Feminist Posthuman Pedagogies in Teacher and Leadership Preparation

• In Event: 61.070 - Sheraton Roundtable 10 - Osgoode Ballroom
  In Roundtable Session: 61.070-3 - Putting PheMaterialisms Into Practice in Pedagogy and Curriculum

Abstract

We consider how critical feminist posthumanisms inform practices in preparing educators across three contexts in the U.K. and the U.S. This unsettles the category of the ‘human’ as historical sites of political privilege providing ‘the possibility of an ethical relation of opening out towards and empowering connection to others’ (Braidotti, 2011: 3). Critical feminist posthumanisms provide different entry points into wider pedagogical debates. These provide sites of challenge allowing for a more expansive view of ‘possibilities that do not neatly replicate or privilege’ ways of knowing (Alaimo, 2016: 25).

Author A disrupts normative views of young children’s outdoor engagements. Adopting a walking-with methodology (Springgay and Truman, 2018) attended to space and place as more-than an inert landscape. Including a field trip to a nature reserve on the South Coast of England revealing dynamic relations to ‘foreground the importance of the material body’ (Springgay and Truman, 2018: 2). During this trip educators experienced affective moments when outside, exploring how these challenged views of outdoor experiences for young children. Walking-with revealed that place activates political questions about life. Relational interconnections between walkers, the nature reserve, weather, curricular policy, and constructions of early childhood pushed against boundaries of ‘taxonomies that categorize some things as human/nonhuman, living/nonliving’ (Springgay and Truman, 2018: 29).


Author B disrupts teacher education ‘pedagogy as usual’ (Taylor, 2016:20) through radical experimentation with reflective practice. Reflecting on experience is key part of English teacher education; yet the practice is rooted in humanistic processes. Drawing on Barad’s (2007) intra-action, Bennett’s ‘thing theory’ (2010) and Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) assemblage challenges linear, reductionists ideas, moving processes into spaces which embrace messy, complex, entangled, embodied natures of ‘becoming teacher’ (Authors, 2017). Activities examined included arts-based practice; multi-species narratives; and cartographic mapping work creating ‘...a theoretically based and politically informed reading of the process of power relations…[assessing] the impact of material and discursive conditions upon our embodied and embedded subjectivities.’ (Braidotti, 2013:4). These approaches entangled different ways of knowing, inspiring a sense of ‘response-ability’ (Haraway, 2016) and built an ‘ethics of affirmation’ (Braidotti, ibid), helping educators/tutors reframe/re-imagine their teaching practice.

Author C describes a set of module activities about “Engaging Critical Theories in Designing Research for Social Justice” for educational leaders. Activities included examining model texts for the influence of theoretical ideas in planning/conducting/interpreting research; drawing on specific critical theories to analyze data sets; and conducting meta-analytic analyses to draw out implicit/explicit ways theoretical concepts shaped knowledge production. Theory, as an agentic non-human actor in research processes, was explored as an observational apparatus that co-produces phenomena (Barad, 2007). This located oneself theoretically as a type of politics of location (Braidotti, 2013). These activities disrupted entrenched ideas that (human) researchers are objective, separate from the research, or that anything can be ‘found’ in data. It opened up notions that research processes are shaped by a continuum of human/non-human factors with distributed agency (Authors, 2018).

Authors

• Nikki Fairchild, University of Chichester

• Kay Sidebottom

• Kathryn J. Strom, California State University - East Bay