Diffracting knowledges with and within schoolyards

This oral presentation was delivered at the ENOTHE Annual conference Tblisi, Georgia, 2022. 

Abstract

Introduction

Occupational Science advocates for children's right to play in schoolyards as an issue of justice by addressing transacting factors influencing play opportunities, including teachers' attitudes (Grady-Dominguez et al, 2021). Interdisciplinary scholarship has cautioned however, against designing practices that despite critical intent, enact what Barad (2014) refers to as an “agential cut”  based on normative disciplinary "this works" certainties (Russell, 2018).  This post qualitative inquiry invites (also) the uncomfortable unexpected, presenting a diffractive analysis that (re) turns to a qualitative narrative study exploring with teachers' their experiences of schoolyard play.

without Method

Based on Barads (2014) ethico-onto-epistemology, the researcher and teachers will walk with anonymized audio interview extracts within schoolyards, thinking with play rhetoric concepts and diffracting different knowledges into each other.  Shared audionotes will matter the meanings to produce something new together (Jackson and Mazzei, 2012).

Becomings and non Becomings

A momentary cut of the differences that intra-act with(in) collective doing within schoolyard spaces responds to Occupational Science calls for the need to examine the consequences that emerge from doing (Lavalley, 2017). Post Qualitative inquiry decentres humans and yet respects the agencies of human and material entangled in ethical knowledge productions towards thinking what has yet to be.