Den-Building as Arts-Based Professional Reflection/Diffraction

• In Event: Moscone Center North Roundtable Session 6
  In Roundtable Session: Arts-Based Educational Research as Learning and Development

Abstract

Reflective practice is a common feature of teacher preparation courses but is sometimes conceptually limited. This paper grew from a session aiming to expand reflective practice within the field by attending to it as emergent within an assemblage of human and non-human forces. Pre-service teachers were invited to construct inhabitable dens to represent collective development experiences, becoming part of an agentic network productive of sensory affects not easily articulated through language. Following Barad (2007), we argue that this process was as much diffractive as reflective, enabling a multiplicity of meanings and plurality of experience that would have been impossible with mimetic reflection, thus moving practice beyond the notion of the unified Cartesian subject as the center of agency.

Authors

• Richard Dunk, Manchester Metropolitan University

• Rebecca Victoria Patterson, Manchester Metropolitan University

• Alison Ramsay, Manchester Metropolitan University