Refiguring Case Study Methodology Through Agential Realism: Possibilities and Dilemmas of Learning Events as Phenomena

• In Event: Roundtable Session 112
  In Roundtable Session: Exploring New Methodologies

Abstract

This study builds from an emerging body of material feminisms research using Barard’s (2007) theoretical framework of agential realism to refigure traditional qualitative case study methodology. Agential cuts of data from teacher-student writing conferences are read diffractively through a series of prethinking/writing methodological questions. The questions illuminate writing conference data as entangled phenomena, honoring learning and teaching as complex processes of intra-action between the material and the discursive. Agential realism provides a theoretical mapping for educational research that recognizes each learning event as new phenomena with multiple relationships, possibilities, wonder, and surprise.

Authors

• Donna Kalmbach Phillips, Pacific University

• Mindy Legard Larson, Linfield College