Sticky stories from the classroom: From reflection to diffraction in Early Childhood Teacher Education

Abstract

This article aims to challenge the prominence of reflexivity as a strategy for early childhood teachers to adopt by taking Norwegian early childhood teacher education as its focus. Observed micro-moments from a university classroom generate multilayered, multi-sensorial entangled narratives that address what reflection and diffraction are and what they do – where students, the educator, materiality, space and affects intra-act. Furthermore, the article explores the ways in which teacher educators and students in early childhood teacher education become-with the classroom and materiality, and, in doing so, ideas about professionalism in early childhood education are opened out. By identifying the limitations of reflection, the authors go on to explore what working with diffraction might offer to reach alternative understandings. By placing a focus on seemingly unremarkable and routine events in the life of an early childhood teacher education classroom, the authors offer other, potentially more generative ways to think about student teachers and their further professional practice in kindergartens.

Keywords

diffraction early childhood teacher education educators reflection student teachers

Introduction

Reflection has been, and still is, a frequently discussed topic in literature about practical work in kindergartens and in teacher education. Current debates about reflection understand it as part of professional daily practices in early childhood institutions (e.g. Liljestrand and Hammarberg, 2017), concerned with development and differences (e.g. Barron et al., 2017), and as a point of discussion for newly qualified early childhood teachers (e.g. Farquhar and Tesar, 2016). However, reflection has long been a contentious concept, with Fendler (2003: 20) describing reflective teaching as a ‘catch-all term’ that carries ‘mixed messages and confusing agendas’, and Klemp (2013: 42) arguing that reflection ‘belongs to an unclear linguistic category’. A recent review of the concept in teacher education concludes by questioning whether it is time ‘to shift our focus from it as a required tool in programs of teacher education to the actual concept itself, and explore more fully its meaning and potential for enhancing professional practice in myriad contexts’ (Beauchamp, 2015: 137). Others have pointed to possibilities that become available when working with ideas of diffraction to investigate an event (e.g. Barad, 2007, 2014; Lafton, 2016; Lenz Taguchi, 2010, 2012). We argue that diffraction offers alternative means to conceptualize teacher education in the university classroom, and specifically in early childhood teacher education (ECTE). We also argue that diffractive thinking holds greater potential to explore unforeseen, not-yet-known possibilities than critical reflection allows for. This article attempts a diffractive analysis of events in the university classroom in ECTE to explore the ways in which becoming early childhood teachers are prepared for work in kindergartens.

Diffraction is deployed in this article as an overarching methodological framing ‘in the sense of materially engaging in the world’ (Barad, 2007: 91) in order to investigate how materiality shapes teaching in university classrooms. In an attempt to open up ideas about professionalism in early childhood education, we focus on how diffractions intertwine in classroom teaching in ECTE and how teacher educators and students become-with materiality. Material–discursive–semiotic patterns are examined by being attentive to how data is made (Barad, 2007; Lenz Taguchi, 2012) – how it spreads out (Lafton, 2016) by undertaking a diffractive analysis (Jackson and Mazzei, 2013; Lenz Taguchi, 2012). Early childhood student teachers’ preparations for future professional practice are discussed by focusing on differences and the agency of materiality. We do this by constructing a narrative based on micro-moments (Davies, 2014a) from observations in a classroom, and then examine closely some possible diffractive moments. Reading Barad (2007) created opportunities to encounter observational data as fragmented but interwoven in unexpected and unanticipated ways. The central narrative strategy we work with in this article is sticky stories, which stresses how matter comes to matter in research in surprising ways. When the human is decentred from investigations, and attention is turned to events that cause us to stumble and wonder, new knowledge is generated that can take sedimented ideas about reflection to other places. Deploying sticky stories as a research strategy enabled us to trace the interconnections and intra-actions between things, doings and ideas in and around university classrooms, and in processes of preparing for working in kindergartens. Crucially, the strategy allowed us the opportunity to approach the concept of reflection afresh and contribute to extending existing debates about its central place in ECTE and early childhood education practice more broadly.

Diffraction in a world of mirrors

Reflection has become embedded within teacher education programmes and is established as a pedagogical tool to link academic knowledge to practical experiences in the education of kindergarten teachers. The aim is to foster practitioners who can reflect on their kindergarten practice and question their professional judgement as part of a professional development process (Kemmis, 2008: 288). Reflection is frequently in use in literature on teacher education, and has been a valued part of learning processes for many years (Beauchamp, 2015; Fendler, 2003; Moxnes, 2016). One example is the curriculum document for Norwegian ECTE (Ministry of Education and Research [MER], 2012), which refers to ‘reflection’ 23 times. It describes reflection as a professional value and an assessment element, and uses concepts like ‘reflection over ethical questions’, ‘professional reflection’ and to do ‘critical reflection’. As such, the curriculum document appears ‘to embody mixed messages and confusing agendas’ (Fendler, 2003: 20). The privileging of reflection in ECTE has often been understood to mirror what is considered good practice and a call to do more of the same (Søndenå, 2002). The concept in ECTE is criticized for functioning as a mirror and fostering normative practitioners who act and think in normative ways, instead of engaging in exercises which might result in fundamental changes to professional practice in early childhood contexts (Søndenå, 2002). As an optical concept, mirroring sheds light on ‘something’ and reflects a picture back to something/someone (Barad, 2007).

However, researchers working with post-humanist ideas offer other possibilities by suggesting a related optical phenomenon: diffraction. Diffraction offers an alternative methodology to reflection (e.g. see Barad, 2007, 2014; Davies, 2014b; Lanas et al., 2015; Lenz Taguchi, 2012, 2013; Osgood & Giugni, 2015), which is being taken up in research on kindergartens and higher education. One example is Otterstad (2012: 147), who urges investigations of pedagogical processes that move beyond critical reflection to include diffraction as a way of seeing teacher educators’ pedagogical processes. Another example is suggested by Lanas et al. (2015), who investigated theoretical reflections in teacher education in Finland. They suggest that diffraction concerns how theory passes and twirls around in the various spaces in the university classroom. Consequently, teacher educators fail to fully recognize student teachers’ diffracted theoretical utterances as theory. Further, this diffractive approach allows educators to re-evaluate what they have taken to be student disinterest, and to approach pedagogy in more expansive and experimental ways (Lanas et al., 2015: 539).

Diffraction can be described as what happens when a wave alters, bends or passes through an opening, or spreads out in different directions (Lafton, 2016: 36). Alternatively, when light strikes a prism, it appears to be white, but when the light hits the prism, it diffracts or separates the white light, so it appears changed and visible in multiple colours. According to Grüters (2011: 60), this can also be studied when a thought materializes through words and concepts. In research that takes a diffractive approach to conceptualizing early childhood practice, a concern with the human subject (i.e. the teacher educator, the student teacher, the child) is displaced, and instead attention to emotion, affect, materiality, space and place, and how they become entangled (and what they diffractively produce), is central. For example, also working in the Nordic context, Davies (2014b: 734) offers a diffractive analysis of anger and bodily affects within and between young children in kindergartens, whilst Hultman and Lenz Taguchi (2010) investigate the relational field between young children and materiality, and Lafton (2016) traces the generative possibilities for early childhood practices when the agency of digital technology is accounted for. In our research, we work with diffraction as a means ‘to see, feel, touch, taste, smell, hear, and otherwise sense phenomena with the mind’s eye’ (Barad, 2007: 388).

By mapping sticky stories, we focus on how matter comes to matter in university classrooms in intra-active micro-moments (Davies, 2014a). We do this to offer a rereading of the concept of pedagogical reflection and to attend to routine and everyday events in ECTE through a different lens. Diffractive analysis allows for a deeper engagement with approaches that are routinely taken to teacher education in early childhood education and care, and we explore what can happen when established and predictable ways of being reflective and doing reflection in ECTE are unsettled. The initial objective of the research was to identify how educators facilitate and work with reflection in their classroom. An observational study was conducted, involving nine teacher educators in ECTE. Pages of observation notes were gathered, but in attempts to identify reflection in practice, the slipperiness of the concept became apparent. Searching for the known (i.e. reflection in practice) incited curiosity about the not-known and the not-yet-known going on in these classrooms that transcended what was recognizable as reflection.

Pathways into diffractive methodology

The methodological approach was inspired by Barad (2007) and Haraway (1997), who suggest that diffractive methodology is a critical practice for making differences. This article concerns differences that interrupt teaching in the university classroom, and its purpose is to inspire stakeholders to twist and twine differences in thoughts, words and happenings when teaching students – or, as Davies (2014b: 734) urges, to consider ‘how something different comes to matter’. Diffraction plays a double role in this study; it is not only something to be studied in the classroom, but is also put to work through a diffractive methodology to undertake a rhizomatic analysis of classroom assemblages and entanglements. In what follows, the data-collection process and a framework for undertaking diffractive analysis are discussed.

Pathways to data

This study works with observations of educators teaching pedagogy with students studying to become kindergarten teachers. The intention was to investigate how these educators work to facilitate student teachers’ capacities to critically reflect. However, in seeking to identify evidence of reflection, the limitations of the concept quickly became apparent. The classroom became more than a site for human subjects to interact, and for pedagogical wisdom to be imparted from the knower to the novice. In a search for reflection, we began to wonder about what else mattered in the ECTE classroom. The myriad intra-actions between people, place, space, affect and materiality interfered with and ultimately generated diffractive patterns that reconfigured what (and who) was taught/teaching in the classroom.

Initially, the intention was to capture observations using a video camera. However, this proposition was met with an uncomfortable silence. Nordstrom (2015) argues that recording devices in research remain largely unquestioned, but she urges that they should not be considered innocent. The suspicion and hostility towards a proposed camera in this research was detectable through the students’ silent protest. Recognizing the affective charges of the not-yet-known camera, an alternative strategy (note-taking) was introduced, which mitigated the absent presence (Haraway, 2008) of the camera and successfully secured the participation of the student teachers. The video camera, even as an imagined presence, brought about material-discursive affects (Nordstrom, 2015: 399) that shaped the research in unexpected ways. The research strategy relied on memory and the noting of as many moments as possible from classroom teaching. The observation process comprised classroom observations and incidental talks in classrooms, meeting rooms or offices.

Each research action becomes an ethical matter (Davies, 2014b: 735), and calls for us to exercise what Barad (2007) terms ‘response-ability’ – the ability to respond – became apparent. To be present as an observer in a classroom site raises different and difficult questions. Moreover, what should be included in the observations, what should be omitted and what excludes itself? Such questions are about practices of engagement. And this, again, is to see ethics as intertwined with knowing and being – an ‘ethico-onto-epistem-ology’ (Barad, 2007: 185). Furthermore, this is questioning what matters, why it matters, and how what matters again affects what it is possible to think and do. This is also to see ethical practices as being in encounters with others – both human and non-human (Davies, 2016: 121).

Attuning to the minute details involved in undertaking research diverts attention to the in-between spaces and events. Conventional research guidelines (NESH, 2013) insist that the researcher should be aware of how she acted when contacting participants, informed them and behaved when observing, and how the data was treated thereafter. However, a shift to diffractive methodology necessitated a deeper consideration; the concern reached beyond what was jotted down to how it was noted, and also to the embodied relationship with the notes. Whilst the students were no longer central to the investigation, they were co-constitutive elements, shaping and shaped by the classroom entanglements. The students were given written information beforehand, and permission to be there as a ‘modest witness’, without interrupting (Haraway, 1997), was granted. Both the students and the educators were invited to make known things that happened which they preferred not to be included. This research, with its concern with the human, non-human and more-than-human, demanded a heightened response-ability to all elements that make up the micro-moments which are under investigation, beyond only humanist concerns.

Pathways to read data and detect sticky stories

In order to see how matter comes to matter, a diffractive mode of analysis was deployed. This analytical strategy does not carry predetermined methods, but allows for experimentation, and it requires the researcher to let analytical processes tune in on ways that are ‘sufficiently attentive to the details of the phenomenon’ (Barad, 2007: 73). Throughout this research study, which has shifted and mutated over time, thinking with theory at each stage has provided generative possibilities (St Pierre and Jackson, 2014: 717) to reconceptualize reflection in ECTE. Such an approach views theory as forces that move the analyses away from mechanical coding towards a diffractive reading – a reading that spreads out thoughts and meaning, which again creates different, unpredictable and productive emergences (Mazzei, 2014: 742). When witnessing teaching and analysing data, and through the process of making text out of data, a different theoretical approach has influenced and changed the understanding of classroom teaching and what might go on in minor micro-moments.

However, the data is not given as data – except that sometimes data ‘may cause us to stumble – and thereby become data. On such occasions, we should stay unbalanced for a moment longer than what is comfortable’ (Brinkmann, 2014: 724). Specific memories from the classroom observations came to haunt and trouble us. Moments that caused us to stumble urged that we question and reconfigure what we thought we saw (or did not see) as reflection in ECTE. Staying with the trouble (Haraway, 2016) provided access to diffractive moments, or ‘micro-moments of being’ (Davies, 2014a: 15). In such small moments, different chaotic elements and happenings become entangled and loaded with difference. These micro-moments form sticky stories, wherein the university classroom is more than a room. It is a site, or context, for student teachers’ learning, acting and playing, and also a place where different elements take part and intra-act as active agents (Barad, 2007). According to MacLure (2013a: 660), data has ways of making itself intelligible. The sticky stories induced wonder and trouble, and, in attempts at diffractive analyses, ideas about the professional becomings of early years teachers are pushed further. Within these sticky stories, there is space for the trouble to continue to circulate.

We use sticky stories as devices for undertaking diffractive analysis of reflection in ECTE classrooms. The agency of the researcher in a diffractive analysis lies in making new mappings instead of tracing the already known (Davies, 2014b: 734). We therefore search through the sticky stories for moments where human, non-human and more-than-human become entangled through processes of intra-activity. Intra-activity as a concept relates to the relationship between various organisms and matter. Barad (2014: 175) claims that ‘[d]ifferences are within; differences are formed through intra-activity in the making of “this” and “that” within the phenomenon that is constituted in their inseparability (entanglement)’. This strong intra-action in how different elements interfere increasingly intertwines into the meaning-making process, because different patterns of unexpected diffractions are endlessly available within the entanglements. The sticky stories carry traces of what Renold and Mellor (2013: 24) describe as a ‘situated body/object/sound assemblage’, which points to all the elements that exist in a particular event (Hohti, 2016: 5). A deep (re)immersion in research field notes exposes places where (sometimes unlikely) elements link closely. A diffractive re-examination of the data exposes ambiguity and uncertainty where once there had appeared to be a neat story about critical reflection and the becoming early childhood education teacher. Unfolding sticky stories in a diffractive mode opens up possibilities to rethink what comes to matter in ECTE.

Sticky stories

In the sticky stories, an entanglement from a seemingly unremarkable and routine moment in a classroom where ICT (information and communications technology) materiality, furniture, equipment and humans intra-act is explored:

The projector warms up and throws a flickering light in front of the classroom, and soon a PowerPoint comes on the screen. Laptops are booted, and sounds from keyboard keys pressed down by fingers are coming from different directions. Desks, chairs, bags and heavy winter coats spread out on the floor. Desks filled up with laptops, books, bottles, cups, fruit, sweets, pens, notebooks, mobile phones create a sense of chaos. I am sitting on the back row and forcing all my attention towards the teacher educator. My pen passes over paper, and letters form words that illustrate the teacher educator’s use of questions, experiences, pauses and other teaching methods. I notice how the smooth, wave-like rhythm of her teaching comforts me. The flow of words is explaining bullet points on PowerPoints, questions are asked to student teachers, students are answering, and the waves reach the shore and fade out. New bullet point, more explanations and practical examples, new questions, answers, and the wave fades out again, and again.

The glow from a laptop a few rows in front of me attracts attention. Earphones are attached to the laptop with a conduit and an audio plug, connected to the student’s ears. A new bullet point shoots onto the screen, more talk about theory. Suddenly, the audio plug becomes detached and a booming, powerful sound emanates around the classroom. The rhythm changes; sounds, expressions hail the attention of others, who turn towards the laptop and stare. The student teacher seems so engrossed by what is happening on the screen that it takes some time before she notices the change of sound source, and the eyes of fellow students resting upon her and the laptop.

The teacher educator begins to move her body over bags and pushes forward between desks and students. Furniture, bags and other equipment intra-acting with her movements, and she has to slow down. I am anxiously watching. This stirs strong feelings of sympathy for the educator, and wonderings about the student’s motivation. The student finds the cause of the error and plugs the audio plug back in, before the educator reaches her desk. Although I am angered by the student’s actions and lack of attention to the lesson, this anger is not shared by the educator. Instead, I am left puzzled when the educator asks the student, with a friendly voice and sympathetic smile, if there was some serious harm done to the student’s equipment. I cannot see or hear any reply from my location, but the educator gives the student a smile and climbs back to continue her teaching.

This situation carries possible moments that might activate reflection, but it also carries diffractive possibilities (Davies, 2014b: 739), due to how elements interfere with each other and open up for differences. In what follows, this sticky story will be made more intelligible by being opened up and further diffracted.

Remapping the laptop intra-action

By making use of what Mazzei (2014: 744) describes as ‘entering the assemblage, of making new connectives’ or ‘reading-the-data-while-thinking-the-theory’, this multilayered micro-moment is read through theory and connected to other events both within and beyond the classroom. Barad (2007: 25) explains this as reading insights from different areas through one another. A diffractive analysis is, according to Lenz Taguchi and Palmer (2013: 676), a ‘wave-like motion that takes into account that thinking, seeing and knowing are never done in isolation but are always affected by different forces coming together’. Through the sticky stories, different forces come together in different constellations over and over again: the continued shooting out of new bullet points, various sounds from electronic equipment, human artefacts – words, glances, bodily movements, furniture and equipment filling up the room. The sticky story is open to a mapping of ‘situated body/object/sound assemblages’ (Renold and Mellor, 2013: 24), which is intended to take us beyond what we think we see and know, and instead make us open to see what happens when materiality is the focus.

The agency of the laptop draws attention to experiences from meetings and seminars for employees in the university sector. A laptop, tablet or mobile phone takes part and influences the owner’s and often bystanders’ focus in meetings. By reading this together with the sticky story, intra-actions such as engagements between human and non-human become visible (Barad, 2007). The student, laptop, earphones and audio plug are entangled, but teacher educators also easily intertwine with tablets, phones and laptops in meetings. When the agency of materiality is the focus, it offers flattened-out non-hierarchical thinking – something that moves the gaze away from only human activities. Materiality is not isolated, but can be viewed in cryptic patterns of movements and actions in relation to the human (Rautio, 2013).

Reading-the-data-while-thinking-the-theory (Mazzei, 2014) takes us, diffractively, to a news article from late summer 2016. The leader of a political party in Norway was discovered playing Pokémon Go on her mobile phone during the open hearing of the Long-Term Plan for the Armed Forces of the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and Defence. A photograph of her playing gave rise to great debate in the Norwegian media. The party leader was, in several quarters, accused of acting disrespectfully (e.g. Wallenius et al. 2016). This situation highlights some of the dominant discourses regarding what it is permissible to think in a situation where humans and electronic equipment interact. The dominant view seems to characterize the politician (or the movie-watching student) as disinterested and failing to take seriously what is being discussed, and gaming on a mobile phone (or a laptop used to watch YouTube or a movie channel) as a way to kill time and avoid paying due care and attention. The reading of data is crucial for where differences get made (Lenz Taguchi and Palmer, 2013: 676). Differences appear in the readings of these stories within each other. The laptop intra-acting with the student and the mobile phone intra-acting with the politician bring differences to expected behaviour. The camera catching the politician and the revealing audio plug created changes in what was expected. The mobile phone and laptop, camera and audio plug, and the politician and the student become visible and emerge through the intra-action within each other (Barad, 2007: 88). In what follows, we will discuss this in the light of temptations.

Remapping temptations

The classroom was connected to the Internet – a net filled with temptations and possibilities, just a few clicks away. The temptation to use the equipment for purposes other than study is available. The concept introduced here to raise diffractive questions (Mazzei, 2014) is inspired by Lather (2007), who works with voluptuous when she offers different perspectives on validity in research. It is used here to discuss materiality further. Voluptuous draws attention to ‘sensuous enjoyment, pleasure, sensuously pleasing or delightful’ (Voluptuous n.d.). Lather (2007: 126) connects it to embodiment, incompleteness, tentativeness, engagement and self-reflexivity. The laptop/mobile/tablet, as sensuous enjoyment, can offer pleasure, but from other perspectives, this enjoyment might also be a vision of incompleteness. Both the student and the politician gave in to temptation and were noticed. The equipment and the user of the equipment acted and revealed actions through intra-actions. When some things come to matter, it might actively change the way things are (Davies, 2014a: 75), and the leader of the political party first faced massive criticism for playing with her phone – her robust defence was that she listens better when she is engaged in something mindless, such as playing games on a phone. For the politician, this led to much media attention. For the student, getting noticed led to a few minutes in suspense, pending the reaction, and perhaps uncertainty and fear of further consequences. The concept of ‘voluptuous’ gives rise to visions of a hyperfeminine, almost sexualized force – something overwhelming, which is hard to escape, like the force to judge from just a visual image of a situation. To be aware of some things, like the earphones, and how a particular reading of the materiality interfered with assumptions and interpretations of the situation, shows how easy it is to be trapped in a specific mode of thinking (Davies, 2014b: 740).

Specific modes of thinking also generate more wonder. The actions of the teacher educator when she arrived at the student’s desk are reminiscent of the ways that some kindergarten teachers work in their interactions with young children. A desire to capture a child’s attention activates a mode of being that foregrounds the performance of showing a keen interest in the child’s immediate preoccupation – like the toy or other materiality which has captured their attention at that moment. The educator’s pull towards the computer and the audio plug inspires a diffractive move as it passes and twirls around. According to Barad (2014: 169), time is ‘out of joint’ – the theory and practice of meeting children might have been passed and twirled around to find re-expression in this encounter, together with the student’s thoughts, bodily reactions, laptop, audio plug, and so on. However, if the material is significant, can educators make use of such situations, open them to unravel the situation differently, and open up discussions?

Lather (2007: 127) highlights that ‘between the no longer and the not yet lies the possibilities of what was impossible under traditional regimes of truth’. The educator climbing over bags and squeezing through narrow rows of benches also interferes and opens for opportunities. In an agential, realist sense, the classroom environment is making itself intelligible (Lenz Taguchi and Palmer, 2013: 678) to the educator, and time is given through delays. The bags and furniture take part and intra-act with the educator, slow down her speed and force different uses of her body. As humans, we are responsible for our behaviour, and the bags and furniture can never take over the responsibility the educator and the student have for themselves in meetings with others. As Rautio (2013: 402) points out, ‘we just no longer have illusions that our part is any grander than it is’. Neither the educator nor the student is responsible for access to the Internet, or the fact that an audio plug comes loose. There is just something sensuously pleasing and delightful in such moments. We now turn to a discussion of another diffractive layering within the sticky stories.

Remapping bullet wonders

In this section, we continue the search for wonder, opening for the not-known and the not-yet-known, unfolding, refolding and enfolding in the sticky stories, which transcended what might be recognized as reflection. We intend to draw the text away from what might feel comfortable and force it to stay unbalanced for a few moments (Brinkmann, 2014: 724) – and also to shade into curiosity around monstrosity, or what MacLure (2013b: 229) suggests as ‘the capacity to affect and be affected’. By making use of small personal stories, we stay unbalanced by playing on affective elements.

The wave-like communication between the educator and a group of students, illustrated in the sticky story, can be read as doing more of the same (Søndenå, 2002). When everyone agrees, the discussion fades out and a new bullet point can take over. What else takes place in the classroom initiates that someone and something are invited into a discussion, and others are excluded from this ongoing educational encounter. Studying diffractions, or the process of how differences are made, instead of reflection, opens for interferences in ‘thinking-as-usual’ (Davies, 2014a: 2). The production of difference in diffractive processes is not necessarily when a new bullet point shoots out, but when we venture behind and beneath the shooting. Who finds themselves invited to participate arises when students enter the classroom, or when the projector warms up.

Bullet points as materiality can be understood as extending beyond mere matter. The bullet points are, as such, relational with space, architecture, the educator, the students, arts and sciences in the intensification of meaning-making and in the notion of efficient lecturing and transmission of knowledge. Osgood & Giugni (2015: 349) urges us to turn our attention towards ‘the material-affective-semiotic entanglements of everyday lives’, to reconstitute understandings and to unsettle dominant ideas. PowerPoints and the constant revealing or shooting out of different theoretical points seem to transmit ideas of an effective pedagogical tool for ECTE. Braidotti (2013: 182) points to academics being ‘left to broken ideas, while information networks do the content provision and are increasingly autonomous in decision making’ – bullet points of broken ideas; educators being ‘mid-ranking executives in a business organization’; educational methods directed by the demands of what the labour market needs; information networks as policymakers; and academics reduced to shooters, shooting out bullet points.

When a bullet point appears on a PowerPoint, it draws attention to important information, so that students are able to identify quickly key issues and facts. New bullet points appear and conquer the classroom with words of wisdom – you ought to know this or read that – with the size of the black dot, or bullet point, indicating the importance of the message. The size of a bullet point caused by a bullet depends on the bullet size. The bullet takes the first author, Anna, back in time to her teaching practice in a kindergarten. She was a newcomer and it was lunchtime. She found a place together with some children round a small table. She invited herself into a conversation. In front of her, a four-year-old boy was watching silently. She gave him a smile and said ‘Hello’. He kept looking at her, lifted what was left of his sandwich, and pointed it towards her. A whispering sound: ‘Bang, bang’. She was hit by she does not know how many invisible bullets.

It is possible to make endless points to huge groups of students, especially if the educator stops asking questions and denies students opportunities to ask questions or offer comments in response to the bullet. Death by bullet point? Who and where do these kinds of textual bullets hit? How does this lead to new or critical thought? Does it prepare students to go ‘beyond discursive, normalising and regulating practice’ (Renold and Mellor, 2013: 25), or for their further practices in kindergartens? What do bullet points bring to associations in education? Bullet point? Bullet? The size of the weapon also indicates the recoil, or the retroactive effect, or force, acting backwards when firing a bullet. Barad (2014: 169) explains that ‘diffraction is untimely. Time is … diffracted, broken apart in different directions, non-contemporaneous with itself’. Bang. Staying with wonders is not necessarily safe and comforting; it somehow shades into disgust and monstrosity (MacLure, 2013b: 229). Bullet. Death. School massacre. The horror of the bullet hits differently. We struggle with suggesting such monstrous bullet diffractions, combining this with classroom teaching. Where do we start up teaching after bullets? We leave this, just here, hit by the recoil from the bullet point.

In what follows, we discuss how diffractions in a teacher-education classroom can open for understandings in which student teachers prepare for their future professional practice through seemingly unremarkable and routine events.

Puzzlements within/against diffractions

In the introduction, we argued that diffractive thinking holds greater potential to explore unforeseen, not-yet-known possibilities than critical reflection allows for. The narration of sticky stories goes beyond the curriculum concept of critical reflection, and scrutinizes other possibilities by working with diffraction. However, reflection in ECTE is a complex concept for educators to make use of for much less than mirroring practice and theories. The sticky stories – the play with bullet points and the laptop–student–politician intra-action – draw attention towards teaching as something known and predictable. The unfolding diffractive patterns challenge discourses about good learning practice, how a student teacher should act and what is expected from teacher educators (Lenz Taguchi and Palmer, 2013). To get closer to the not-yet-known, both the student–laptop–educator–bags–furniture entanglement and the educator–bullet points–computer–PowerPoints–students entanglement become possible points of departure to challenge predictable thoughts. Matter and materiality give room for other dimensions both in kindergarten practice and in ECTE – dimensions where differences are of value as something to kick-start thinking or for materializing affects. The sticky stories engage in situated body/object/sound assemblages (Renold and Mellor, 2013) to offer different ways of seeing/thinking/hearing a given situation. Differences can be made intelligible for both educators and students if such situations become something to think with – not to proclaim right or wrong, but to generate different ways of understanding what is happening in ECTE classrooms and in kindergartens.

Differences in this text also provoke questions about how bullet points contribute to education, and how the Internet plays out in intended and unintended ways, and can help teacher educators to become more aware of their teaching strategies. Both student teachers and teacher educators enter the classroom carrying years of multiple experiences within the education system. Education teaches us to sit still or protest, to pay attention to and maybe ignore lecturers, among other ways of thinking and acting in teaching. Going beyond the dominance of critical reflection in ECTE and making use of the potential available within modes of diffractive thinking might take us beyond sedimented ways of being and doing becoming-teacher. Ongoing rethinking of what teaching is, and might otherwise be, is needed if we are to recognize the limitations of critical reflexivity and the generative possibilities for diffractive readings of what we think we know is going on in the classroom.

Reading other texts and other narratives together-apart with the sticky stories opens to sensing difference from within (Barad, 2012: 77). Embedded within this diffractive practice of cutting together-apart is the idea that all matter comes to matter – material entanglements are intra-active and all constituent elements make a difference in the world. Such intertwinements carry fascinating forces that transform our thinking about teaching, students and materiality in education. Human intra-actions with the non-human and more-than-human interrupt everyday life, and it contains what Haraway (2008) terms ‘pastpresences’ – the idea that the future is already present (Osgood & Giugni, 2015: 349). In a classroom, this invites us to constantly grapple with life as being of the past, present and future. The classroom is, in itself, a site for everyday life. This article has invited a consideration of what going beyond entrenched ideas about critical reflection might afford us. By revisiting concepts and practices that have become embedded in practical training, and that are then reinscribed in kindergartens, we can question the primacy of critical reflection in ECTE. We can take a step back to reconsider the educator’s role beyond passing on (theoretical) knowledge, and we go on to invite teachers and students to consider diffraction as a mode of enquiry. Working diffractively can help teaching to exceed traditional patterns. When materiality functions as multiple performative agents, it breaks us free of a unilateral focus only on human factors. Scrutinizing the situation or staying with the trouble of how furniture, bags and a laptop intra-act, how the smell from a cup of freshly brewed coffee interrupts, and how bullet points are being shot out – these all offer possibilities for future understandings of early childhood education teacher professionalism.

Diffracting professionalism

This article has attended to the diffractive patterns that erupt and circulate in classrooms in ECTE programmes. It has also sought to reconsider how educators, students and materiality become-with each other, and so open up ideas about professionalism in early childhood education. An experimental analytical process inspired by different theoretical and methodological entries helps to illustrate materiality as playing an agentic part in ECTE classroom situations. Sticky stories offer an analytical device to explore how matter comes to matter in a university classroom. The discussion maps the multilayered and interwoven patterns of diffraction that occur repeatedly, but in different ways, and persistently interrupt and intertwine in the classroom. By working with concepts and figures – intra-actions, voluptuous and bullet points – the sticky stories unravel to offer an opened-out discussion about how diffraction might contribute in viewing educators and student teachers as always in processes of becoming. Discovering the classroom as a site for everyday life and constantly engaging with the idea that the future is already present also opens up possibilities to disrupt and reconfigure views on professional life and professionality.

However, diffraction is constantly splitting and mutating to become something else, somewhere else. This endless movement and dynamism always produces something different. Constant change invites us to rethink teaching afresh in each event, and so urges us to rethink what is possible in a classroom. It is in such differences that diffraction has greater potential than reflection, because diffraction offers us a capacity to think-with and to think differently, and resist being drawn back to familiar modes of understanding, mirroring the known. Seemingly unremarkable moments in classrooms offer halting places, where if we stay with the trouble and reconfigure, we are offered ways to make matter matter and to trace differences. Diffraction might be considered an additional strategy to reflection that holds the potential to expand and change understandings and views on professionality.

What if we end this twisting and turning by going back to the bullet-point diffractions of effective teaching and stay there a little longer? What if the sound from the earphones and pictures on the computer screen are empowering the student to dare to protest against effective pedagogy? And the educator climbing over bags and coats is appreciative of the possibility for change that the protest incites? What if the presence of a pile of paper, pen and researcher prevents the educator’s attempts to make sense of the diffractive moment? Bang! The recoil hits back.

Footnotes

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

Author biographies

Anna Rigmor Moxnes works as teacher educator in pedagogy in Early Childhood Teacher Education (ECTE), University of Southeast Norway. In her resent research project, she is investigating different entrances to reflection in ECTE. She is inspired of feminist new materialism theories. She has long experience from practical work as Barnehagelærer (Teacher in Norwegian kindergarten institutions).

Jayne Osgood is Professor of Education (Early Years & Gender) based at the Centre for Education Research & Scholarship, Middlesex University. Her present methodologies and research practices are framed by feminist new materialism. Through her work she seeks to maintain a concern with issues of social justice and to critically engage with early childhood policy, curricular frameworks and pedagogical approaches. Through her work she seeks to extend understandings of the workforce, families, ‘the child’ and ‘childhood’ in early years contexts.

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