Local girl befriends vicious bear : unleashing educational aspiration through a pedagogy of material-semiotic entanglement

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13 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

In education, posthumanist approaches require us to pay attention to the more-than-human contexts within which young people come to take themselves up in the world, and to the affordances and capacities of worldly things and affective flows to shape young people's desires and ways of being in the world. While there has been considerable work in early childhood contexts (e.g., Blaise, 2013; Davies, 2014; Hultman and Lenz Taguchi, 2010; Pacini-Ketchabaw and Taylor, 2015; Taylor, 2013), in secondary schools the more-than-human requires researchers to look beyond taken-for-granted rational, cognitive, curriculum contexts to attend to surprising configurations where bodies, things, affect, desire, matter, imagination and pedagogy collide to form new assemblages and possibilities. The material-semiotic entanglements of pedagogy are complex, multiple, uneven, unstable, emergent, and contingent on the specificities of particular times and places. In school education, pedagogy tends to be a taken-for-granted concept, shorthand for all manner of practices around teaching and learning, and in its most common usage it foregrounds the humanist master narrative that positions careful teacher planning for student learning as the most significant aspect of the classroom experience. Deviations and surprises, lessons that veer away from intended outcomes, unexpected pedagogical encounters' provoked by things other than people are elided rather than understood as part of complex assemblages where pedagogy is emergent, relational and ethical, opening towards intensities and difference (Davies, 2014; Davies and Gannon, 2009). The pedagogical encounter glimpsed in this chapter was a career planning day in a secondary school. However, its pedagogical trajectories and intensities extended beyond that time and place to incorporate researchers and research apparatus. In this chapter I experiment with some of the (im)possibilities of posthumanism in thinking through conventional empirical research in education. I do not intend to present a definitive demonstration of posthuman research at work in a replicable way, or to provide a comprehensive review of scholarship in this burgeoning arena. Rather, by returning to a fragment of data from a completed research project, I aim to provoke questions and incite problems that cannot be resolved here, but that I hope will continue to resonate with readers into then own work, as they do in mine.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationPosthuman Research Practices in Education
EditorsCarol A. Taylor, Christina Hughes
Place of PublicationU.S.
PublisherPalgrave Macmillan
Pages128-148
Number of pages21
ISBN (Electronic)9781137453082
ISBN (Print)9781349686872
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2016

Keywords

  • education, secondary
  • posthumanism
  • youth

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