture metaphor as a frame for understanding empirical data about pedagogical leadership in two Australian schools during a period of imposed curriculum change. Utilising ‘the theory of practice architectures’ (Kemmis, Stephen, Jane Wilkinson, Christine Edwards-Groves, Ian Hardy, Peter Grootenboer, and Laurette Bristol. 2014. Changing Practices, Changing Education. Wagga Wagga: Springer), the paper explores a direct quotation as metaphor from several pedagogical middle leaders that ‘we’re spies’ – and from one participant, ‘in a good James Bond sort of way.’ This research plays with and interprets the politics of practice including collaborating or ‘licensed trouble shooting’, and empowerment or ‘interrogation’ in everyday pedagogical leadership practice where distributing leadership may create espionage, or compliance during reform. Educational reform is espoused for ‘the good of the empire’ of education through the enabling and constraining practices of pedagogical middle leaders.     

Posthumanist ethical practice: agential cuts in the pedagogic assemblage

With researchers funnelled into lucrative research practices that value fast scholarship, we explore ethical practice as an ethico-onto-epistemological project. Through collective biography, diffractive choreography, and poetry, we map systems of entrapment that manifest power relations in the academy. We argue the posthumanist ethical practice is an intra-active project in higher education – involving rich material, social, political and intellectual entanglements. Posthumanist ethical practice rejects dualisms of body/mind, nature/culture and human/non-human. It evokes creativity to generate new vocabularies for challenging anthropocentric ‘exceptionalism’. Mapping relations in posthuman assemblages can involve agential cuts that evoke ethical practice as affective encounters. Agential cuts give permission for pedagogic storying where there is ontological connectedness. As academics, we are immersed in assemblages where posthumanist education research and practice is a rich, embodied, and connected process. Particular consideration is given in this article to affectivity and the value of pedagogic performance in education research.     

Academic literacies: the word is not enough

For Academic Literacies, the world is textually mediated; written texts and what informs them reveal elements such as subject-discipline practices. Furthermore, multi-modalities, for example, visual representation, inform written text, and multiple methods of inquiry, including interviews, shed light on written text production. In this article we argue that the word is not enough, and non-textual elements must also be considered. From multiple-discipline focused research, we present data from interviews and focus groups with Design and Nursing lecturers that explored student success holistically, not solely through, or for, written text production. We highlight non-textual elements key to both student success, and written text production, such as ‘empathy’, the ‘visual’, the ‘non-verbal’, and also the inability of text to reveal certain key features. We argue that rather than solely prioritise text, Academic Literacies approaches can more effectively help students succeed by holistically considering non-textual elements.     

The sociology of Pierre Bourdieu and researching education policy

Bourdieu did not write anything explicitly about education policy. Despite this neglect, we agree with van Zanten that his theoretical concepts and methodological approaches can contribute to researching and understanding education policy in the context of globalisation and the economising of it. In applying Bourdieu’s theory and methodology to research in education policy, we focus on developing his work to understand what we call ‘cross‐field effects’ and for exploring the emergence of a ‘global education policy field’. These concepts are derived from some of our recent research concerning globalisation and mediatisation of education policy. The paper considers three separate issues. The first deals with Bourdieu’s primary ‘thinking tools’, namely practice, habitus, capitals and fields and their application to policy studies. The second and third sections consider two additions to Bourdieu’s thinking tools, as a way to reconceptualise the functioning of policy if considered as a social field. More specifically, the second section develops an argument around cross‐field effects, as a way to group together, research and describe policy effects. The third section develops an argument about an emergent global education policy field, and considers ways that such a field affects national education policy fields.     

Bodies of knowledge: The concept of embodiment as an alternative to theory/practice debates in the preparation of teachers

The theory/practice divide is a persistent theme in teacher education research. This article reports on a phenomenological study of thirteen newly-qualified teachers across their first two years of teaching and their sense of preparedness to teach. Analysis of interviews with the teachers suggested they equated ‘being prepared’ with ‘being knowledgeable’, with being knowledgeable described in embodied terms, rather than as knowledge held ‘in the head’. We argue that the concept of embodiment, particularly as it has been taken up within the ‘practice turn’ in teacher education, offers a potential alternative to long-standing theory/practice entanglements in debates about learning to teach.     

Teacher identity development through action research: a Chinese experience

This study explores how two language teachers constructed and reconstructed their professional identities through their action research (AR) facilitated by university researchers in China. Informed by the theory of ‘community of practice’, the findings of the study show that AR exerted a transformative impact on the teachers’ identity development. Four distinctive routes of identity change were noted, namely their transformation from ‘fisherman’ to ‘fishing coach’, from ‘craftsman’ to ‘teacher researcher’, from ‘lonely fighter’ to ‘collaborator’, and from ‘housekeeper’ to ‘change agent’. Such change can be attributed to their engagement and practice in different communities of practice. However, the participants’ identity development also encountered some contextual obstacles, including the rigid school curriculum, lack of research knowledge, as well as the power dynamics between them and the researchers. Several implications can be drawn for teachers, teacher educators, and school leaders to help teachers construct a solid and robust professional identity in seeking their continuing professional development through AR.     

Walking Propositions: Coming to Know A/r/tographically

This article explores walking as a form of inquiry within a study group at The University of British Columbia committed to a/r/tography. Three propositions are explored and as a result we think more deeply about being present, truly present, to that which we never anticipated. The first proposition, ‘Go for a walk outside, find an object and do something with it’, leads us to think more deeply about being present to possibility: kicking the rock. The second proposition, ‘Walk around your neighbourhood with another. When you find unfamiliar ground, pause, and ground yourself’, leads us to appreciating being present in‐between place and relationality. The third proposition, ‘Follow one another in a line without stopping or speaking’, invites us to explore being present to interiority. Walking in response to these propositions and coming to think deeply about the impact of being present to presence, became important to us as a community of a/r/tographers.     

Developing an equalities literacy for practitioners working with children,young people and families through action research

ABSTRACT

The Marginalisation and Co-created Education (MaCE) project was developed between the University of Southern Norway, VIA University in Denmark and the University of Cumbria in the UK and funded by Erasmus+. The project aims to co-create proposals to achieve an equitable and socially just education system through participative action research with ‘Early School Leavers’. This paper establishes a conceptual framework called ‘Equalities Literacy’ that evolved from the first action research cycle of the project. The framework is informed by the practice experience and theoretical knowledge of the international and interdisciplinary research team. It is applied to one youth narrative in this paper to illustrate its efficacy in revealing socio-cultural in/equalities. The Equalities Literacy framework is proposed to challenge and inform practice and further research. Further, the ‘Indirect Approach’ is introduced and located within action research as a participatory methodology that other researchers may wish to adopt.     

Rethinking agency as an assemblage from change management to collaborative work

The movement towards inclusion comes together with a neoliberal audit mentality whereby individuals are held responsible for the transformations. The Special Educational Needs Coordinators (SENCOs) are seen as ‘change agents’ whose task it is, to support teachers in adapting their approach to optimise the chances for children with special needs in regular schools. In this paper, we want to problematise the ‘responsibility-blame discourse’ and look differently at agency. By using a diffractive methodology based on collaborative work, in which we have used material images of the workplace of the SENCO, and read-the-data-while-thinking-with-theory, we deconstruct the individualisation of agency. The SENCOs are no longer seen as separate individual humanist subjects where agency is solely lodged in the body of an individual agent [Barad, K. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press] but the SENCOs are part of the intra-active entanglement of multiple agencies, of an assemblage. This re-conceptualisation of agency leads to a different approach to inclusion, in which the participants in any encounter can work as part of the assemblage to develop communities capable of re-thinking practice and transforming it into a place where children with special needs become legitimate members of the school.     

Learning,action and solutions in action learning: investigation of facilitation practice using the concept of living theories

This paper explores the practice of action learning (AL) facilitation in supporting AL set members to address their ‘messy’ problems through a self-reflexive approach using the concept of ‘living theory’ [Whitehead, J., and J. McNiff. 2006. Action Research Living Theory. London: Sage]. The facilitation practice is investigated through personal observations and explanations of learning and action through shift in identity, thinking and approach of AL members in resolving complex problems raised during the AL sessions. The paper demonstrates how AL can be applied as a methodology for supporting leaders to address complex organisational problems through inquiry, critical reflection and advocacy to gain new insights as well as new practice. The findings highlight that key theoretical principles in AL such as critical reflection and problem-solving can be applied to support managers and leaders to analyse and solve complex organisational problems. The paper also contributes to the current literature on AL through the application of the living theory approach as a discipline for critical inquiry, self-reflection and evaluation.     

Waiting on text: interpretation in educational research

Against the widespread insistence that educational research should be ‘scientific’, I attempt to change the terms of the debate. Instead of asking whether research is robust and rigorous, and whether it ‘works’—all terms derived from the ‘scientific’ view—I argue that we should ask whether we can have confidence in research. This way of putting it enables us to place the idea of interpretation back at the centre of our understanding of education, and to see that when we have confidence in interpretation, it is because good interpretation has quite different qualities from scientific knowledge. At the centre of interpretation lies the idea of text and of responsiveness to text. Good interpretation requires good listening or ‘attentiveness’. It does not pretend to represent the world accurately and conclusively, as ‘scientific’ research does: it opens up space for conversation, and brings a world into being.     

Global-local divides and ontological politics: feminist STS perspectives on mobile learning for community health workers in Kenya

ABSTRACT

This theoretical paper argues that Feminist Science and Technology Studies (FSTS) can help advance the emancipatory project in critical Ed Tech research. To support this claim, we deploy Tsing’s concept of ‘scale-making projects’ (2005. Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press) to connect ‘global’ narratives to ‘local’ users in a mobile learning project for Kenyan health workers. Drawing from this exemplar case, we discuss more broadly how FSTS provides useful theory and methods for tracing the trans-national power relations of digital technologies ‘on the ground’. The paper concludes by advocating for new forms of emancipatory Ed Tech research – ones framed not only within oppositional pairings such as ‘global’ versus ‘local’, but which elucidate how binaries themselves are constituted through far-flung trans-national arrays of sociomaterial practice.     

Facilitating democratic professional development: exploring the double role of being an academic action researcher

Abstract

This article focuses on the double role of the academic action researcher working as facilitator and researcher in democratic professional development projects. The inquiry is based on three partnership projects: ‘research circles’ in Sweden, ‘dialogue conferences’ in Norway and ‘tailored professional development’ in Finland. In a self-study and through the lens of practice architectures, we, as action researchers, explore how our practices are enabled and constrained in, as well as are enabling and constraining, professional development partnerships with teachers and educational leaders. A critical perspective is provided on how and what democratic practices evolve. The inquiry opens up understandings about how the academic action researcher’s practices entails multi-faceted ways of working to be able to accomplish different and somehow contradictory objectives, yet at the same time enacting democratic working methods. Furthermore, the act of recognition as a connecting aspect between prefiguring arrangements and evolving practices will be elaborated on to supplement perspectives offered by the theory of practice architectures.     

Diffraction and response-able reading of texts: the relational ontologies of Barad and Deleuze

In this paper, we use a diffractive reading developed by feminist philosopher and quantum physicist Karen Barad, as part of a response-able methodology, in order to consider the claim made by Serge Hein in his paper ‘The New Materialism in Qualitative Inquiry: How Compatible Are the Philosophies of Barad and Deleuze?’ (2016) that the philosophies of Barad and Deleuze and Guattari are incommensurable. Our point of departure is from a stance which is quite different from that of Hein’s – we propose that it is indeed productive to put the work of Barad into conversation with that of Deleuze. As an alternative to critique used by Hein to engage with the work of Barad and Deleuze, we consider how a response-able and diffractive reading of notions of critique could provide a more affirmative and productive way of reading academic texts, including those by Barad and Deleuze.