Storying Diffractive Pedagogy

Abstract

This paper aims to investigate the affective flows and material intra-actions that unfold in micro-moments in Early Childhood Teacher Education (ECTE) within observations of student teachers' cooperative work. Putting to work Haraway's SF philosophy (1997, 2004 and 2016) we work towards reconfiguring the primacy of critical reflection, and the cultivation of reflexive practitioners by troubling pedagogical practices such as groupwork that claim to generate critical reflexivity. We ask what else gets produced during groupwork and argue that diffractive pedagogy might open up possibilities for student-teachers to move beyond a narrow concern with critical reflection. By playing with rhythm and plasticity we stretch established ideas about ECTE and offer diffractive pedagogy as a slippery, contingent, relational, emergent, speculative and ultimately less certain concept than critical reflection. Introducing diffractive pedagogy into debates about ECTE offers a generative rupture; an opportunity to extend conceptualisations and practices.

Fugitive Futures and Knowledge Brokering: Adding Value, Habits, and Trust in Early Childhood Education and Educational Research

“…In the earlier mentioned master program Early Childhood Studies (0–3 years) , at Østfold University College, we are engaged in cooperative explorations involving both master students and lecturers, searching for more organic educational methodologies that align themselves with, and are closer to toddlers’ life orientations (Larsen et al, 2020; Sandvik et al, 2019; Ulla et al, 2019). We are inspired by the knowledgeable child and how the youngest children seem to live multimodality and multidimensionality (Moxnes & Osgood, 2019). By trusting the generative forces of childhood, we explore changemaking potentialities in what we label “organic methodologies” in higher education (Larsen et al, 2020).…”