| dc.description.abstract | Both early years students and the higher education academics who teach them are situated in neoliberal performance and accountability regimes that de-professionalise. This has been traditionally resisted by some teachers in higher education, including myself, through critical pedagogies, often using tools such as critical reflective practice, to enable students and academics to resist and position themselves. These critical pedagogies sit within a poststructural frame that attempts to deconstruct the neoliberal discursive structural power through education practices that activate agency. Despite the students’ ethical alignments with critical perspectives this was proving to be difficult for them to enact in their practice. There was an ongoing negative cycle of deconstructing ever changing policy frameworks that led to despondency and ‘stuckness’ for the students and myself, therefore something else was needed. This research is a posthumanist, feminist new materialist study that moves out of poststructural binaries of agency-structure and nature-culture to agential realism (Barad, 2007). Matter-meaning comes in to existence through iterative material-discursive intra-action (Barad, 2008) of phenomena. In agential realism the human is de-centred and is entangled with all matter that is human, and non-human. The study employs a diffractive ethico-onto-epistem-ological (Barad, 2007) methodology entailing a detailed reading of critical pedagogy, critical reflective practice and agential realist literature and theory, along with ‘re-turning’ (Barad, 2014) some reflective diaries kept by myself. The diaries were written during the teaching of a Masters level module on an early years programme which incorporated credits towards a professional qualification. Diffraction offers a way of thinking about, and doing, research and practice, and in this study materialised ‘propositions’ (Springghay, 2015) about ethical response-ability (Barad, 2010) in higher education pedagogical practice. These include, the classroom apparatus Barad (2007), artistic making, and reflection in diffraction. | en_GB |
