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‘I don’t want them to feel like we’re part of the establishment’: teachers’ learning to work with refugee families as entangled becomings
Abstract
In this paper we ‘plug in’ ideas from post-qualitative thinking to read empirical material from Erasmus+ project, Open School Doors, and mobilise new ways of conceptualising teachers’ work with newly arrived families. Driven by commitments to inclusion and social justice teacher participants described tacit, in-the-moment, knowledge-making, that felt contingent and risky, as they sought to respond to encounters with families that demanded compassionate action but pushed them beyond the threshold of professional certainty and the would-be neutralities of ‘professional’ identities. We understand these affective responses to the work of teaching as ‘abductive’ moments of breakdown, rupture and estrangement, that draw attention to the always already becoming nature of professional practice. We put to work the concepts of entanglement, assemblage and rhizomes to make use of ‘abductive’ moments as productive opportunities for exploration of teachers’ messy, implicated, intra-relatedness to their practice worlds and to imagine models of professional learning that promote connection and knowledge-in-the-making as ethical, ‘response-able’ post/rhizo-professional alternative to linear forms of professional learning. Our discussion is embedded in a specific context but has important broader implications for the design of teacher education as preparation for complex anticipated working lives.
... We conceptualise practice as reciprocity, or the kind of 'odd-kin-making' ??? that Haraway imagines, a becoming together beyond binaries. We have argued elsewhere that this may be particularly important in the context of education in countries like England that have entangled, present but often silenced and suppressed histories of empire and colonialism (Kendall et al 2021). In our context in Birmingham, this may be particularly urgent -making kin with post-humanism argue Franklin-Phipps and Rath (2018, 270) refuses humanist stories of white exceptionalism 'that center [sic] certain kinds of human subject and destroy others' and to stay with the trouble as 'a sustained consideration of ideas that challenge us' in an 'ethical encountering of and becoming response-able to and for suffering, dispossession, histories that hurt.' (Franklin-Phipps and Rath 2018, 271). ...
Quality' and 'excellence' are omnipresent terms permeating all areas of higher education, particularly in the context of teaching and learning. The recent COVID-19 pandemic has further intensified debates about conceptions of quality and excellence, particularly regarding universities' ability to adapt from face-to-face teaching to virtual provision and to respond to the growing mental health needs of its students. In this chapter, we draw on evidence from three distinct projects undertaken in one university in England, each involving academic staff and students co-researching and collaborating on areas of curriculum, pedagogy and mental health. What links these projects is our participatory approach to rethinking notions of quality and excellence in practitioner education, which empowers students and staff to work collaboratively to improve the quality of teaching and learning experiences.
... This work is aligned with the "complex turn" in teacher education research that attempts to account for the various mediating elements at work in PD projects. Studies conducted within this framing have shown how simple one-to-one and here-to-there linear representations do not explain teacher learning in the context of professional development initiatives (Calderon et al., 2021;Rice, 2021;Kendall et al., 2021). Further, research within this tradition is revealing and problematizing how power structures and hierarchies are implicated in the way teachers learn within the context of these initiatives (Aderet-German et al., 2021;Chang, 2021;Mendoza et al., 2021;Moore et al., 2021;Trent, 2020). ...
This paper uses Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) to examine the boundary zone of teacher professional development within a multi-agency collaborative project. It highlights different goals, histories, and commitments that collided and intermingled to create tensions, contradictions, and opportunities for expansive learning. Although a policy mandate, use of the English Language Arts-Common Core State Standards created a common goal, however, interagency participants acted under strikingly different conceptions of effective teacher professional development. In an era of increased collaboration among agencies, this paper reconceptualizes interagency teacher professional development, serving as both a cautionary tale and a vision for the future.
In this paper, we bring together research literature on parental engagement and refugees and parental engagement to open up novel conversations about schools’ work with newly arrived families in the context of a moment of mass forced migration to communities and their schools across the European Union. This work was undertaken as part of the Open School Doors (OSD) project, a two-year Erasmus funded project involving researchers and teachers from Austria, Germany, Greece and the UK in collaboration with a pan-European parents association (EPA) that aimed to develop resources for teachers and schools working to include and support newly arrived young people and their families. We use the term ‘newly arrived’ as an inclusive term, taking account of families from both forced and more-established migration contexts as well as families from diverse Roma communities. This review identified the theoretical and contextual issues that framed OSD. Our review of the literature found that existing models of parental engagement neglect the complexity of social identity markers for newly arrived families and their inter-section with a UK teaching practice framed by white-ness and ‘post’-colonialism. Through this review, we problematise ideas of socio-cultural neutrality in home-school interactions, and draw attention to disparities in actions and outcomes for different agents (teachers, young people, parents) which have potential impacts for newly arrived and refugee families. Through this we foreground a multi-layered, intersectional approach to parental engagement. Our hybrid thinking mobilises new insights on parental engagement that demands de-othering of refugee families and reading ‘teacher-selves’ against the grain. Our review contributes recommendations for primary and secondary education, including starting points for reflection, review and practice development for teachers and school leaders.
This article addresses the problem of writing the posthuman in educational research. Confronted by our own failures as educational researchers within posthuman and new materialist approaches, it seeks a more radical opening to Lather and St Pierre’s question: ‘If we give up “human” as separate from non-human, how do we exist? … Are we willing to take on this question that is so hard to think but that might enable different lives?’ We do this to enable different lives for the planet in all of its manifestations, including its children of the Anthropocene. We begin with the insistent presence of mud in our deep hanging out in an early learning site and ask: what is mud, what does it do, where can mud lead us in its oozing at Grey Gums Preschool. From these explorations we include a scripted dialogue that was performed at a conference against a background of rolling images of the proliferation of mud’s play with children. We consider this scripted dialogue, and its performance, as data read in relation to the recent special issue of Educational Philosophy and Theory on ‘Educational epistemologies in a more than human world’ (2017).
Series: Expanding Literacies in Education Covering key terms and concepts in the emerging field of posthumanism and literacy education, this volume investigates posthumanism, not as a lofty theory, but as a materialized way of knowing/becoming/doing the world. The contributors explore the ways that posthumanism helps educators better understand how students, families, and communities come to know/become/do literacies with other humans and nonhumans from pre-K to adult literacy. Inviting readers to pause, slow down, and consider posthumanist ways of thinking about agency, intra-activity, subjectivity, and affect, this book explores and experiments with new ways of seeing, understanding, and defining literacies. 20% Discount Available-enter the code FLR40 at checkout* Hb: 978-1-138-09439-0 | $128.00 Pb: 978-1-138-09441-3 | $39.96 * Offer cannot be used in conjunction with any other offer or discount and only applies to books purchased directly via our website.
In this article, I describe how following the contour of concepts can enable a minor inquiry in which voice might be rethought as what Deleuze and Guattari called a “collective assemblage of enunciation.” Following the contour of Deleuze and Guattari’s “minor literature” and thinking voice as an assemblage, I both explain the characteristics of a minor literature and provide examples of the conditions for a minor inquiry. Mapping an enactment of a minor inquiry with examples from my previous work on voice, I conclude with what minor inquiry might look like as I experiment further with collective assemblages of enunciation.
While the theme of this special issue is concept as/instead of method, my contribution is to provide an account of Deleuze's " thought without image " in which the production of concepts takes place. Deleuze (1994) claims that concept creation does not occur in the dogmatic image of thought, for " the object of the concept, in itself or in relation to other objects, relies upon resemblance as a requirement of perceptual continuity " (p. 138). For Deleuze, this reliance on recognition renders thought bound to representation and stranded in a striated, universal space that crucifies difference. Thus, my intent is to take readers out of the dogmatic image of thought and into the conditions under which concepts are created and expressed. The descriptive force of my approach here is to emphasize rhythmic movement within an open system: what I'm naming thinking without method. Thinking without method relieves qualitative inquiry from the twin forms of epistemological imperatives of knowledge production and a conventional dependency on procedural method. Freedom from this reliance gives us a new starting place: the outside of method. The outside is an important concept in Deleuzian thought and undergirds my argument for thinking without method in qualitative inquiry. In his book Foucault, Deleuze (1988) reads his own concept of the outside through Foucault's theory of power, so ideas about relations, forces, and resistances are crucial to constitute the outside of both method and thought. In this section, I take up these intersections in an introductory manner because in qualitative inquiry, method has taken on normalizing forms. Giving prominence to relations that compose the outside is a radical shift that takes qualitative research into the new. In the social sciences, and qualitative research in particular , method reigns supreme to provide normative forms to our thinking in research. In other words, method supposedly , somehow, saves us from criticisms of credibility and reliability. A fixed image of method (i.e., a method that precedes inquiry) takes on a stratified form of trustworthiness that validates research. For example, qualitative fieldwork methods are recognizable: those of us trained in method know what it means to collect valid interview data. " Formed substances are revealed by visibility, " writes Deleuze (1988, p. 77), and method's visibility has been captured and insti-tutionalized by qualitative textbooks, coursework, publication standards, and so on. Method, as a " molar agency " (Deleuze, 1988, p. 76) of stratification, takes on functions of stabilization and reproduction (i.e., doing the same thing, or starting in the same place). Method, as strata, governs our inquiry. When we are caught in a dogmatic image of method, one option to escape capture is an oppositional turn to deny method altogether—which may trap us in a binary system of staunch procedure versus anything goes. However, we can rely on Deleuze to refuse that dichotomy and start elsewhere: the outside of method. Deleuze (1988) insists that any dualism opens up to a " multiplicity of relations between forces. .. free of any dualizable form " (pp. 83-84); these relations between forces " do not lie outside strata but form the outside of strata " (p. 84). The outside of method, then, Abstract The author relies on Deleuze's critique of the dogmatic image of thought to produce the conditions under which new concepts are created. Putting together a network of concepts such as the outside, the encounter, and force, the author invents thinking without method, an emergent, fragmented strategy that forms the outside of stratified qualitative research methods. The author draws upon some of her previous work to experiment with a new starting place for inquiry.
This article reports communicative interactions with a focus on the body as a dimension of the semiotic repertoire. The research context is a four-year, multi-site linguistic ethnography which investigates how people communicate in superdiverse cities in the UK. In the setting of a butcher’s stall in a city market we consider three interactions at a particular market stall between butchers and their customers. In the first, gesture is deployed as a resource by both an English butcher’s assistant and his customer. In the second, we examine the body as a resource in the semiotic repertoire of a Chinese butcher as he negotiates a faux haggling interaction with East European customers. In the third example, also recorded as field notes, a Chinese woman employs a ‘Chinese’ gesture to represent the number of pieces of offal she wishes to purchase from an English butcher’s assistant. Each of the examples was recorded during an extended period of ethnographic field work in Birmingham Bull Ring market. Through detailed analysis of these interactions we argue that when people’s biographical and linguistic histories barely overlap, they translanguage through the deployment of wide-ranging semiotic repertoires.
In short, this essay does for the concept of the assemblage what Deleuze and Giorgio Agamben did for Foucault in their essays on the dispositif: it extracts from a large body of work the core formal features of its operative methodology or logic.
In 2015, Europe faced the arrival of over 1.25 million refugees fleeing from war-affected countries. The public mainly learned about this issue through domestic media. Through the use of computer-assisted content analysis, this study identifies the most dominant frames employed in the coverage of refugee and asylum issues between January 2015 and January 2016 in six Austrian newspapers (N = 10,606), particularly focusing on potential differences between quality and tabloid media, and on frame variations over time. The findings reveal that, apart from administrative aspects of coping with the arrivals, established narratives of security threat and economisation are most prominent. Humanitarianism frames and background information on the refugees’ situation are provided to a lesser extent. During the most intense phases of the crisis, the framing patterns of tabloid and quality media become highly similar. Media coverage broadens to multiple prominent frames as issue salience sharply increases, and then ‘crystallises’ into a more narrow set. In sum, the results confirm a predominance of stereotyped interpretations of refugee and asylum issues, and thus persisting journalistic routines in both, tabloid and quality media, even in times of a major political and humanitarian crisis.
Professor Elizabeth Adams St. Pierre’s work focuses on critical and poststructural theories of language and the subject and what she has called post qualitative inquiry or post inquiry. She asks what might come after conventional humanist qualitative research methodology. She’s especially interested in the new empiricisms/new materialisms as well as new research practices enabled by the ontological turn. During St. Pierre's visit to the Finnish Educational Research Association (FERA) Conference in Oulu in November 2014, we had the opportunity to talk with her about post qualitative research around some questions we had sent her beforehand. We then transcribed, edited, and translated the interview, and published it in the Finnish journal Kasvatus (Education) in spring 2015. In this interview St. Pierre talks in the US context, where qualitative methodology is turning—or being pushed to turn—back to positivism with normalized and formalized practices, St. Pierre encourages researchers to constantly question the prevailing truths and the traditions they have learnt too well.
This article examines how one first-year physics teacher translated his inquiry-based, socially just pre-professional learning into classroom practice in his first several months of teaching, using rhizomatics, a non-linear theory of social activity, as a theoretical and methodological frame. This case highlights the complexity of enacting a social justice-oriented pedagogical practice as a new teacher in a constrained school environment. Although the participant experienced positive interactions with his students, he faced multiple external challenges as well as his own internal conflicts about teaching methods. These conditions influenced him to adopt more traditional practices than those that were espoused in the participant’s teacher education programme, although some evidence of progressive teaching surfaced inconsistently. Authors provide recommendations for teacher educators and policy makers to better support new teachers as they transition into the first year of teaching, and call on researchers to explore methodologies and theories that can account for nonlinearity, complexity and multiplicity in investigating teaching and learning.
In this article, the authors describe the work of their recently published book, Thinking with Theory in Qualitative Research: Viewing Data Across Multiple Perspectives. The purpose of this article is to show how they use theory to think with their data (and use data to think with theory) in order to accomplish a reading of data that is both within and against interpretivism. The authors put to use a concept picked up from Deleuze and Guattari to capture their thinking with theory in qualitative research: “plugging in.” They engage “plugging in” as a machinic process that works against conventional coding in qualitative data interpretation and analysis by explaining and enacting the methodological maneuvers taken up in their thinking with theory. The authors conclude that “plugging in” positions both data and theory as machines and reveals both their supple substance and their machinic potential to interrupt and transform other machines, other data, and other knowledge projects.
This article draws on systems theory, complexity theory, and the organiza - tional sciences to engage boundary dynamics in the creation of parent-school partnerships. These partnerships help children succeed through an emergent process of dialogue and relationship building in the peripheral spaces where parents and schools interact on behalf of children. Historically, parental in- volvement and parent education programs evolved from mechanistic thinking. This review and interpretation of multidisciplinary research suggests reframing parent-school partnerships in the context of schools as learning communities that generate new knowledge and innovation as the experiences and com- petencies of teachers and parents interact to make tacit knowledge explicit. Knowledge society concepts including social capital, actionable knowledge, networked innovation, and communities of practice are applied to parent- school partnerships. Acknowledging vast contributions of research to current understanding of parental involvement, the article also explores the limitations of existing theoretical models and seeks to expand that understanding through the introduction of boundary dynamics and systems thinking.
This is an electronic version of an article published in Journal of education policy, 2002, vol.17, no.1, pp. 109-138. The Journal of education policy is available online at informaworldTM at http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/02680939.asp This paper is about the nature of contemporary professional identity. It looks at the ways in which 'discursive dynamics' come to re-write the professional teacher and nurse as split, plural and conflictual selves, as they seek to come to terms with a political impetus written through what the authors term an 'economy of performance' in uncertain conflict with various 'ecologies of practice'. The teacher and nurse are thus located in a complicated nexus between policy, ideology and practice. Epistemologically, the paper offers a deconstruction of professional identities, and criticizes the reductive typologies and characterizations of current professionalism. Politically, it reaches towards a more nuanced account of professional identities, stressing the local, situated and indeterminable nature of professional practice, and the inescapable dimensions of trust, diversity and creativity.
This article examines two vignettes taken from a research project designed to give voice to children's understandings of equity and social diversity in order to raise questions about how this project potentially reinforced inequities in children's lives. A rhizoanalysis of the vignettes is used to raise questions about how young children perform diverse discourses of ‘race’. This paper specifically focuses on the extent to which some of the voices produced in the research colluded in the production of racist and sexist practices. It uses this focus to raise questions generated through the rhizoanalysis for researchers who want to give voice to young children. Specifically, it asks if it is time for researchers to move beyond a concern for children's ‘voices’ and towards transforming inequitable power relations in our research with them.
As a critical sociolinguistic theory, translanguaging has had the most application in language education, especially in the education of language‐minoritized students and in bilingual education and increasingly in what are considered foreign language programs. It has been seen to have the capacity and potential to transform the way we see, use, and teach language, literacy, and other subjects. This entry first discusses the meanings of translanguaging theory and its implications for a theory of language. It focuses on how translanguaging transforms our understandings of bilingual/multilingual people as well as the familiar concepts that have been used to study them. The second part then turns to how translanguaging has impacted language education, transforming how we teach students for bilingualism as well as how bilingual students learn. The focus then shifts to how translanguaging informs and can transform language policies in classrooms as well as pedagogies.
This paper draws on my own research attempts to reconsider the complexities of teacher becomings using creative methodologies. It explores the subsequent dilemma of how to ‘do’ analysis of data which emerges from post-qualitative methodological contexts. Drawing on new feminist materialist theories and taking inspiration from the notion of data ‘glows’ and ‘abducts’, I illustrate how the affective intensities of encountering data can be productive of a different, more emergent meaning-making and knowledge production for both researcher and for participants. Through an unfixing of more traditional and particular ways of knowing and representing practitioners and practitioner learning, blurring the boundaries of life/experience/research/theory/method; I suggest that embodied, affective and relational readings of data can help us tell alternative, less predictable stories of both practitioner and researcher becomings. This approach suggests new possibilities for re-making and re-imagining professional learning and practices in the 21st century.
In this conversation rhizoanalysis is introduced as a way of processing through an assemblage involving research methodology, generation of data and analytical possibilities entwined within. As a research methodology, rhizomethodology (Author, 2009) is a way of putting the Deleuzo-Guattarian philosophical imaginary of rhizome (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) to work; it is a way of working (with) data, complexly. With/in/alongside this methodological approach, the rhizoanalysis becomes the inquiry of the research, happening throughout the whole research process. The analysis is not a constant thing relegated to a place of its own, rather, the rhizoanalysis as ‘some of rhizome’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 9) happens throughout. With/in/through processes of thinking rhizome in flux, working rhizome (im)provis(at)ionally is an ongoing experiment with and exploration of my own thinking. Rhizoanalysis (dis)continuously (e)merges with/in/through every dimension of the thinking, ebbing and flowing with/in/through matters of always already becoming so that writing (about) rhizoanalysis is also affected by writing (the) methodology and doing (the) rhizoanalysis; nothing was/is separate or linear in the thinking or writing up~down of the research project drawn on here. Rather, there was/is an ongoing intermingling of data, methodology and analysis with theorising the literature and practicing the theory, each becoming the other(s).
This paper introduces the AHRC-funded research project, Translation and Translanguaging: Investigating Linguistic and Cultural Transformations in Superdiverse Wards in Four UK Cities. The overall aim of the four-year project, TLANG for short, is to investigate how people communicate when they bring different histories, biographies, and trajectories to interaction in contexts of superdiversity.
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.
This article problematizes the concept of data and experiments with rhizoanalysis to think data in terms of problems, questions, and concept creation. At issue is representation and interpretation, foundational blocks of qualitative research that are incommensurate with rhizoanalysis and post-qualitative research. Deleuze has problematized this issue through questions and experimentation within an asymmetrical world filled with paradoxes that gave rise to concept creation of sense and nonsense. In the Logic of Sense, sense is the event itself. Sense emerges out of nonsense. In this article, representation and interpretation are deterritorialized (virtual becoming) and reterritorialized (actualized) as nonsense–sense and palpation. Palpation is a concept that refers to data experienced indirectly. Rhizoanalysis is deployed because of its non-hierarchical and non-linear approach to data. Multiple Literacies Theory follows a similar path. It releases school-based literacy from its privileged rank to engage reading in multiplicitous and heterogeneous rhizomatic connections. Reading a data assemblage is untimely and not pre-given. It plugs into Multiple Literacies Theory, an analytic approach to reading an assemblage in rhizoanalysis. Reading a data assemblage is explored in a study on how writing systems in multilingual children function and what writing systems produce through affect. A rhizomatic approach is proposed and constituted through a research assemblage whose differential elements enter into a relationality of affect that flows through and transforms the assemblage. It produces a movement that dissolves dualisms in favor of multiplicity, uncertainty, and the untimely. It decenters the cogito human, maps assemblages, and extends experiences of a material world. Posing problems and questions open paths to a future yet to become.
This chapter theorizes translanguaging, while describing how it is carried out in one “English” classroom in a school for Latino adolescents who have arrived recently in the USA. The theories of transculturación, autopoeisis, and coloniality and border thinking are brought to bear on the concept of translanguaging, which is defined as an act of bilingual performance, as well as a bilingual pedagogy of bilingual teaching and bilingual learning. The theoretical discussion is then followed by a description of how the flexible use of linguistic resources in classrooms for immigrants can resist the historical and cultural positionings of English monolingualism in the USA. Translanguaging as pedagogy holds the promise of developing US Latinos who use their dynamic bilingualism in ways that would enable them to fully participate in US society, and meet the global, national, and social needs of a multilingual future.
Current government policy, which calls for closer working relationships with families, together with the escalation of globalised communities places mounting pressure on teachers to take account of increasingly diverse family values, traditions and parenting styles. Considering the disproportionate number of minority ethnic children facing educational underachievement in the UK, one could argue practitioners take up this challenge. In view of increased European migration, this paper considers factors which remain the key to enabling migrant worker parents to establish and sustain effective links with their child’s school. After decades of research and government reports, how far we have come to ensuring that all families are enabled to become involved in their children’s schooling? The findings, which stem from a broader qualitative study, are largely presented through three collective vignettes which represent the voices, and different experiences, encountered by nine migrant worker parents. Factors identified as having significance to home–school relations include language barriers, issues associated with changing family structures, and community relations.
Coding and data are conceptual twins. This article focuses on the latter concept in particular and opens with a dilemma: We can either follow the root meaning of "data" and say that they are the "givens" that we "collect" and code. In this case, however, data turn out to be mythological, for they are always produced, constructed, or "taken" as the pragmatists said. Or we can say, like some qualitative researchers, that "everything is data," which rests on a more sophisticated philosophical position but which easily renders the concept empty. The article describes a way out of this dilemma by presenting a way to think about (and teach) qualitative analysis that is neither data-driven (induction) nor hypothesis-driven (deduction) but driven by astonishment, mystery, and breakdowns in one's understanding (abduction). Materials are "taken" and produced to describe or resolve a mystery, which, to me, is " analysis after coding."
This paper describes assumptions of representational logic and phenomenology that organize much of Enlightenment humanism and one of its knowledge projects, conventional humanist qualitative methodology. The author argues that the ontological critiques of “post” theorists, including Foucault, Derrida, Baudrillard, Lyotard, and Deleuze and Guattari, were set aside in favor of epistemological projects following World War II and that, in general, the “posts” had little effect on that methodology. Those critiques are now being put to work and extended in the new empiricism and new materialism to re-imagine being, always an ethical task. Whether humanist qualitative inquiry can survive the ontological turn is a question to consider.
The article imagines a materially informed post-qualitative research. Focusing upon issues of language and representation, under the influence of Deleuze’s Logic of Sense, it argues for research practices capable of engaging the materiality of language itself. It proposes the development of non- or post-representational research practices, drawing on contemporary materialist work that rejects the static, hierarchical logic of representation, and practices such as interpretation and analysis as conventionally understood. The article explores the ontological and the practical implications of this state of affairs, via a re-reading of a fragment of what would have been called data. Offering relief from the ressentiment and piety that have characterised qualitative methodologists’ engagements with scientific method, the ‘post’ could therefore be read as signalling the demise of qualitative research. Or at least, as inaugurating a qualitative research that would be unrepresentable to itself.
In many literacy classrooms, students engage in public performances in which they use various texts, movements of their bodies, and verbal interactions. How do we interpret such events? In this article, we critique a representational mode of interpretation and describe an alternate mode. We argue that literacy performances are often about creating differences, including differences in the moving, shifting relations of semiotic resources and differences in the performed identities of participants. Such differences - effects and affective intensities - are lost or overly stabilized within conventional interpretations, which focus on asking how meanings are represented, organized, and produced in performances. Conventionally, the texts of performances (e.g., print, images, speech) are imagined to signify (or re-present) a world that lies behind them. The task of interpretation is approached as reading for meaning. In this mode, we conceive of performances as primarily communicational or informational. Alternatively, using rhizomatic analysis, we follow the emergence of relations and differences by mapping performance-in-motion. We discuss how rhizomatic analysis shifts attention away from fixed meanings and toward action and the new "becomings" that are an important part of literacy performances. Data are drawn from an ethnographic study of interactions in a socially, culturally, and racially diverse high school American Studies classroom.
This essay seeks to give philosophical expression to the vitality, willfullness, and recalcitrance possessed by nonhuman entities and forces. It also considers the ethico-political import of an enhanced awareness of “thing-power.” Drawing from Lucretius, Spinoza, Gilles Deleuze, Bruno Latour, and others, it describes a materialism of lively matter, to be placed in conversation with the historical materialism of Marx and the body materialism of feminist and cultural studies. Thing-power materialism is a speculative onto-story, an admittedly presumptuous attempt to depict the nonhumanity that flows around and through humans. The essay concludes with a preliminary discussion of the ecological implications of thing-power.
This paper addresses the usefulness of angels in breaking out of the Hegelian enclosure that typifies late 20-century critical thought and practice. Grounded in efforts to create a broadly accessible book about an interview study of women living with HIV AIDS, the paper sketches interpretive and textual strategies toward a less comfortable social science. After providing background to the study and an overview of the book's format, the paper presents an overview of the angel inter texts. This is followed by probing four thematics: displacement dispersal deferral, translation as betrayal, rhizomatics, and feminist ethnography as a ruin rune. Each is prefaced with quotes from readers of the book as a sort of ''fold'' of ''response data'' in order to situate the book within a larger field of the failures of representation in order to begin to theorize the failures of the book in moving toward a different scene of representation.
This paper deals with the following questions:1The ‘problem’: what is the ‘Literacy Debate’ and why do such apparently arcane accounts of language and literacy have such a high profile in popular media?2What are the New Literacy Studies (NLS) and what are the new understandings of language and of literacy on which NLS are based?3. What are the implications for literacy education?
This article reports on research that questions commonsense understandings of a bilingual pedagogy predicated on what Cummins (2005, 2008) refers to as the “two solitudes” assumption (2008, p. 65). It sets out to describe a flexible bilingual approach to language teaching and learning in Chinese and Gujarati community language schools in the United Kingdom. We argue for a release from monolingual instructional approaches and advocate teaching bilingual children by means of bilingual instructional strategies, in which two or more languages are used alongside each other. In developing this argument, the article takes a language ecology perspective and seeks to describe the interdependence of skills and knowledge across languages.
Full-text of this article is not available in this e-prints service. This article was originally published following peer-review in Journal of Education Policy, published by and copyright Routledge. Theory frequently offends. The paper argues that this is its strength: the value of theory lies in its power to get in the way. Theory is needed to block the reproduction of banality, and thereby, hopefully, open new possibilities for thinking and doing. However, I also note that theory has become somewhat disengaged from its objects, diminishing its power of productive interference. I argue for 'exemplary' practices, in which theory proliferates from examples. Caught in the minutiae of the example, yet also open to unexpected connections, theory might develop more productive ways of offending. Or to put it differently, of producing wonder.
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Forming and reforming identities among 1.5- generation asylum seekers and refugees Refugee Studies
- S S Kebede
Making Kin in Chthulucene
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Meeting the Universe half-way
- K Barad
Rethinking the genders and becoming in second language education. Deterritorialising language, teaching and learning and research: deleuzo-Guattarian perspective on second language education
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Translanguaging. The Encyclopedia of AppliedLlinguistics
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Understanding Deleuze. Australia: Allan and Unwin
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