Description
This presentation builds upon an analytical and methodological journey by a research collective involving seven researchers in Finland. The focus is placed on the in-depth analytical processes undertaken by the collective in writing a research article about literature’s thing-power in teacher education.The study adopts a post-qualitative and non-representational approach, aligning with the principles of thinking-with research materials, theories, and collaborative discussions to reimagine teacher education (Jackson & Mazzei, 2013; Murris, 2021; Vannini, 2015). We approach the empirical material, nine student-teachers learning diaries, as diffractive engagements in practice (Murris, 2021) presented as companions for thinking, seeing, and feeling with rather than as representational examples (Murris & Bozalek, 2019; Vintimilla et al., 2021). By thinking through and engaging with moments that made a difference, the focus was on the relational and material becoming rather than separate pieces of data (Sheridan et al., 2020).
When thinking and writing with the student learning diaries, we felt that thinking through words and writing was not enough to grasp and explore the affective and non-linguistic dimensions of the literature’s thing-power. Hence, we started to play visually with various movements we could sense in the learning diaries, that is, ‘plugging’ these texts and movements into another (Jackson & Mazzei, 2023). Each of us scribbled visual expressions of movement on post it notes while thinking with the excerpts. We drew rhythms, flows, directions, crossings and speeds that we could sense in the way the literature had put something in motion in the learning diaries. Throughout this non-linear process of analysis, we moved within the modes of thinking, scribbling, painting and collaging with the data, engaging in messy experimentations of doing analysis, or research-creation (Truman, 2021). This ‘alternative aesthetic’ offer a lively and dynamic thinking and painting with theory and data (Balmer, 2021; Jackson & Mazzei, 2023).
| Period | 8 Jan 2025 |
|---|---|
| Event title | 8th European Congress of Qualitative Inquiry: Hope, Humility and Playfulness in a Precarious World 2025: ECQI 2025 |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Edinburgh, United KingdomShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | International |