Reconceptualizing Educational Research Methodology

Special issue: Turning the tides; the child and the political. Methodologies for integraled child politics in education

Anne Beate Reinertsen — 2024-12-20

This Special Issue concerns the child and the political: the political child.

The call for papers asked for immanent and minor (transpolitical, transgenerational, decolonized…) perspectives in which child and childhood are seen as moulding collective futuring forces in a globalized world. The call asked to refrain from rights perspectives in a narrow juridical sense to avoid any type of categorization and compartmentalization. The call also asked to avoid universalized, major, or idealistic politics of the child, and as Marina Garcés (2022) asserts: “The western humanistic tradition must leave the expansive universalism and learn to think of itself from a mutual universality” (p. 92). Being human is thus seen as a collective and collaborative activity ultimately repealing any divisions between subject and object, adult and child, nature and culture, body and mind. What can children teach us about politics, we asked, and how can the child become more than an object of policies? Further, we asked what kind of childhoods are desirable, necessary, and possible to future?

The political child

Anne Beate Reinertsen — 2024-12-20

This essay is an attempt to write un unruly force field in sustained expansions about the political child, life, philosophy, policies, and science. Unruly as in messy and stammering but open. Unruly about the political child as a force and carrier of immanence, unencumbered, and as an expression of a future. It implies a view of the child born with inalienable rights as a political subject and force of material and social transformation, and temporalities of writing being transformational techniques. Writing ultimately treated as an ecological practice and method that facilitates the production of collective subjectivities. Thinking the child, life, science, and the world politically means thinking with Chantal Mouffe’s (2015) concept agonism in combination with writing as continual Deleuze and Guattarian (2004a) becomings, active in life itself. There are thin walls between realisms, dreams and fabulations, and this essay is an attempt to strike a blow for freer, humorous, more philosophical, and political mindsets in our pedagogical sciences and imaginations. Therefore, there are also unruly words and sometimes not yet present.

Editorial

Jayne Osgood — 2024-10-15

This issue of RERM includes four papers that boldly attempt to propose ways in which educational research practices, traditions and methods might be enacted differently. They take seemingly foundational research methods (reviewing literature, ethnographic observation, walking methodologies) and transform them in to something less familiar that invite our readers to stutter and reappraise how else research might be done and with what outcomes.

Firstly, researching from Danish inner cities, Staunæs and Vertelyte draw on affect theory and a concern with moods and felt pedagogies in education to explore how hopes and anxieties are woven through school objects and architecture. Through minor interventions the authors propose that there are abundant possibilities to improve the inclusion of racialized students in the inbetween, and often pathologised spaces of school. This holds the potential to radically shift perceptions, prejudices and behaviours that are not always identifiable but that can be sensed through the minor gesture. The authors attend to the significance of language and what happens through translation and diffractive readings. They stress that concepts that travel require careful consideration when transposed into alternative geopolitical contexts. They take Ahmed’s ‘happy objects’ as a case in point to make visible the specificities of local context and what that means for advancing theory that can pay closer attention to time and space.

The next two papers address ways in which literature reviews – a staple element to any research project – can be up-ended and reimagined when post-foundational theories and practices are put to work. Naomi Pears-Scown makes use of Baradian theoretical concepts to think-with literature rather than merely review what is already known and organize a corpus of knowledge into useful categories. Through literature cartographies, Pears-Scown develops a mapping strategy that makes visible her affective engagement with literature through the crafting of found-poems which tell stories of the ways in which place shapes approaches to arts therapy in various geopolitical contexts. This novel approach to engaging with and encountering literature disrupts received wisdom about how literature should be reviewed and instead invites the reader to sit with the discomforts of expanding how literature stories can be told.

In resonance with Pears-Scown, the next paper written by co-authors Boks-Vlemmix and Aspfors, offers a similar challenge to orthodoxies surrounding what a literature review is and how it should be undertaken. In their experimental piece the authors offer glimpses into what gets generated when the emphasis concerns processes and practices of doing a literature review rather than what it represents. Like the previous paper, the authors are inspired by a cartographic approach that holds the potential to map the processes involved in becoming deeply immersed and affect with a body of literature. They take literature on Teacher Educator Professional Learning as a case in point to explore how mapping and tracing entangled concepts can generate unanticipated insights and present new lines of thought.

Finally, Louisa Allen explores the potential of smell, with all the senses and beyond the human, for educational research. She takes the reader on ‘smellwalks’ which presented themselves as an unlikely research method during pandemic lockdown. Allen provides detailed accounts of the ways in which smellwalks came into being in a small coastal town in Aotearoa-New Zealand and enabled a deep exploration of pandemic-transformed life at a daily and local level. The paper offers a theoretical examination of smellwalk methodology as a means to consider smell through multisensory conceptualisations where human senses are understood as distinct but overlapping. Further, the paper theorises the act of smelling as unbounded and ultimately, always more-than-human. A series of research moments are examined to demonstrate how smelling involves a multisensory experience that emerges with/through the material landscape.

Together these papers offer important ways to reappraise approaches to research methodology in education that have become so deeply embedded that they unwittingly shape conventional expectations of how research should be done, has always be done. Each of these papers offer exciting invitations to interrupt this routine way of thinking. Respond to the invitation to pause, to ask, must we do it that way? The way it has always been done? What happens if we question and dare to experiment with alternative approaches? When theory is mobilized through research that seeks to pursue alternative lines of inquiry, what then? When theoretical concepts are taken up in/to ‘foreign’ spaces what happens to them? How do they travel? What do they agitate? What do they make possible? Aligned with the aims of this journal, these papers individually and collectively, invite a pause to business-as-usual in educational research.

Jayne Osgood

Camilla Andersen

Mona-Lisa Angell

Ann Merete Otterstad

Editors

Hopeful Things as Minor Interventions in Educational Atmospheres

Dorthe Staunæs — 2024-10-15

Drawing on scholarship on affects, moods, and affective pedagogies in education, we explore how educators in a Danish gymnasium weaved hopes and anxieties into a school space and the specific things, such as books and bookshelves, to address and improve the inclusion of racialized students in school life. Based on a feminist new materialist and diffractive reading through translation of English-language based concepts through Danish grammar and language, we explore how the concept of the "happy object" as delineated by feminist scholar Sara Ahmed takes on a more hopeful interpretation when analyzed within the Danish educational context and language. We argue that ‘foreign’ concepts require careful consideration and adaptation to suit another (Danish) linguistic, cultural, and racial context. Making such adjustments is not just a matter of taking specificities of local contexts seriously, it is also a means of advancing theory that can inspire analyses conducted in a wider range of educational time-space-coordinates.

Slow and affective becoming-with in early childhood education as the initiation of cultivation

Alexandra Nordström — 2024-12-20

In this paper, we explore slow and affective becoming-with in early educational contexts as the initiation of cultivation. A slow approach advocates varied pace and rhythm, diverging from goal-driven approaches. Affective intensities, including feelings, bodies, and sensory elements challenge Western understandings of child and childhood. Our starting point for this reconsideration is the Finnish scholar J.A. Hollo’s (1895-1967) educational thinking, emphasizing Bildung as a process and the initiation of cultivation. Exploring postqualitative and non-representational methodologies, we focus on the messy and mundane in-betweens in early childhood education. That is, altering how we perceive place by refocusing our gaze from a physical location to intricate, intertwining becoming-withs. By refocusing our gaze on the slow and affective here and now – by thinking, seeing, and feeling with Hollo – we aim to contribute to ongoing discussions on a post-developmental and post-neoliberal ECEC.

Re-turning the Child in Educational Research Methodology

Agnes Westgaard Bjelkerud — 2024-12-20

The methodological approaches we explore in this article are anchored in Manning’s (2016) concept agencement and Barad’s (2014) concept re-turning. By re-turning the soil of our doctoral dissertations (Westgaard Bjelkerud, 2022, Moxnes, 2019) and exploring agencement as a way of activating the child in research, we draw attention to minor issues within the ecologies of research practices. According to Manning the minor works through the major as a force from within, problematizing the major’s standardisations, opening norms and experiences to variations and potentialities. We re-turn our doctoral projects to actualise minor events by discussing the child as knower; childspacesmattering and child-events. Hence propose the child as political through agencement, and from this thinking of the child in research differently.

Under the table

Soern Finn Menning — 2024-12-20

Centred around a one-minute short film of an everyday activity in a Norwegian early childhood education institution, this article will explore how thinking with video offers the ability to deconstruct and re-imagine taken-for-granted conceptions of children’s political participation. Sensitive to aesthetic dimensions of video, this research-creation emphasises bodily intensities and collective vitality often less noticed in childhood research. Paired with both a close and an in-depth reading of Manning´s (2016) minor gestures as political as well as Agamben’s (1992, 1995) conception of gesture, the use of the cinematic technique of montage enables us to challenge dominant methodological discourses in the investigation of children’s agency. While the major gestures of political child are often based on identifying children’s individualised subject-centred and discourse-based agency, this multi-modal article will explore how video as research-creation might contribute to reconceptualising political child differently.

Superpositioner. Om kvantfysik och barns blivande

Bosse Bergstedt — 2024-12-20

I denna artikel utforskas vad som kännetecknar barns blivande med superposition, ett tillstånd där allt sker samtidigt och överallt. Ett tillstånd som finns där före det att barnet placeras som subjekt i tid och rum. Med utgångspunkt i två bilder på mig och min farfar diskuteras i artikeln hur det är möjligt att med hjälp av kvantfysik förstå barns blivande. Hur barnets mikropolitiska handlingar kan ifrågasätta etablerade verklighetsuppfattningar och därmed också medverka till en bättre värld. Artikelns bidrar till metodutveckling inom postkvalitativ forskning genom att visa hur begreppet superposition vidgar förståelsen för forskning kring barns blivande (St. Pierre 2011; Myhre Otterstad & Waterhouse Lorvik 2023).

Editorial

Jayne Osgood — 2023-12-26

This issue of Reconceptualising Educational Research Methodology offers the reader a range of insights from scholars located in different disciplinary spaces and geopolitical contexts. This collection of articles may at first appear to address very different topics: early childhood teachers’ stories about ‘culture’ in Australia; on-line YouTube followership as research in the USA; an Artographic approach to Theatre in Education situated in Finland; and the co-creation of data with young people in a Kulturskole in Norway. Yet a deep engagement with each reveals several threads to run throughout the collection that raise important questions when contemplating what else educational research can become when established conventions are questioned or put aside altogether in favour of approaches that foreground theoretically-rich methodologies that refuse formulaic implementation. Each paper invites the reader to question researcher relationships with ‘participants’; and to consider the possibilities available when mobilizing philosophy to reconsider what and how research might be undertaken otherwise.

The issue opens with an article written by Sonja Arndt and Clare Bartholomaeus that seeks to diffract early childhood teachers’ stories about culture in pursuit of more-than-only-social justice, and to reimagine research methodologies. The authors recount their multi-modal, multi-layered approach to researching with teachers that produced collectively entangled stories that reached far beyond anyone individual. They candidly recount the emergent and messy shape that their research project took, whilst finding themselves negotiating and working against research conventions (recognisable methods, ethics applications and so on). Their approach is described as a middling, where they recognise the significance of their own situatedness which found expression in surprising ways as the study took on unanticipated shapes. The article offers ‘philosophy as method’ by drawing upon the work of Julia Kristeva and Karen Barad to disrupt and reformulate ideas about both ‘culture’ and ‘research’. Theirs is a hopeful project that seeks to elevate the ways in which methodologies, when understood as always re-iterative, contingent and in response to relational context, can shift the ground on which research is conceived and takes shape.

Next, Maureen Lehto Brewster offers a phenomenological analysis of a researcher becoming a YouTube follower. The paper attends to the methodological implications of such a phenomenon by paying close attention, through event memories, to how and why this comes to matter. The author offers detailed reflections on YouTube culture and considers how it is designed to influence affective relations among creators and followers on the platform. Phenomenology, with its concern to study experience as lived, has the capacity for researchers to develop a lens that makes an ordinary lived experience quite extraordinary. Lehto Brewster pursues the extraordinariness of following with the help of Sara Ahmed’s queer phenomenology. The meticulous analysis throughout the article allows the affective dimensions of the phenomenon of on-line following to be intricately explored by asking: how is this phenomenon lived? Experienced? Productive? How does a feeling shape our worldview? Whose feelings shape the concept? The paper highlights the ways in which relating, knowing and trusting are fundamental to cultivating followers. Connections are then drawn between research and internet use (i.e. following) in which researchers mediate content based upon internal biases, predictive impulses and collaborative filtering. Like, Arndt and Bartholomaeus the inevitable and indisputable entanglement of the researcher is made explicit. Rather than being viewed as something that can (or should) be mitigated, reduced or somehow controlled – both papers make visible how such entanglements are produced, and how they can be embraced to enrich research and the claims that are made from such studies.

Nina Dahl-Tallgren then offers an account of becoming artography by attending to the movements of possibility in four evolving spaces: lingering in-between; transformation and affect; knowing and being; and encouraging diffractions with young people in a Finnish Theatre programme. Inspired by Baradian agential realism, the study takes up a diffractive methodology to read insights and discoveries that consider how ‘artist’, ‘researcher’ and ‘teacher’ intra-act through entangled practices. The theatre project sought to investigate how humans encounter global challenges, find ways to reduce risks and find new ways to think and work towards sustainable action. The role of the artographer was central to the project and facilitated reflection upon - what if, what is, what has been, what has yet to become and what matters - as new ways to understand, engage audiences, and provoke new learning through co-creation. Dahl-Tallgren’s close attention to ‘becoming artography’ allows for diffractive patterns to push all of those involved in Theatre in Education programmes to places outside usual comfort zones. The role of becoming artography then, highlights that when ‘artist’ is foregrounded a sensuous connection with human experience provides dramatic tension for participants; when ‘researcher’ is foregrounded genuine curiosity to explore and navigate through the process becomes pronounced; and when ‘teacher’ is foregrounded scope to be more engaged in what it sets in motions and what that means for participants is set free. With an agential realist lens artography is conceptualised and encountered as inherently dynamic, and constantly shifting and mutating. Like the previous two papers, Dahl-Tallgren makes visible the nuances, intricacies, tensions and affordances of embracing research as situated and relational. All three papers make explicit the potential that is set free when researchers refuse Donna Haraway’s ‘god trick’ and instead work with what the messy, middling of situated research might make possible.

Finally, Mali Hauen and Monica Klungland offer ‘trembling moments’ in their account of data-making with young people in a kulturskole in Norway. The authors co-creation methodologies with young people sought to reach understandings about what kulturskole does rather than what it is. Working with a small group of pupils it became apparent that methodologies that could reach beyond capturing accounts that represented their experiences were needed. Young people wanted to be heard, to tell their stories, and to offer embodied accounts of what being with the kulturskole potentiates. The approach taken brought together critical personal narratives, autoethnography, a/r/tography – which together became a methodology grounded in the physicality of making and creating. As the other papers in this issue gesture toward, following narrowly defined research conventions creates frustrations and false starts. Pushing against such conventions involves being adaptive and flexible; the authors draw upon existing and emerging examples of research-creation from the growing field of postqualitative inquiry. Their study underlines the importance in creating space for research to become something else, something more – where ‘participants’ can express themselves in a wider range of non-normative modalities, in this case through embodied languages. Through rap and the creation of short films pupils were able to engage in an affirmative and vital approach to ‘research participation’ which shifted power, positionality and called in to question what counts as research.

The Editors

Jayne Osgood, Camilla Eline Andersen, Mona Lisa Angell, Lotta Johannson and Ann Merete Otterstad

Literature cartographies

Naomi Pears-Scown — 2024-10-15

If traditional literature reviews in academia tell stories of what is known about a topic, this article proposes a way to engage in this knowing differently through cartography, geography, and poetry, informed by Baradian theory. This writing details the creative method developed to think-with literature using geography as a mapping strategy, called ‘literature cartographies’. Through affective engagement with literature, geographical found-poems are presented that tell stories of how place shapes identity in arts therapy across the globe. The creative method of literature cartographies disrupts traditional literature review writing by inviting us to consider expanding how we tell and are affected by literature stories.

A Cartographic Review of Teacher Educators’ Professional Learning with an Aesthetic Approach

Juliette Boks-Vlemmix — 2024-10-15

Experimenting with innovative and creative ways to conduct a literature review aligns with the paradigm shift from qualitative to post-qualitative research, which is concerned with doing and becoming rather than being. The aim of this article is twofold: to unfold the process of a cartographic approach to conducting a literature review; and by exploring the literature to discuss what an aesthetic approach activates in teacher educators’ collaborative professional learning activities. Inspired by Deleuze and Guattari (1988)’s cartographic principle of the rhizome, and post-qualitative inquiry more generally, this review generates knowledge through connections of concepts across 21 international research projects from teacher educators that use an aesthetic approach in their collaborative practices. New components of professional learning are found by mapping-and-tracing entangled concepts. A discussion of encounters within an aesthetic approach to professional learning shows how the processes involved in a cartographic review generates new directions in thinking, such as becoming-professional.

The Smell of Sunshine

Louisa Allen — 2024-10-15

This paper explores the experience of trialling smellwalks during the pandemic for use in educational contexts. It details how these walks were designed and mobilised in a small coastal town in Aotearoa-New Zealand to explore how the pandemic transformed life at a daily and local level. The paper has two aims which entail a theoretical examination of smellwalk methodology. Firstly, to rethink a multisensory conceptualisation of smell where human senses are understood as distinct but overlapping. And secondly, to theorise the act of smelling as unbounded and involving non-humans. A series of research moments are examined to demonstrate how smelling involves a multisensory experience that emerges with/through the material landscape. Barad’s (2007) notion of intra-action is drawn upon to re-conceptualise the idea of smell as led by the nose and reconfigure it as an indeterminate bodily experience.

Becoming Artography

Nina Dahl-Tallgren — 2023-12-26

This study focuses on mapping Theatre-In-Education (TIE) practices through the research methodology artography. The study is inspired by agential realism, using diffraction as a way of reading different insights and discoveries with an artographic lens and how these multiple dimensions intra-act as an entanglement. The article provides an example of TIE artists co-labouring their practice as research by exploring the entangled intra-action between the positions ‘artist, researcher, teacher’. This study aims to explore how the multiple perspectives offered by an artographer’s lens contribute to significant knowledge in the art-making process of the TIE programme The Clearing. Learning for the TIE artists involves moving in and through spaces of possibilities folding and unfolding new understandings, a becoming intensity of an entangled artist, researcher, teacher. The process of becoming artography in TIE produced movements of possibility in four evolving spaces: Lingering in-between, Transformation and affect, Knowing and being, and Encouraging diffractions. The study also produced artistic and pedagogical principles regarding dramaturgical thinking concerning how to structure an aesthetic learning process and how it is facilitated.

Diffracting early childhood teachers’ culture stories

Sonja Arndt — 2023-12-26

Teachers’ cultures impact on their orientations to diversity and pedagogical practices. However, limited attention is given to early childhood teachers’ cultures in research and practice. Informed by Barad’s notions of diffraction and intra-action, we reimagine research methodologies as critical in shaping research on what culture does or how it works for teachers and their culture stories. Turning and re-turning to diffractively engage with teachers’ culture stories in an exploratory Australian project, this paper pushes the boundaries of conceptualisations of research. It elevates the ways in which research methodologies, like culture, are always re-iterative, contingent and responsive to their relational context.

Hanging-out-knowing

Noora Pyyry — 2022-11-17

In this paper, I approach knowing as a spatial practice of dwelling with one’s affective landscapes of inquiry to think with Erin Manning’s idea of research-creation as immanent critique. ‘Landscape’ is re-defined in a nonrepresentational frame to include the various materialities with which we sense and see. To approach research-creation as a joint-action with the landscape, I turn to my native language, Finnish, in which being is referred to as pre-individual with the passive form of ‘to be’: ollaan. I build the argument by discussing my research with young people on their hanging out practices. Movement without destination, attuning to the landscape, can be taken as an energizing technique of relation: an encouragement to follow the call of the unfolding world. In this experimental way of being together, new worlds and selves emerge in encounters. ‘Hanging-out-knowing’ arises from moments of hesitation that challenge what is known.

A Pedagogy of Suspensions

David Rousell — 2022-11-17

This paper takes as its catalyst a series of live art events that took place between London and Manchester in 2019. Thinking in conversation with Erin Manning’s propositions for “minor movements” and the Duchampian “infrathin”, we explore the potential for live art to temporarily suspend the thresholds of perceptibility and permissibility in the public realm. We argue that artful techniques of improvisation carry the potential to suspend capitalistic orderings of time by temporarily confounding the perceived barriers between art and life. Drawing together anarchival traces of improvised movement, sound, image, and thought, the paper is composed of vignettes that sketch the infrathin variations of a “pedagogy of suspensions” as elaborated through live art events in a public park, a moving train, a university gymnasium, and an anechoic sound chamber.

Shifting Focus

Elke Mark — 2022-11-17

Erin Manning's concept of the minor gesture invites a changed approach to education and encourages a radical reconceptualisation of studying within educational institutions. Using examples from her teaching with students in teacher training as well as from her artistic practice, Elke Mark studies the intertwinement of her varied collective, practice-theoretical research approaches with Erin Manning's philosophical concepts in order to apply them to qualitative inquiry and educational research.

From Technique to Technicity: Non-Methodological Explorations of Chairs, Neurodiversity, and Schooling

Ananí M. Vasquez — 2022-11-17

In response to the call for this special issue, we draw upon Erin Manning’s (2013, 2016) theorizing of technique and technicity to reconsider schooling and inquiry practices through the chair. The chair is often taken for granted and narrowly conceived through the lens of neurotypicality. By beginning with technique and technicity, this work foregrounds affect, relation and process, rather than object, form and method, so as to dislodge the chair from the sedimented practices of schooling and inquiry. In the emergent fashion of research-creation, this article makes use of genealogy, narrative and theory to explore how the interplay of technique and technicity might engender different modes of chair-ing, and how these modes might speak to concerns of neurodiverse schooling and research methods.

Standing in the Midst

Ana Ramos — 2022-11-17

This paper is an entry point into a different way of doing research: speculative pragmatism. Its roots are to be found in A. N. Whitehead, W. James, H. Bergson, among others. The main concept it fosters for a speculative pragmatism practice is intuition (Bergson, 2007; Deleuze, 1988, 2002; Manning, 2016). Around a discussion on knowledge, the concept of intuition is a pivotal milieu that anchors the basis for thinking-with-research-in-the-making. In the outlining of this background, the classical structure of experience is challenged. It introduces the subjective nature of the event, and shifts the role of objects, as they are normally understood.

The Value of the Useless: Erin Manning, Impact, Higher Education Research, Progress

Laura Elizabeth Smithers — 2022-11-17

This article brings the work of Erin Manning to bear on common sense practices and conversations of the value of a college education. Manning’s work provides a productive alternative to the neoliberal discourse of college impact that has dominated higher education research for the past half century. Neoliberalism produces the common sense of the value of education as privatized, datafied (or dividuated), and measurable outcomes. This common sense reduces American higher education to the sum of its parts. To produce worlds to which campus marketing departments on occasion gesture, worlds where college produces spaces of community transformation, we must come to re/value progress in excess of measurable outcomes. In a rotating series of revaluations, this paper puts Manning’s concepts to work in both substance and form in four refrains: redefining value in higher education, revaluing the infrathin and the imperceptible, reconceptualizing liberal education, and valuing the useless.