Abstract
In education, posthumanist approaches require us to pay attention to the more-than-human contexts within which young people come to take themselves up in the world, and to the affordances and capacities of worldly things and affective flows to shape young people’s desires and ways of being in the world. While there has been considerable work in early childhood contexts (e.g., Blaise, 2013; Davies, 2014; Hultman and Lenz Taguchi, 2010; Pacini-Ketchabaw and Taylor, 2015; Taylor, 2013), in secondary schools the more-than-human requires researchers to look beyond taken-for-granted rational, cognitive, curriculum contexts to attend to surprising configurations where bodies, things, affect, desire, matter, imagination and pedagogy collide to form new assemblages and possibilities. The material-semiotic entanglements of pedagogy are complex, multiple, uneven, unstable, emergent, and contingent on the specificities of particular times and places. In school education, pedagogy tends to be a taken-for-granted concept, shorthand for all manner of practices around teaching and learning, and in its most common usage it foregrounds the humanist master narrative that positions careful teacher planning for student learning as the most significant aspect of the classroom experience.1 Deviations and surprises, lessons that veer away from intended outcomes, unexpected ‘pedagogical encounters’ provoked by things other than people are elided rather than understood as part of complex assemblages where pedagogy is emergent, relational and ethical, opening towards intensities and difference (Davies, 2014; Davies and Gannon, 2009).
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Barad, K. (2007) Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham: Duke University Press).
Beier, J. L. (2013) ‘Dis-organ-izing the Subject: Thinking with Sound’, Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, 10(1), 23–25.
Bennett, J. (2010a) ‘A Vitalist Stopover on the Way to New Materialism’, in D. Coole and S. Frost (eds.) New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics (Durham: Duke University Press), pp. 47–69.
Bennett, J. (2010b) Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press).
Blaise, M. (2013) ‘Activating Micropolitical Practices in the Early Years; (Re)assembling Bodies and Participant Observations’, in R. Coleman and J. Ringrose (eds.) Deleuze and Research Methodologies (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press), pp. 184–200.
Bradley, D., P. Noonan, H. Nugent and B. Scales (2008) Review of Australian Higher Education. Final Report, Commonwealth of Australia: Canberra, www.deewr.gov.au/he_review_finalreport .
Braidotti, R. (2013) The Posthuman (Cambridge and New York: Polity).
Childers, S. M. (2013) ‘The Materiality of Fieldwork: An Ontology of Feminist becoming’, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 26(5), 599–609.
Davies, B. (2003) Frogs and Snails and Feminist Tales: Preschool Children and Gender (New York: Hampton Press).
Davies, B. (2014) ‘Reading Anger in Early Childhood Intra-Actions a Diffractive Analysis’, Qualitative Inquiry, 20(6), 734–741.
Davies, B. and S. Gannon (2009) Pedagogical Encounters (Rotterdam: Sense Publishers).
Deleuze, G. and P. F. Guattari (1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Vol. 2) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press).
Gannon, S. (2009) ‘Difference as Ethical Encounter’, in B. Davies and S. Gannon (eds.) Pedagogical Encounters (New York: Peter Lang), pp. 69–88.
Gannon, S., L. Naidoo and T. Gray (2016) ‘Educational Aspirations, Ethnicity and Mobility in Western Sydney High Schools’, in D. Cole and C. Woodrow (eds.) Superdimensions in Globalization and Education (Dordrecht: Springer).
Hultman, K. and H. Lenz Taguchi (2010) ‘Challenging Anthropocentric Analysis of Visual Data: A Relational Materialist Methodological Approach to Educational Research’, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 23(5), 525–542.
Jackson, A. and L. Mazzei (2012) Thinking with Theory in Qualitative Research (New York and London: Routledge).
Jackson, A. and L. Mazzei (2013) ‘Plugging One Text into Another: Thinking with Theory in Qualitative Research’, Qualitative Inquiry, 19(4), 261–271.
Jagodzinski, J. (2013) ‘Art and Its Education in the Anthropocene: The Need for an Avant-Garde Without Authority’, Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, 10(1), 31–34.
Lanagan, M. (2009) Tender Morsels (Crows Nest: Allen and Unwin Publishers).
MacLure, M. (2013a) ‘The Wonder of Data’, Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, 13(4), 228–232.
MacLure, M. (2013b) ‘Researching without Representation? Language and Materiality in Post-qualitative Methodology’, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 26(6), 658–667.
Pacini-Ketchabaw, V. and A. Taylor (2015) ‘Unsettling Pedagogies through Common World Encounters: Grappling with (Post)colonial Legacies in Canadian Forests and Australian Bushlands’, in V. Pacini-Ketchabaw and A. Taylor (eds.) Unsettling the Colonialist Places and Spaces of Early Childhood Education (New York and London: Routledge), pp. 43–62.
Radomska, M. (2013) ‘Posthumanist Pedagogies: Toward an Ethics of the Non/Living’, Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, 10(1), 28–31.
Snaza, N. and J. Weaver (2015) ‘Education and the Posthumanist Turn’, in N. Snaza and J. Weaver (eds.) Posthumanism and Educational Research (New York and London: Routledge), pp. 1–16.
Somerville, M. (2013) ‘The “Placetimemattering” of Aspiration in the Blacktown Learning Community’, Critical Studies in Education, 54(3), 231–244.
Somerville, M., T. Gray C. Reid, L. Naidoo, S. Gannon and L. Brown (2013) Student Trajectory Aspiration Research (STAR): A Study of Aspirations, Enablers and Barriers to Further Education in the Blacktown Learning Community, University of Western Sydney, May 2013, http://www.uws.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0011/504992/STAR_Report,_2013_v2.pdf, accessed 21 April 2015.
Springgay, S. (2008) Body Knowledge and Curriculum: Pedagogies of Touch in Youth and Visual Culture (New York: Peter Lang).
St. Pierre, E. (2013) ‘The Appearance of Data’, Cultural Studies <=> Critical Methodologies, 13(4), 223–227.
Taylor, A. (2008) ‘“Taking Account of Childhood Excess”: Bringing the Elsewhere Home’, in B. Davies (ed.) Judith Butler in Conversation: Analysing the Texts and Talk of Everyday Life (New York and London: Routledge), pp. 195–216.
Taylor, A. (2013) Reconfiguring the Natures and Cultures of Childhood (London: Taylor & Francis).
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2016 Susanne Gannon
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Gannon, S. (2016). ‘Local Girl Befriends Vicious Bear’: Unleashing Educational Aspiration through a Pedagogy of Material-Semiotic Entanglement. In: Taylor, C.A., Hughes, C. (eds) Posthuman Research Practices in Education. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137453082_9
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137453082_9
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-68687-2
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-45308-2
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)