Pedagogy Is a Messy Affair: A Performative Narrative of Being New

• In Event: What Pedagogies Produce: Teaching Responsible/Response(able) Qualitative Inquiry

Abstract

Purposes
We use performative writing to explore the pedagogical entanglement of staff, students, and matter at the [university]. It is a collaborative narrative in which different voices share the textual stage. Each author contributes to how our experiences emerge in a messy, complex, and volatile context. Our story sketches the backgrounds, in-between spaces, and ‘negative spaces’ of pedagogy. We abandon the world of the real to explore the entanglements that pedagogies produce.

Theory
We engage in critical qualitative inquiry (Denzin, 2017) to explore transformative life experiences. In particular, we understand pedagogy as relational encounters (between humans and the more-than-human) that makes growth possible, rather than a classroom-bound practice (Zembylas, 2007). We do not attempt to describe or represent what pedagogies might produce in our context or historical moment. We set out to “perform” our local lives and experiences (focusing on the backgrounds and in between occurrences) as we explore what pedagogies produce.

Modes of Inquiry & Data
We have chosen to actualize the three voices that inhabit our narrative through three “characters.” We did this not because we understand voice as “emanating from a unique, essentialist subject conscious to itself,” which would imply that each “character” speaks with their own voice through which they narrate “an experience fixed in a moment in time” (Mazzei, 2016, pp. 152, 154). We understand voice to emerge from a multiplicity. As a performative collaborative narrative, we construe the textual world not only as an actual one about which to learn the facts, but simultaneously as a hypothetical world that abandons the circumscribed territory of the “real” and moves into the realm of the possible (Barone, 2008, p. 15). We bring different human and more-than-human voices together in creating our narrative:

Daisy is new. The office is dusty and full of relics of its previous inhabitant: […] a few forgotten, outdated textbooks on education theory; and a couple of melancholic half-empty folders. The computer will not come to life; it is missing too many parts and wires are sticking out in all the wrong places. […] She feels foreign in this space. A little out of place...

Results
Ulmer (2017) reminds us that from a posthumanist perspective life is “inextricable from our local ecologies. Humans are characters in a cast of many” (Ulmer, 2017, p. 833). We believe that critical post-qualitative approaches to justice involve a posthuman understanding that extends our experiences to material entanglements in a local ecology. Our collaborative narrative allows us to think of pedagogy as a “leaky” and messy thing that spills over it (imagined) boundaries, into our lives and into the spaces where we live, eat, drink, and breathe.

Significance
Through this narrative we experiment with how voice functions as a means to “identify and follow different lines that connect and traverse each other,” which in turn enables possibilities to explore the “ruptures and differences that get made” (Lenz Taguchi, 2013, p. 713). We express pedagogy as an occurrence that actively produces new connections between human and nonhuman worlds.

Authors

• Marguerite Muller, King's College London

• Frans Kruger, University of the Free State