Attending to Our Response-abilities: Diff/reading Data Through Pedagogies of the Other-wise

• In Event: Response-able Pedagogies in Educational Research: Four Studies Using Posthuman Methodologies Across Contexts

Abstract

Objectives: In times of global emergencies and shifting social priorities worldwide, literacy researchers are facing challenges in thinking about previous research sites, the literacies that mattered then, and what literacies come to matter now when thinking with data as countries worldwide are imposing school closures, remote emergency pedagogies, and physical distancing. Specifically, in the field of literacy studies that is so dependent on and shaped by ethnographic methods—foregrounded by New Literacy Studies researchers—literacy researchers must recognize how such methods may be rendered temporarily and persistently inaccessible. We are concerned with how literacies come to matter in forced political and health situations that allows us to see the methodological other-wise. Across the United States, England, and Canada, our inquiry asks: How do diffractive methodologies help researchers attune to the other-wise? How do these methodologies support equitable and fully-lived futures?

Theoretical Framework: These conditions force us to work other-wise, employing new materialism to contemplate methodologies of the other-wise by channeling our response-abilities (Barad, 2007). Our theorizing extends emerging literature of the otherwise (Kuby & Gutshall Rucker, 2020; Wohlwend, 2019) to make the matter of literacy research come through otherwise---through each other as humans, but also through the materialities of working remotely, over time, across time zones, and across different political climates and orientations. We find that new materialism and agential realism (Barad, 2007) offer an ideal framework though diffractive methodologies to attune to what might unfold otherwise, what is normally discarded in research or that remains invisible to researchers conducting representational qualitative research (St. Pierre, 2016).

Methods: Moving from the otherwise to the other-wise, we define the latter as an assemblage of diffracted dynamisms through which unfolding realities occur on a continuum. The presentation offers concrete examples of what these relationalities look like, through diffracted readings of each other’s data and neomaterialist reconfigurations of data assemblages in literacies and the learning sciences.

Data Sources: We examine our research questions by diffractively reading our data and each other’s over time—rethinking our methodologies in previous research sites, the literacies that mattered in them, and the literacies that matter now. Data sets come from studies of: a) middle school youths’ literacies in an English Language Arts classroom, b) preschool children’s digital literacies at home, c) high school youths’ stop-motion environmental literacy project.

Results: Preliminary analyses suggest these diffractive readings extend NLS methodological principles through attention to how socio-material assemblages (Burnett & Merchant, 2020) and affective dimensions of literacies (Rowsell, 2020) come to matter differently in the midst of unprecedented global unrest and the relational dynamics produced through the pervasive policies that govern each of our situations as researchers.

Significance: These relational dispositions help us dive into what matters now, by accounting for how a collaborative diffractive analysis of data pushes against the fixed, situatedness nature of data towards transporting data across time and place. Our contribution elucidates diffractive readings to attend to time, situatedness, and political tensions.

Authors

• Amélie Lemieux, Mount Saint Vincent University

• Kelly C Johnston, Baylor University

• Fiona Scott, The University of Sheffield