Description
Research topicThis collaborative research involved seven educational researchers from Finland with different research interests and backgrounds, all connected to teacher education and postqualitative approaches. During the symposium, the presenters will discuss tensions and potentials of an analytic process of scribbling, writing and painting with movements when thinking with nine learning diaries by Finnish early childhood education student teachers.
Theory and research design
The learning diaries inspired us to delve into literature’s thing-power (Bennett, 2010) and trace the movements set in motion by literature in early childhood teacher education. During our explorations with movement, we scribbled visual expressions of movement on post-it notes while thinking with the excerpts. These scribbles were then translated into a visual vocabulary of movement by Renlund in Photoshop. We used visual vocabulary to paint experimentative and enlivened collages in Canva, which worked as visual expressions and provocations for our ongoing thinking and moving with the students’ texts. In this way, we moved with the rhythms, flows, directions, crossings and speeds that we could sense in the way the course literature had put something in motion in the students’ learning diaries.
Implications and relevance
Following Jackson and Mazzei (2023, p. 2), “In writing, in plugging in, we enact something that is a constant, continuous doing. It is attuning to how lines respond to each other, how they fit together [...]”. In this presentation, we want to approach the entangled collaboration where we began the analytical process of thinking-with each other, learning diaries, theories and images. Each author came to the study with their perspectives, backgrounds and movements, which unfolded into embodied acts of experiencing-with data (Vagg, 2022) and performed further movement. Our collective endeavour touched upon “the quivering unease of doing research differently” but simultaneously together (Springgay & Truman, 2018, p 204). This methodological endeavour involved productive tensions between the movements of materialising text and images, which we sensed and interpreted in unique and collective ways, performing additions, juxtapositions and lively collages. Often, the emerging and continuously changing collages would elicit provoking and engaging discussions about our ontological and theoretical focus, pushing us to ask questions about where the movements in the student’s texts and our scribbling, writing, painting and collaging were taking us, what these movements were expressing about the affective force of literature in education, and what they could teach us about our relations to literature as educators and researchers in a Nordic context.
References:
Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant matter – a political ecology of things. Duke Press.
Jackson, A. Y., & Mazzei, L. (2023). Thinking with Theory in Qualitative Research. Routledge.
Springgay, S., & Truman, S. E. (2018). On the Need for Methods Beyond Proceduralism: Speculative Middles, (In)Tensions, and Response-Ability in Research. Qualitative Inquiry, 24(3), 203-214. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800417704464
Vagg, J. (2022). Experiencing-With Data: Exploring Posthuman Creativity Through Rhizomatic Empathy. Qualitative Inquiry, 28(5), 541–551. https://doi.org/10.1177/10778004211069696
| Period | 6 Mar 2025 |
|---|---|
| Event title | NERA 2025 Education for a better and just world |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Helsinki, FinlandShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | International |