Escaping oppositional thinking in the teaching of pleasure and danger in sexuality education

Sexuality education and preventative sexual abuse education are often taught as separate subjects in secondary schools. This paper extends the argument against this separation by highlighting flaws in the logic that manifests this separation. Diffracting critical sexuality education theory with the monist logic of new materialism, I rethink sexuality as an array of intra-acting¹1. ‘In contrast to the usual term interaction, which assumes that there are separate individual agencies that precede their interaction, the notion of intra-action recognizes that distinct agencies do not precede, but rather emerge through, their intra-action’ (Barad 2007 Barad, Karen. 2003. “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter.” Signs 28 (3): 801–831. doi: 10.1086/345321[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar], 33). bodies that are always in a process of becoming anew. Realising the belonging together of dualist terms [Bergson, Henri. 1896 [1911]. Matter and Memory. Translated and edited by Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer. London: George Allen &; Unwin Ltd.] and how the reductive structure of dualist logic affirms an original ‘One’, I argue that the feminist push for pleasure-based, sex-positive education affirms sex-negative attitudes. Embracing Barad's [Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press.] notion of ethics as inescapable entanglement woven through all matter(ing), I suggest that rather than any particular ‘aspect’ of sexuality being emphasised in sexuality education it would be more useful to centre classroom discussions on ethics, as inescapable entanglement.     

New perspectives on the positioning of parents in children’s bullying at school

This article explores the subject of parents with respect to children’s bullying at school. The overarching claim is that parental agency and positions on children’s bullying at school are produced and made possible by an apparatus of multiple, concurrent forces that provide poor conditions for a constructive partnership between parents and schools in cases of bullying. This research adds to the existing literature in the field by suggesting that the connections between schools, parents and their children’s social behaviour at school must be seen as complexly entangled and involving a range of forces at local, societal and political levels. Furthermore, based on an emergent research design, the article contributes to the discussion of post-qualitative research, drawing upon varied, qualitative empirical material and analytically experimenting with combining Adele Clarke’s idea of situational analysis and Karen Barad’s concepts of intra-action and apparatus.     

Things and children in play – improvisation with language and matter

Based on the authors' studies of material-discursively approached lives of children, this paper addresses the educational relevance of playing, through re-entangling and complicating divided, purpose-directed and individualistic conceptualisations of play. The unhelpful binary of conceiving playing as an end (‘free play’) as distinct from playing as means (‘guided play’) is argued to render children as subjects of education who do not yet know, rather than ones who are capable of also producing knowledge and challenging ways of knowing and being. The empirical anchoring of this paper is a study in which 12 Finnish children, aged four to seven, gathered once a week for a total of 11 times to assist an adult researcher in studying ‘things, objects and beings’. Based on insights from this study, an approach to playing as intra-active and comprising improvisation with language and matter, is suggested to provide spaces for producing and contesting as well as acquiring knowledge.     

Heterarchical coaching for continuing teacher professional learning and development: a transversal analysis of agency

Aligned with the development of human capital, in-service teacher education is globally conceived as a key lever in economic development. However, teacher education is also a critically important process to leverage teacher political awareness and social justice. This article provides a socio-materialist account of continuous professional development (CPD) that recognises the transversality of objects, space and bodies as a rich and complex assemblage. Investigations into agential matter are of increasing research interest. The authors use collective biography that draws on their CPD work with teachers in Aotearoa/New Zealand, to provide a ‘new material’ analysis of the multiplicitous nature of the agency of objects. Although agency in education is predominantly theorised in humanist terms, this article gives consideration to the co-constitutive nature of material objects in professional learning spaces. In particular, the research highlights the importance of material concerns in the relational and fluid dynamics of heterarchical coaching practices.     

Smart girls traversing assemblages of gender and class in Australian secondary mathematics classrooms

I examine experiences of former Australian schoolgirls in relation to mathematics during secondary school. This research scrutinises misunderstandings about success and impact on subject choice that can result in post-schooling trajectories that limit what girls can do in their lives beyond school. I examine ways affective relationality, as a sense of embodied belonging, may influence participation in subjects. I frame the discussion using the Baradian concept of intra-action, a co-production that engages an ethic of non-coincidence. For these participants, a reductive high-stakes testing environment and aspirations to become a master subject evoke a powerful not good enough assemblage. The responsibility to achieve enough success incites a soliciting of a particular self in affective regulation. The dread of not excelling in mathematics was often too much to endure thus participants chose to discontinue studying mathematics. They understood this as a sensible solution to prevent vulnerability, as not good enough.