Post-Qualitative Research and Innovative Methodologies by Matthew K. E. Thomas;Robin Bellingham;

Author:Matthew K. E. Thomas;Robin Bellingham;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781350062061
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

7

Who is in my office and which century/ies are we in? A pedagogical encounter

Mary Dixon

I am seated in my office, my back to the window looking across the computer desk to my door. Over the day it will open for three doctoral supervision meetings. Rebecca’s thesis concerns the pedagogical positioning of secondary teachers. She is finalizing her colloquium document but still struggling for a theoretical frame. Tom is finishing his thesis on the pedagogical networks of higher education online students. He is putting Dewey to work along with Van Manen and Maggie MacLure. Finally, Zoya will come later today. Her work regards the educational opportunities for teenage girls in newly developed areas of Melbourne. She insists on engaging Foucault and Bourdieu and Butler. Each meeting will last at least an hour and will also involve an associate supervisor.

Researching pedagogical encounters

What follows here is a two-step analytical experiment in pedagogical encounters. Here ‘black holes’ are engaged as analytic devices to discern the ‘event’(Deleuze 2003) of learning in these encounters. The experiment then involves a pedagogical mapping that is discerned through a black hole perspective. I have chosen to locate this exploration in pedagogical encounters in doctoral supervision. The chapter is not intended to provide an analysis of doctoral study and supervision although located in those spaces and some attention is given to it. Nor are the encounters here from an actual research study. The imagined encounters are offered to provide a site for a new form of pedagogical analysis. The reading of pedagogical encounters offered here draws on overlapping concepts from both Barad and Deleuze. There has been considerable discussion around the problematics of using Barad and Deleuze together. Hein (2016) argues that ‘Deleuze’s is a philosophy of immanence and difference, whereas Barad’s is a philosophy of transcendence and identity’ (p. 132). Hein draws on the distinctions of immanence (from Deleuze) and transcendence (from Barad). These concepts call up issues of interiority and exteriority which lend themselves to a binary reading of these ontological positions. Several scholars have taken up this problematic (Sheldon 2016; Davies 2016) with a significant contribution from Kathrin Thiele (2016) who argues the relationship between Deleuze-Guattarian immanence and Barad’s agential realism. Barad and Deleuze share an interest in different understandings of thought and being. The lively agency of Barad’s posthumanism overlaps with what St. Pierre (2016, p. 101) names ‘the vitalist proclivities of Gilles Deleuze’. I use this chapter as an opportunity to read pedagogical encounters diffractively into each other (Barad 2007 p. 30; Jackson and Mazzei 2012, p. 11) putting to work Barad’s ‘timespacemattering’ (2007) and Deleuzian ‘becoming’ (2003).

Pedagogy is the study of learning, of learner, of knowledge, of place and, on occasion, of teacher. The pedagogical encounter is their dynamic intra-action (Barad 2007, p. 141). The nature of their dynamic intra-action is a critical component in reading this encounter. As Barad argues, these entangled agencies, in this case the learner, knowledge, place and teacher are in mutual constitution. They each emerge through their intra-action. In

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