Experimenting with experience: Searching for 'the middle ground' of artful literature teaching

The purpose of this chapter is to investigate what educating for artful teaching of literature ‘in the middle ground’ might imply. ‘The middle ground’ is defined by Gert Biesta as a place for arts education where expressing one person’s desires is in dialogue with the desires of The Other and the world. The chapter is based on experiences from a Finnish extensive research and development project organized in teacher education, and performed within basic education during a ten year period. In the longitudinal project ‘Aesthetic approaches to fictive reading’, a teacher educator team explored how aesthetic approaches to fictive texts might open worlds of involvement. The project affected and enchanted the teacher team and the participants in profound ways. A re-reading of one extended moment is a reading with theory and data through the lenses of post-humanistic thinking, when applying a diffractive reading. The moment in the longitudinal project is documented as visualized theory, in a thinking tool called ‘The Drum’. The authors describe a movement from thinking in terms of representation to thinking in terms of more than representation, towards becoming and presenting in planning literacy-as-events informed by the affects, desires and enchantment of the teacher educator team and the participants in the events under study. This movement is an animation of key concepts in non-representational theory: vitality, performativity, corporeality, sensuality and mobility.