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Disrupting Boundaries in Education and Research
In Disrupting Boundaries in Education, six educational researchers

explore together the potentialities of transdisciplinary research that
de-centres human behavior and gives materiality its due in the
making of educational worlds. The book presents accounts of what
happens when researchers think and act with new materiality and
post-human theories to disrupt boundaries such as self and other,
human and non-human, representation and objectivity. Each of the
core chapters works with different new materiality concepts to dis-
rupt these boundaries and to consider the emotive, sensory, nuanced,
material and technological aspects of learning in diverse settings, such
as in mathematics and learning to swim, discovering the bio-products
of ‘eco-sustainable’ building, making videos and contending with
digital government and its alienating effects. When humans are no
longer at the centre of the unfolding world it is both disorienting and
exhilarating. This book is an invitation to continue along these paths.
suzanne smythe is Assistant Professor in Adult Literacy and Adult

Education in the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University.
She is the author of several articles and book chapters related to
community-based adult learning, policy and digital equity.
cher hill is Assistant Professor of Professional Practice and an in-

service teacher educator in the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser
University.
margaret macdonald is Associate Professor in Early Childhood

Education in the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University.
With funding from a Canadian Foundation for Innovation grant,
she researches young children’s perspectives on environmental
sustainability.
diane dagenais is Professor in Language Education in the Faculty of

Education at Simon Fraser University. She and Kelleen Toohey
launched ScribJab, a website and free iPad application that enables
language learners to compose, illustrate and narrate bilingual stories
in French or English and another language.
nathalie sinclair is the Canada Research Chair in Tangible Math-

ematics Learning at Simon Fraser University. She is the author of
several books and the founding editor of the journal Digital Experi-
ences in Mathematics Education.
kelleen toohey is Professor in the Faculty of Education at Simon

Fraser University. With Diane Dagenais, she has investigated the
language learning affordances of videomaking with multilingual
children.
Disrupting Boundaries in
Education and Research
suzanne smythe
Simon Fraser University
cher hill
margaret macdonald
diane dagenais
nathalie sinclair
kelleen toohey
University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom
One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA
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79 Anson Road, #06–04/06, Singapore 079906
Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.
It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of

education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence.
www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108415668
DOI: 10.1017/9781108234931
© Suzanne Smythe, Cher Hill, Margaret MacDonald, Diane Dagenais,

Nathalie Sinclair, Kelleen Toohey 2017
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception

and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without the written
permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 2017
Printed in the United Kingdom by Clays, St Ives plc
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Smythe, Suzanne, author.
Title: Disrupting boundaries in education and research / Suzanne Smythe, Cher
Hill, Margaret MacDonald, Diane Dagenais, Nathalie Sinclair, Kelleen Toohey.
Description: Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, NY : Cambridge
University Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017019540 | ISBN 9781108415668 (Hardback)
Subjects: LCSH: Interdisciplinary approach in education. | Interdisciplinary
research. | Education–Research.
Classification: LCC LB2361 .S54 2017 | DDC 370.72–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017019540
ISBN 978-1-108-41566-8 Hardback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy

of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication
and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain,
accurate or appropriate.
Contents
List of Figures page vi
Prologue 1
1 Introduction: Theories of the Material 18
2 Materiality and Language Learning in Classrooms:

Rethinking Ethnographic Research 34
3 ‘Poo Theatre’: Young Children’s Dramatic

Intra-actions with a Bioreactor 59
4 Education as Instauration: Extended Bodily Learning

from Early Childhood to Teacher Education 89
5 Mathematics Learning as an Entanglement of Child,

Concept and Technology 116
6 ‘I See You’re a Little Confused’: Intra-action

and Entangled Agencies in an Adult Digital Learning
Programme 144
Conclusion: Creating New Stories of Education and

Research 167
Bibliography 189
Index 201
v
Figures
P.1 Suzanne’s ‘messy map’, made during one of our

early G7 conversations page 5
P.2 G7 overnight retreat 7
1.1 A visual of instauration 24
1.2 The two-slit experiment 26
1.3 A visual of diffraction 30
1.4 Spider drawing: one thing folding into another 32
2.1 Screen shot of video productions 52
3.1 The children exploring the panel connected to the
bioreactor 62
3.2 Sharing M’s drawing of the panel 63
3.3 The children’s enactment of the microorganisms
during guided imagery 64
3.4 The children drawing and discussing the bioreactor 65
3.5 Learning about the bioreactor and the panel from
Rudolf the technician 67
3.6 The children drawing, discussing and enacting ‘poo
theatre’ 69
4.1 Examples of Cher’s children’s learning contexts 92
4.2 Examples of Cher’s students’ learning contexts 93
4.3 Mia the swimmer 94
4.4 Alex the swimmer with his big brother Kai 95
4.5 Experimenting with a/r/tography 105
4.6 Lego creations 107
4.7 Beach weaving by Elizabeth Hansen 109
4.8 Graduate class at the beach 110
4.9 Beach weavings of teacher trajectories 112
5.1 (a) The herds; (b) pinching two herds together;
(c) the sum of two herds 123
vi
list of figures vii
5.2 Calling out to Geoff 131

5.3 Geoff falls to the ground 132
5.4 Everyone but Nathalie falls to the floor 134
5.5 Wanting to make 100 tens 135
5.6 Wanting to make ten tens 136
5.7 Getting to 100 137
6.1 Login page ‘but I have a passcode’ 145
6.2 Hands, pens, screen and earphones at the digital café 147
6.3 Email verification protocol 2: a literacy problem
created by design 160
6.4 Email verification protocol: a literacy test embedded
in a cell phone verification protocol 162
6.5 A job application? An ad? Do I need to log in? 163
C.1 G7 heading down to the beach 188
Prologue
who we are
We are a group of six researchers who come together from varied
academic backgrounds within a Faculty of Education. We represent a
spectrum of appointments across our faculty with three full Professors,
one Associate, one Assistant and a limited-term faculty member. One
of us is a professor in mathematics education, another in adult literacy
education, one in continuing teacher education, one in early childhood
education, and two in second language education. Our faculty is non-
departmentalized in part to encourage interdisciplinary work (or so our
origin myths go), and interdisciplinary work does happen occasionally
here, but perhaps not as often as we might wish, and when it does, it
usually occurs around our teaching assignments and among colleagues
in closely related fields such as within language education or among
science, math and technology cognate groups. In our case, our inaug-
ural meeting as the ‘G7’ followed from a faculty administrative meet-
ing that we all attended almost two years ago. At the time we six
expressed interest in working with colleagues with differing back-
grounds as research partners. Our meetings began as simply a way of
getting to know each other’s scholarship and interests, and then it
turned towards a common purpose to investigate new approaches to
our research. Here we found it useful to view our common research
tensions and compare our methodological approaches.
w h at b r i n g s u s t og e t h e r
We conferred about what we felt was missing in our ethnographic and
grounded fieldwork traditions and discussed how we could create a
better or more complete account of the emotive, nuanced, material
1
2 disrupting boundaries in education and research
and technological aspects of our research and teaching contexts. Over

the course of our meetings, we realised that we all held a common
focus around empirical research and that we had all situated our
research in schools and/or communities with which we held ongoing
relationships that were personally and professionally important to us.
We also realised that we collectively held a belief that our role as
researchers was to learn with these settings and people, and to create
new practices, artefacts, concepts and theories that we could bring to
the work of teaching and learning. We also realised, however, that the
new relationships this work set in motion were not always expected,
especially as our interactions in these sites evolved. We sometimes sat
uneasily in these sites, and we all had reservations about leaving them
after our ‘projects’ were completed. We felt affinities to the sites and
to our ongoing responsibilities to people and were also unsure that the
new practices we attempted to create and explore in these settings
would or could continue. We wondered why this was so: do new
concepts demand more or different resources (including time, space,
people, learning objects) from those the participants had on hand? Do
other material conditions of our research sites, in terms of the archi-
tecture or the interior design and discourses of those sites, have
something to do with the seeming fragility of new practices? Was
the work we were doing leading anywhere, or were our observations
or ‘findings’ just singular events that reflected our own commitments
and interests and that could never be repeated elsewhere, let alone
scaled up? These questions intersect with the increased expectations
placed on researchers in our institution and elsewhere to be ever
innovative, to spread new ideas and practices often without a deep
understanding of the social-cultural-material practices in which the
‘new’ is taken up. As researchers strive to create ‘impact’ at every
turn, what is lost along the way?
We then started to examine the relationships between our the-
oretical and methodological approaches. We all used aspects of socio-
cultural theory to describe and understand the social, cultural and
discursive aspects of our research sites. We agreed that this focus,
prologue 3
while deepening our critical perspectives and allowing an interroga-

tion of relationships, marginalisation and inequity, sometimes made
it difficult or impossible in our research to account for other events
and/or things that were outside this paradigm. We observed that lived
research experience sometimes deviated dramatically from planned
research experience (and often, reported research experience). For
example, we fretted over occurrences such as equipment failure and
technological glitches, or when learners or their teachers walked away
from or digressed from the planned activities we were studying. All
these unanticipated events seemed important somehow, but it was
difficult to know how to account for these. We did not know what to
do with unexpected or discrepant data (if we even noticed or docu-
mented the unexpected). Sociocultural theories gave us ways to talk
about social, cultural and political aspects of schooling, but we knew
they did not easily allow us to think about how bodies, feelings, and
particular material phenomena were shaping the events we observed
and were a part of.
We shared with one another video clips highlighting these experi-
ences and agreed that many powerful moments were difficult to fully
include in our language-driven writeups and so were often ignored in
favour of elements that were easier to identify and document within
our existing linguistic-centred theoretical frameworks. Rather than
working around aspects of the natural, built or technological environ-
ments in our research sites, or conceiving of them as a backdrop, we
wanted to embrace them and move beyond a human-centric ‘gaze’ that
did not fully convey the human/technology or human/other connec-
tions equally or were perhaps even more consequential within these
teaching and learning moments. In part we also felt restricted by a post-
positivist ethos in our research that has lingered in our scholarly com-
munities where learning is identified, coded and discussed in language-
based transcripts to convey the learners’ ‘concepts’, ‘ideas’, ‘intentions’,
‘thoughts’ or ‘representations’. This approach seemed to skim over so
much of what was going on in our settings. How could we report and
celebrate meaning making that is beyond human in these human-
other-material moments so as to honour the process and excitement

and invention (or frustration) within encounters and also continue
to make our research sufficiently robust and acceptable within the
scholarly community? How could we better capture this complexity,
and perhaps more important, how could it be accounted for
theoretically?
Some of us had employed actor–network theory (ANT) (Latour,
2005) to theorise how students, their learning tools and the settings in
which they learned had links one to another, but we were also aware
of the tensions in these theories in ascribing agency to objects, and
indeed how objects are defined. ANT recognised things, but their
relationships with other things seemed a little static to us. ‘Theories
of the material’ or ‘posthumanism’ were emerging in feminist theory
as well as in science studies and philosophy, and we were all attracted
to them. Nathalie had read and published more widely about these
theories of new materiality, and she recommended texts we could
read. We found other texts that aligned with our various fields, and
we read, discussed and struggled to articulate how new materialist
theories were helpful to us in understanding phenomena in our varied
research settings (see Figure P.1). We return in the Conclusion to the
productive tensions in this early work together.
We tried to honour slow scholarship (Berg & Seeber, 2016) by
taking the time in our meetings to cultivate deep thought in our
writing and discussion and to develop fuller understandings of how
these theoretical perspectives might align with our research and
teaching experiences. Our scholarship was also joyous and spontan-
eous. For example, one time we all abandoned our scheduled after-
noon activities, hopped in Suzanne’s car, and headed off to the
University of British Columbia when we heard that Tim Ingold was
speaking there later that day. We found that meeting together in our
personal rather than professional spaces led to better understanding
each other and made potential boundaries permeable. Feminism is a
force that also drew us together. We are all women concerned with
sexism and misogyny, racism and inequality; we are all mothers of
prologue 5
figure p.1 Suzanne’s ‘messy map’, made during one of our early G7
conversations
children of various ages, and our gendered rhythms as mothers and

daughters and our experiences as women in the academy created a
shared spirit and strong connections. Hearing personal stories, being
present in each other’s spaces and sharing meals contributed to our
collective sense of belonging and a deeper understanding of our
scholarship.
For well over a year we intentionally refrained from applying for
grants, submitting conference proposals or writing papers together,
preferring instead to let the work of slow scholarship unfold in a deep
sense of valuing of our exchanges. Things percolated. With this
approach we were able to bring our different, individual research
projects together to review and discuss. Sometimes we analysed one
another’s data or offered alternate reads of the meanings we created in
our research settings. Initially these discussions were exploratory and
social but later evolved to a joint goal of sharing our journeys with
others and seeing our work as a collective endeavour. This book
brings together chapters that emerged in these conversations and
collaborations.
o u r p ro c e s s
We each began by drafting one chapter based on our research site
experiences. Later we conducted a major group edit with each of us
commenting on the draft of the others by making changes and margin
notes where applicable. Kelleen then combined each member’s com-
ments and edits into one master document that we reviewed as a
group. We immersed ourselves in this latter process by viewing it
collectively during an overnight retreat at Margaret’s cabin outside
the city. During our process of re-reading and re-writing, we chal-
lenged each other in important ways that helped to advance our
thinking. The process of living and writing together (we are at
Margaret’s kitchen table in Figure P.2) for a short time away from
the noise and distraction of our usual lives helped deepen our conver-
sations and solidified some of our thinking about being post-human in
our research and teaching contexts.
During this time, we also searched for a common way to unify
our use of pronouns in the book. Here we realised that we had several
levels of ‘we’ as we referred alternatively to each other and at times
the ‘we’ of our colleagues in our research sites. To rectify this, we
chose to refer to ourselves as Cher, Diane, Kelleen, Margaret, Nathalie
and Suzanne when referring to ourselves within our research projects.
When we referred to our research group, we use ‘G7’. We had origin-
ally adopted this name because there were six of us and one person
whom we hoped would join but was unable to do so – we kept the
name, though, as a reminder to keep ourselves open to possibility, but
there is also a very real way in which the six of us have assembled into
a seventh. In different contexts the ‘G’ has come to stand for different
words, a placeholder for multiplicities. All the same, for the purposes
of this book the quick reference to G7 has helped distinguish our
prologue 7
(a)
(b)
figure p.2 G7 overnight retreat

research group from the other research colleagues we are associated

with in different contexts.
We begin our chapters with brief descriptions of preoccupations
and important issues in our diverse fields of scholarship and examine
how new-material analyses have helped us to see relationships and
phenomena we may not have seen before and, perhaps, to contribute
new concepts and ideas to our various fields. Each chapter of the book
describes specific theoretical aspects of our work that moves towards
the material and aligns with our experience in field research.
We organised the chapters of the book by charting our ‘lines of
flight’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987/2005) according to rhythms and
repetitions across chapters. Inspired by Braidotti’s (2011a) words that
feminist and other theories take shape in the place and space between
dualistic thinking, we have adopted here Braidotti’s cartographic aes-
thetic of a ‘living map’ or ‘figuration’ to provide a brief transformative
account of ourselves. These lines of flight or what Braidotti (2011a)
might refer to as ‘in-between states of social (im)mobility’ (p. 10) help
chart the nomadic pathways that brought us to this work. In addition
to these lines of flight we have also provided figurations between
chapters to provide insight into our ways of configuring the flow of
our work. We felt sharing this history in our process was important to
outline our thoughts on how the chapters congeal and their potential
layering, as well as the new layers that each chapter contributes in our
collective conversation.
o u r l i n e s o f fl i g h t
This book documents our lines of flight both individually and collect-
ively, and how our attention to the material contributed to unex-
pected shifts in our trajectories as researchers, educators and
scholars. The term lines of flight comes from Deleuze and Guattari
(1987/2005) and is articulated in relation to the concept of multiplici-
ties, structures with no static essence but rather characterised by
forces, dimensions and magnitudes that are continually unfolding in
prologue 9
a rhizomatic fashion as they assemble with other multiplicities, cre-

ating an ever-evolving world. They observe:
Multiplicities are defined by the outside: by the abstract line, the

line of flight according to which they change in nature and connect
with other multiplicities. The plane of consistency (grid) is the
outside of all multiplicities. The line of flight marks: the reality of a
finite number of dimensions that the multiplicity effectively fills;
the impossibility of a supplementary dimension, unless the
multiplicity is transformed by the line of flight; the possibility and
necessity of flattening all of the multiplicities on a single plane of
consistency or exteriority, regardless of their number of
dimensions.
(pp. 9–10)
Reading Deleuze was a struggle for some of us and we joked at times

that we were ‘Deleuzing our minds’.1 Suzanne suggested that she best
understood Deleuze’s ideas when she tried not to read them too
carefully but instead allowed herself to surf the images. ‘Kind of like
looking at something out of corner of your eye to see the contours.’
Our experience resonates with that of Kuby and Rucker (2016), who
evoke the materiality of scholarship and its effect: ‘we learned not to
focus as much on the meaning of Deleuze and Guattari’s writing as on
what it did and produced in/with/between us’ (p. 27).
We have come to understand lines of flight as trajectories that
trace paths through potential worlds. Documenting lines of flight
makes movement from one place to another visible; movement that
is not linear or even intentional but involving a gathering of force that
allows one to go to a new place and enables transitions that transcend
the actual and ascend to the virtual. The virtual is a new ontological
space that is, in a sense, both real and ideal. For example, in Chapter 5,
the number 100 combines the real, as in the sound of ‘one hundred’
that the five-year-old children have heard before (and keep repeating
1
Thank you to Dr. Valia Spiliotopoulos for this witty phrase.
over and over) with the potential of making 100 on the iPad. This
accomplishment is potential in the sense that the children know little
about what they have to actually do – in terms of tapping and pinch-
ing – in order to make this large and alluring quantity, but also know
that if they keep tapping, they will eventually get to 100. The gestur-
ing of the children’s hands, in which all ten fingers are held up and
then placed on the screen, becomes a new line of flight in which the
potentiality of 100 becomes actualised.
Our personal trajectories or flight paths as we worked with new
materialities theories have been interesting to members of G7. We
hope these trajectories (described below) help readers understand
better why and how we came to be doing the work we do. Kelleen
and Diane’s lines of flight are described both individually and collect-
ively, as Chapter 2 (the language chapter) is based on their shared
experiences.
Kelleen
In doing research in classrooms with young English language learners
over a few years, I started to think about the importance of space and
things in classrooms after I had a skating accident and broke my
kneecap. Because of the injury I had to sit on chairs, find space for
my crutches, and could not move around the room or slide onto the
floor to listen or talk to the children easily. Because of this I started to
think about space and about how children across the room might look
as if they were having an interesting conversation that I couldn’t hear,
but the effort required to get up, pick up my crutches and find another
chair to sit on so as to hear seemed too much. Then I started to think
about how the children in their desks were restricted from movement
too, and how they worked around those restrictions, by lending and
borrowing ‘stuff’. So new materialism opened a way for me to think
about how my researcher body and my temporary disability were
implicated in how I did my research and what I noticed about how
the children with whom I worked used space and movement as well.
prologue 11
Diane
When I began my career in education as a teacher in French immer-
sion and Core French (Canadian second-language) programs, I was
surprised to discover that it was considered good practice to keep first
and second languages separate in school, since this did not reflect my
experience growing up as a French-English bilingual in settings where
we moved between languages and mixed them frequently in our
communicative practices for pragmatic and personal purposes. Later,
as a researcher accompanying language learners as they navigated and
documented the linguistic landscape (the languages visible in the
environment) of their communities, I was struck by the way signage
in different languages and its placement in the geographical space
contributed to multilingual children’s understanding about the value
attributed to diverse languages in their repertoires. Barad’s (2007)
interrogation of boundaries between discursive and material forces
and Braidotti’s (2013) discussion of the Cartesian logic dominating
humanist perspectives opened a line of flight for me to explore
boundary-making practices and attend to material participants in
language teaching and learning. Ingold’s (2011) description of life as
movement along a trajectory and ethnographers as co-sojourners res-
onated with my experience as a learner and led me to re-examine my
practice as a teacher and researcher and reconsider my implication in
educational settings.
Diane and Kelleen

As we (Diane and Kelleen) became intrigued by how videomaking and
story production using iPads seemed to provide learners opportunities
to engage in diverse multilingual and multimodal literacy practices, we
could not help but notice the ways these digital tools seemed to recon-
figure relationships among various participants in learning, including
children’s and teachers’ bodies, school spaces, classroom materials,
technologies, timetables, curriculum objectives and educational
discourses about what counts as language and literacy at school. As
we explored what shifted in these settings when new tools and prac-
tices were introduced, we read new materialists whose work drew our
attention to the entanglements of participants, leading us to wonder
how those shifts might open up new possibilities for learning/teaching
and research. This literature also encouraged us to see language as
something more than just one of many modes of expression humans
use to communicate but also as both material and immaterial forms
that impact learning. As well, our reading of new materialists with our
colleagues offered new ways for us to think about our own entangle-
ment with multiple others as participant observers in learning encoun-
ters and navigate our way around established conventions in language
education research when reporting on our experiences in the field.
Margaret
With an undergraduate background in geography and cartography,
classroom environments have always been fascinating to me and a
significant part of my research, practice and scholarship in early
childhood education. My graduate work also coincided with an
awakening among academics regarding the fallacy of objectivity and
the incommensurate qualities of scientific methods within the social
sciences. This confluence of self in environment (What is the environ-
ment? Who am I within that environment?) and the unmasking of a
cult around scientific objectivity in the social sciences led to my
pursuit of phenomenological approaches in combination with ethno-
graphic and grounded theory methodology (Charmaz, 2014). I felt that
if I could critically interrogate my subjectivity and surface and bracket
my biases (Ladkin, 2005) or deconstruct them by putting them under
erasure (Derrida as cited in Lenz Taguchi, 2006) I would be on higher
ground as a researcher. I also promoted this with my graduate stu-
dents and selected readings and activities that drew this out in the
qualitative methods courses I taught. Gradually, however, my words
became hollow as I increasingly saw also the influence that
technology had in shaping our epistemology and ontology through
its selective gaze. I wanted to understand this coming together of
prologue 13
technology, children, researchers and other adults better to be able to

theoretically guide my research questions and better explain findings.
A line of flight occurred for me when I had the opportunity
through a Canadian Foundation for Innovation (CFI) grant to present
and discuss early childhood principles of project-based and Reggio
Emilia–influenced practices to architects who were awarded the con-
tract to design a research-focused ‘living building’ childcare centre
where I now conduct my research. My partnership with the teachers
and administrators in this unique environmentally sensitive building
helped me move away from teacher-centred and/or child-centred
practices to seeing learning as connected to both the teacher and child
and now also explicitly to the building and materials. For me onto-
logical possibilities opened up after reading Barad (2007), Braidotti
(2011a; 2011b; 2013) and Haraway (2007) and deepening my theoret-
ical understandings of the synergy between the children, researcher,
technology and the building. On another level, taking this line of
flight with my colleagues in G7 as a collaborative assemblage also
allowed a range of possibilities to emerge in our collective thinking as
we explored our work apart and together. This heightened my under-
standing of how we in the past have essentialised our understandings
often without leaving room to negotiate key but non-traditional ways
that children think and learn with others and with the tools and
materials they encounter.
Cher
I am an in-service teacher-educator working with practicing teachers
enrolled in a M.Ed. in Educational Practice program. This program is
based on a practitioner inquiry methodology (Cochran Smith & Lytle,
2009) in which the teachers engage in the disciplined study of their
own teaching practice. A foundational principle of the inquiry meth-
odology is that all members of learning communities are regarded as
teachers, learners and producers of knowledge (Cochran Smith &
Lytle, 2009). One tension with regards to my own teaching practice
has been creating learning environments that are self-directed and
empowering for the teachers but are also profoundly impactful and
professionally transformative. My colleagues and I often experience
difficulties navigating the authority that is often bestowed on us based
on traditional roles of students and teachers, as well as the institu-
tional practices of the university, seeking instead to create more
collegial, democratic learning environments (MacDonald, Hill, Dono-
van, Howarth & Irvine, 2013). Heron and Reason’s (1997) perspective
that all institutions require an appropriate balance of authority,
collaboration and autonomy, and that authority is most authentic
when it is used to enable human flourishing, has inspired me to
reconfigure my relationships with my students in this regard.
I came to G7 with a strong background in post-structural femi-
nist theory and understood how inequities and power structures
within classrooms are discursively constructed but had not yet con-
sidered the role of the material world. Attending to the material
created openings that encouraged me to consider how classrooms
conspire to reinforce my authority as a teacher and to imagine it
otherwise. I turned to the material world to reconfigure learning
contexts to provide the potential for new lines of flight for my stu-
dents in ways that provided teacher-learners with a sense of agency.
This path parallels my own professional line of flight as a member of
G7. As a junior limited-term faculty member in a position that is
predominantly administrative, I struggled to establish my voice
within the academy. Yet within the world of G7, enacted within the
comfort of Suzanne’s artisan kitchen, Diane’s elegant living room,
Kelleen’s garden patio, Nathalie’s sophisticated apartment in the city
and Margaret’s seaside cottage, swimming in a sea of video clips,
quotes and stories told over lattes, herbal teas and occasionally cham-
pagne, I became a scholar.
Nathalie
For over two decades, my research has focussed on the role of digital
technologies in mathematics teaching and learning. My interests in that
area were sparked by my experience of working in the Centre for
prologue 15
Experiment and Constructive Mathematics (CECM) as a Master’s stu-

dent and witnessing how mathematicians were using digital technology
to do, create and change mathematics. I happened to be working in a
middle school at the same time and often tried out some of the new
approaches I was seeing in the CECM – albeit somewhat modified – with
my students. Over time, after many research projects that featured the
use of different digital technologies, I became increasingly frustrated by
the constant comparison between with-technology and without-
technology contexts, mostly because they always inadequately meas-
ured what it was that students were learning with technology (since the
measurements were always done with paper and pencil). More recently
I have noticed that even researchers who have eschewed the comparison
paradigm continue to assume that the technology may change the
teaching and learning of mathematics, but the mathematics stays the
same. This does not fit my experience in the CECM, nor does it make
sense when one acknowledges that ‘Mathematics has been engaged in a
two-way co-evolutionary traffic with machines since its inception’ (Rot-
man, 2008) – that is, that mathematics has historically evolved in and
with machines, and is continuing to do so.
When I began working with young children using the Touch-
Counts (Jackiw & Sinclair, 2014) multitouch application, in which
fingers, symbols, sounds, words and eyes are all at play in the making
and manipulating of number, I wanted a way of making sense of
learning when the concepts being learned were themselves in flux. If
TouchCounts is an interesting and novel technology, it should be
changing the concept of number. The shift in focus that post-human,
material perspectives offered, from the epistemological to the onto-
logical, opened up lines of flight. Not only could I now reconfigure the
relation between the student and the machine as imbricated and
sensible – in Sherry Turkle’s (2011) sense of being about knowing
and feeling – but I could also start to study the way in which number,
as a concept, was evolving in and of the children and the app. Inspired
by Barad’s (2007) account of the experiments of the physicist Niels
Bohr around the nature of light, I carved out a path in which, as a
mathematics education researcher, I might also engage in an experi-

ment around the nature of number. In so doing, number ceases to be
an abstract a priori that is separated from the material world, and
becomes entangled in the very indeterminacy of that world.
Suzanne
A long-time adult literacy educator once said that no one, when asked
what they want to be when they grow up, pipes up with ‘adult literacy
educator’. This is not an option in career planning courses in high
school, and few university faculties of education acknowledge adult
education any longer as an area of educational practice that is in need
of research and pedagogic innovation (my institution is an exception!).
But people find their way to this work anyway because it is challen-
ging and transformative, although sometimes frustrating. Through
various circuitous routes, including a degree in political studies,
I found myself working as an adult literacy educator in several differ-
ent settings and countries. I learned that literacy education work
outside schools is unchartered territory. Working with people
who are placed on the margins of society means also being prepared
to be professionally marginalised, as indeed are many adult literacy
educators. It also requires improvisation and the ability to see through
nefarious projects that seek to blame individuals and their ‘lack of
literacy’ for poverty, unemployment, inequality and other complex
phenomena over which they have little control (Braidotti, 2013).
So when our G7 group decided to read together Tim Ingold’s
Being Alive (2011) and Making (2013), I experienced a deep sense of
familiarity and also de-stability. Improvisation, unchartered territor-
ies, learning in the ‘margins‘ is for Ingold wayfaring, the very heart of
learning that is continually emergent, corresponding with people and
materials to make new things that matter. Rather than ‘standing
outside’ the worlds of those we call ‘learners’ as experts and data
collectors, making judgements about how people represent their
knowledge of things already known, what would literacy education
look like when we place ourselves as educators back into this flow of
prologue 17
the ‘worlds’ differential becoming’? (Barad, 2003, p. 829). What would

need to change in policy and practice if we reconfigured adult educa-
tion as learning with rather than learning about (Ingold, 2013) our
students?
Barad (2003)’s opening line in an article, ‘Language has been
given too much power’ (p. 801) was also quite the jolt for a literacy
educator like me in love with Foucault. But the force of this idea sent
me looking for what else might be going on. Reading and thinking
with the G7 has led me to notice, or try to notice, the human and non-
human phenomena, including pedagogies and research methods, that
are entangled in our discourses and practices and that matter. This has
me alive to the delightful indeterminacy of research, leading me away
from finding answers and toward the potential of new questions such as
those guiding my work in this book. How might research that de-centres
human activity and that reinstates humans in the flow of materials
move us towards more hopeful and affirmative ways of learning?
a n i n v i t at i o n
This book reflects our commitment to educational advocacy and to
working alongside those who have been typically marginalised or
disempowered in educational settings. We hope to move pedagogy
and research forward in creative and inventive ways that help to
flatten power relations. We invite you as readers to approach this
book with the same openness to possibilities and curiosity as we have
embraced in writing it. We encourage you to use the text interactively
in collaboration with others by talking and thinking through the work
and/or to relate to it as part of a process of investigating what it means
to go beyond the traditional boundaries and fixedness of your own
work as students, researchers, professors and scholars.
1 Introduction
Theories of the Material
The new materialisms work across boundaries of science and the social,
nature and culture. All, in their various ways, contest the notion of nature
as merely the inert scenery against which the humanist adventures of
culture are played out.
(MacLure, 2013a, p. 659)
As a group, our introduction to new materialism was our reading of

feminist physicist Karen Barad’s (2007) Meeting the universe halfway:
Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. As
many of us were unfamiliar with the physics examples she used, the
reading was difficult but evocative. Her work struck many chords, in
different ways for different members of the group. Reading and dis-
cussing her book made us realise that we had each made our own
previous and unique incursions into new materialism, through the
works of Donna Haraway (2004), Bruno Latour (2005) and Jane Ben-
nett (2010), to name just a few. Reading Barad enabled us to name
shared questions and concerns, while also alighting us to new ideas –
and altering the way we re-read these authors.
Materialism has a long tradition in philosophy, so it is not
surprising to see new materialism arise in contemporary philosophy,
but it has also received attention in a variety of other domains such as
sociology (especially science, technology and society), feminist stud-
ies, and anthropology and education. Indeed, one of the compelling
features of Barad’s, as well as Haraway’s and Bennett’s work, is its
feminist roots, which we have found productive in helping us think in
different ways about some of the political aspects of our work in
education. Having experience and education in varied fields of study,
18
introduction: theories of the material 19
we found resonances with different authors, such as anthropologist

Tim Ingold (2011; 2013), educational researcher Margaret MacLure
(2013a) and Lenz Taguchi (2010) and mathematics education research-
ers Elizabeth de Freitas and Nathalie Sinclair (2014). Some of us draw
on the work of Vicki Kirby (2011), and many of us were taken with
philosopher Rosi Braidotti’s (2013) description of the history of
humanism and how post-humanism might help us see new relations
and realities. Finally, the influence of process ontology philosophers,
such as Alfred North Whitehead (1929/1978) and Gilles Deleuze and
Félix Guattari (1987/2005; 1994), cannot be overstated. We come back
to a discussion of process ontologies below.
In this Introduction, we provide observations about the new
materialism theories that inform the chapters to follow. We explore
here how the various scholars on whom we draw make sense of
concepts such as relational or process ontology, assemblage, intra-
action and apparatuses as they relate to our collective work, concepts
that are taken up in more detail in our separate chapters. Reading the
introduction may thus help prepare readers for the chapters that
follow. An alternative entry point into these ideas, however, is to start
by reading examples in the chapters that follow, in which the con-
cepts come alive through the storying of our worlds, and returning to
this chapter to clarify and extend meaning making. We encourage you
to stand, gesture and/or create, as you work through the ideas in this
book, as coming to know begins in the body (Serres, 2011).
r e l at i o n a l o n t o l og i e s , p ro c e s s o n t o l og i e s
a n d a s s e m b l ag e s
As we read various descriptions of new materialism in our respective
fields, we began to see differences in approaches and emphases. How-
ever, there are commonalities, and one might be summarised as a
rejection of traditional philosophical dualisms and the hierarchies that
often accompany them (human/non-human, thinking/feeling, male/
female, mind/body, research/practice and so on). As anthropologist
Ingold (2013, p. 31) puts it, a new material perspective ‘returns persons
to where they belong, with the continuum of organic life, and . . .
recognize[s] that this life undergoes continual regeneration.’ Sociologist
of science and technology and acknowledged originator of actor–
network theory (ANT), Latour (1998; 2005) also pursues this new
materialist view in that he maintains the importance of treating human
and non-human ‘actants’ more equally, formulating this notion as a
principle of ‘generalized symmetry’. This denial of the set-apartness of
humans has been a fulcrum for debate about actor–network as well as
other new materialism theories, particularly with respect to agency,
with some arguing that all actants have agency, including non-animate
and non-human entities, others arguing that it makes no sense to speak
of non-animate things as initiating action, and still others maintaining
that the notion of agency having an individual source that makes
things happen is incommensurate with a relational ontology. For these
theorists, agency is in the relation. We take up this issue in more detail
in Chapter 2. What these theories concur with is the assertion that the
material world is not entirely passive or merely responding to the forces
of human action and intention.
Another commonality in various materialist accounts is rejec-
tion of the belief that fixed, determinable and essential qualities can
be attributed to the (for example) animate or the inanimate, or to
human persons or non-human things; rather, the claim is that mater-
ial people, animals, objects, nature, discourses and so on proceed
together in relation to and with one another. Here, change, becoming
and reciprocal effects are ubiquitously present. These materialist
accounts invite us to refrain from positing a priori individuations (or
boundaries) between things, such as people, tools, furniture and so on.
Rather, things are what they are in terms of how they are in relation
with other things. Barad (2007) calls such a view a ‘relational ontol-
ogy’, recognizing that while distinctions between (for example)
humans and non-humans are continually made and have sociomater-
ial consequences, ‘[w]hat is needed is an analysis that enables us to
theorise the social and the natural together, to read our best
understandings of social and natural phenomena through one another’

(p. 25). This ‘reading through’, whereby taken-for-granted divisions are
ignored, makes possible new interpretations as well as new method-
ologies, as we discuss later.
Barad also advocates examination of the processes by which
such distinctions are made, and how it is that we ‘produce objects
and subjects and other differences out of and in terms of a changing
relationality’ (p. 93), and whose interests are served or what assem-
blages are buttressed by such distinctions. Such an examination is
both political as well as aesthetic in that it involves attending to how
the conjunction of ‘sense’ (as sensation) and ‘sense’ (as common
meaning) operates and conditions our modes of individual perception
as well as our social institutions (Rancière, 2010). So many of the
boundaries that get drawn are binaries. For example, de Freitas and
Sinclair (2014) describe a situation in which a primary school student
attempts to put forward the idea that a number can be both even and
odd, a suggestion that is met with some derision by his classmates,
but that could very well lead to coherent and interesting mathemat-
ical results. A preference for a strict division between even and odd is
not so much logical as it is aesthetic in that it involves a preference for
definitions and distinctions that are exclusive. Readers are invited to
consider other binaries, of which there are many, and the shifts in
sensation that might be involved in order to disrupt their status as
being common sense.
Rejection of taken-for-granted dualism, hierarchical systems of
value, and essentialism are found in the work of many of the feminist
and process ontology philosophers we have already mentioned includ-
ing Whitehead (1929/1978), Deleuze (1994), Haraway (2004) and Ben-
nett (2010). Similar to relational ontology, process ontology challenges
essentialism, emphasizing the emergent as well as relational nature of
entities that are always in a state of becoming. Process ontology is
evident in Deleuze’s (1994) thinking about an organism as a ‘sum of
contradictions, of retentions and expectations’ (p. 73). Manuel Delanda
(2002) describes Deleuze’s organism as ‘not defined by its essential
traits but rather by the morphogenetic process that gave rise to it’ (p. 2);
such a perspective moves away from static, transcendent traits of
‘identity’ to a concern for change, reciprocal relations and difference,
and underscores ‘the intrinsic indeterminacy and mobility at the heart
of any process of becoming, which is crucial to de-essentialising’ (de
Freitas & Sinclair, 2014, p. 34). As we will discuss throughout this
volume, recognition of indeterminacy – which contrasts with mechan-
ical metaphors of phenomena in terms of linear models of cause and
effect – requires new ways of conceptualizing concepts that have trad-
itionally guided much educational theory, such as identity, human
agency and causation.
We find these ideas help us see how people, discourses, practices and
things are continually under construction and changing together,
becoming different from what they were before. This is a perspective
that does not promise clarity, universality or finality about these
relationships; however, it may be able to deal more effectively with
the complexity of events in education settings that we have hereto-
fore not been able to pay attention to. We are interested in under-
standing this complexity not because we are pursuing a more exact or
faithful or detailed description of educational phenomena, but
because it helps us question assumptions about how we conceive of
learning and teaching, what causes learning, who is doing the learning
(or teaching) and how certain ways of learning and objects of learning
are valued more than others.In social science, theories of new materi-
alism try to de-centre the human, preferring instead to see ‘assem-
blages’ (the English translation of philosopher Gilles Deleuze and
psychiatrist Felix Guattari’s [1987] term agencement) in which
mutual entailment and influence are ubiquitous. This notion of
assemblage has been extremely influential in new materiality
studies. Although not defined by Deleuze and Guattari (an intentional
refusal to ‘fix’ meaning), Delanda (2002) describes assemblages as
compositions of elements in which the parts are implicated in each
other, that is, in which the relations between the parts are contingent.
Deleuze and Guattari explain this contingency using the example of

orchids and male wasps in warm areas in Europe. Orchids look like
female wasps and males attempt to mate with them; when they do so,
the orchid’s pollen loads onto the wasp, which is then deposited on
the next orchid with which the male attempts to mate. Deleuze and
Guattari thus see wasps as part of an assemblage of the flower’s
reproductive organs. They further insist that if the orchid or the wasp
were to die out, the other could become situated in new relations.
Should the orchid die out, the new relations involving the wasp would
actualise different properties and behaviours of the wasp.
We find Étienne Souriau’s (2015) concept of instauration helpful
in understanding the relations that constitute an assemblage and what
it means for parts to be implicated in each other. The concept is not an
easy one to define, especially since its English translation can be mis-
leading. Vitry Maubrey describes instauration as the ‘ensemble of
processes which lead to the moment wherein the presence, assurance
and autonomy of existence conferred upon a certain being are incon-
testable’ (in Noske, 2015, p. 38). She suggests that the concept can be
used in place of words such as invention or creation. However, whereas
creation often implies an emergence of the new out of nothing, instaur-
ation is not self-determined. Nor is instauration caused by its milieu.
An example might be helpful: instead of seeing things as
existing in and of themselves, like a potter and a piece of clay, Souriau
describes the artist as being instaurated in the clay, of being in and of
the clay. This is not to say that the clay and the potter have similar
intentions or desires; they might easily ‘come together’, but they also
‘resist’ one another, and the outcome of their coming together cannot
be predetermined. Indeed, Latour (2011) argues that ‘the act of instaur-
ation has to provide the opportunity to encounter beings capable of
worrying you . . . Beings whose continuity, prolongation, extension
would come at the cost of a certain number of uncertainties, discon-
tinuities, anxieties’ (p. 311). Instauration is another concept that is
perhaps best understood by ‘surfing the image’, as Suzanne would say,
because it is so different from the way we typically think of people and
things as being separate, distinct and having agency to act upon one
another.
In the video grab shown in Figure 1.1 from www.youtube.com/
watch?v=IQE_w16KdeM, we see the experienced potter’s body, and
hands and fingers and the clay and the water and so on, as an assem-
blage, in which what happens with any of them is contingent on what
happens with any other part (Uhlick, 2016). We might say they are
figure 1.1 A visual of instauration (copyright Sam Uhlick, used with

permission)
implicated or instaurated in one another, or that together they form

an assemblage. Instauration is explored further in Chapter 4.
i n t r a - ac t i o n a n d a p pa r at u s e s
For new materialists, human bodies, discourses, environments, tech-
nologies and so on are continuously changing, learning and adapting
in ‘intra-action’ (Barad, 2011) with one another. Barad’s neologism,
intra-action, emerged from her study of Danish physicist Niels Bohr’s
quantum physics and contrasts with the idea of interaction. If two
things are in interaction, then they are ontologically separable; how-
ever, if they are intra-acting they are ontologically inseparable but
come into being through their entanglement (Barad, 2007). Intra-
action shifts attention to the relation, and conceptualises the relation
as the unit of analysis. In what follows, we will be concerned with the
subatomic world, but examples such as lightning (see Barad, 2011),
which emerges from an intra-action of sky and ground, may be worth
keeping in mind (see http://science.howstuff-works.com/nature/nat
ural-disasters/lightning.htm).
Following Niels Bohr, Barad (2010) proposes that objects, con-
cepts and things emerge through particular intra-actions. In the case
of theoretical physics, the concept of light emerges through a particu-
lar intra-action of electrons and machines. Thus concepts are to be
seen as ‘specific material arrangements of experimental apparatuses’
(Barad, 2010, p. 253). This contrasts with the more Platonic view that
concepts are universal ideals that are instantiated in the material
world. It also contrasts with the more sociocultural view that con-
cepts are social constructs that are abstracted from the material world
and wholly dependent on human perception, agency and language.
Barad explains her way of thinking of concepts by describing the
two-slit experiment (see Figure 1.2). This experiment, designed to
explore the nature of light, involves an apparatus in which an electron
gun is directed towards a screen on which there are two slits. Behind
that screen is a second screen on which a pattern of light is generated.
If a scatter pattern appears on the second screen (two lines of minuscule
figure 1.2 The two-slit experiment
dots), this would mean that the light behaved as particle because
particles of light would go through the slits and land on the observing
screen in a way similar to what would happen if tiny spitballs were shot
through the two slits. If light is behaving as a wave, these waves would
spread and interfere (diffract) with one another as the light passed
through the two slits and produce bright and dark bands on the observ-
ing screen, as in Figure 1.2. In fact, the observing screen shows a
diffraction pattern as if the light was behaving as a wave, but the light
is absorbed by the screen at discrete points, as if it was behaving as a
particle. To add to the mystery, or to what gets called the principle of
wave–particle duality, when detectors are placed at the slits, it appears
that each detected photon passes through only one slit and not both,
which is how particles would behave (and not a wave).
Some, such as the German physicist Werner Heisenberg, inter-
preted this result in terms of the limits of human understanding, that
is, as an epistemological issue. But Bohr insisted that it was an onto-
logical issue: instead of assuming that light is an independent entity
and that we are merely measuring its properties, Bohr argued that
what light is emerges from an intra-action, rather than being an object
that merely interacts with a particular apparatus. According to Bohr,
there is not a pre-existing, determinate thing that is being observed at
the instant during which the experiment is conducted. In further
developing Bohr’s ideas, Barad suggests that the experiment entails an

intra-active phenomenon where humans are implicated in the ontol-
ogy of the atomic world. In other words, what light is taken to be
cannot be separated either from the apparatus used to measure it or
the humans who observe it (and its measurements).
It is important to emphasise that Barad is not just saying that
human observation disturbs what would otherwise have happened, or
what otherwise would have some determinate behaviour (wave or
particle). To connect to the context of classroom research, it is not
just that the presence of the researcher disturbs what would otherwise
have unfolded, but that teachers and students and desks and curricu-
lum guides and computers and the architecture of classrooms and
researchers (and much else) are what they are in relation to one
another, and do not have fixed inherent natures. Their intra-actions
are fundamentally unpredictable.
Barad’s (2011) argument about the indeterminacy of matter applies
not just to the subatomic world of atoms, photons and electrons, but
extends also to more macroscopic phenomena such as animals, plants
and humans. That said, she does not separate the microscopic and the
macroscopic, and maintains that quantum, relational ontology is also
relevant to everyday matters. She gives the example of the Pfiesteria
piscicida, a one-celled micro-organism that can act as both a plant and
an animal and that came to the attention of scientists after being sus-
pected for the mass killings of billions of fish. Barad describes how policy
makers have responded to scientists’ inability to determine the basic
characteristics of the Pfiesteria by adopting a ‘wait and see’ approach that
assumes that such determination will eventually occur. But Barad, draw-
ing on the research of science studies scholar Astrid Schrader, suggests
that ‘scientists’ inability to pin down the nature of Pfiesteria has precisely
to do with the nature of the critter itself – namely, that its very species
being is indeterminate’ (p. 134). The problem is therefore not one of
epistemological uncertainty but instead of ontological indeterminacy:
‘There is no moment in time in which Pfiesteria could be unambiguously
delineated from its environment’ (Schrader, cited in Barad, 2011, p. 134).
This example, albeit somewhat extraordinary, resonates strongly for us

in relation to ambiguities around dis/ability as well as around gender and
sex. If we take the material nature of these ‘characteristics’ seriously
(rather than seeing them simply as sociocultural labels), then we must
also contend with how indeterminacies of the body frame policies that
are created in relation to distinctions made in schools.
Barad’s new materialism exhorts us to attend seriously to the
more-than-human when we study classroom learning. It also pushes
us, as educators, to rethink the macroscopic phenomena in which we
are interested, such as learning and agency, ‘without taking these
distinctions [human/non-human] to be foundational or holding them
in place’ (Barad, 2011, p. 124). We have throughout this volume dis-
cussed in more detail our struggles in doing so, struggles that stem at
least in part from the human-centric nature of educational research
discourse (see Chapter 3).
Rooted as it is in the study of quantum theory, Barad’s work
concerns the experimental devices with which physicists create and
sustain theories, such as the two-slit device described above. Her treat-
ment of them, again following Bohr, differs from the way in which we
usually conceptualise the devices used in the sciences. She uses the word
‘apparatus’ to designate the actual material configuration of an experi-
ment, but she argued that ‘apparatuses are not mere static arrangements
in the world, but rather . . . are dynamic “(re)configurings of the world”
and therefore “are themselves phenomena”’ (Barad, 2003, p. 816). In
other words, for her, an apparatus is not simply a window onto phenom-
ena or a tool for measuring determinate entities or extracting concepts.
Instead, meaning and matter are mutually entailed:
'The objective referent for concepts like ‘wave’ and ‘particle’ is not a
determinately bounded object with inherent characteristics . . . but
rather what is called a phenomenon – the entanglement/inseparability
of ‘objects’ and ‘apparatus’ (which do not preexist the experiment but
rather emerge from it).
(Barad, 2011, p. 142, emphasis in original)
In this way, method (measuring with an apparatus) gives rise to

theory (the nature of light) in what Barad calls diffractive analysis, a
term she borrows from Haraway (1997), who describes it as a method
for making meaning: ‘Diffraction is a narrative, graphic, psycho-
logical, spiritual, and political technology for making consequential
meanings’ (p. 273). The word ‘diffraction’ refers to the way in which
water waves, for example, can pass around a barrier on their path, like
a log, and create a disturbance in the waves behind that barrier. The
direction and wavelength of the water changes, producing novel and
unexpected patterns. Similar to the way waves passing around a log
creates an interference in the water, a diffractive analysis, in which
insights are read ‘through one another in ways that help illuminate
differences as they emerge’ (Barad, 2007, p. 30), can produce openings
and create consequential meanings (see Figure 1.3 for a visual of
diffraction). For example, Cher (Hill, 2017) ‘plugged in’ (Jackson &
Mazzei, 2012) her field notes of an encounter between herself and
two of her children into two different frameworks, self-regulation
theory (Shanker, 2013) and a relational materialist approach (Barad,
2007), to produce two very different accounts of causation, agency and
mothering. She then read these accounts through each other, allowing
them to interfere with the internal rhythms of each other to produce a
new concept and an alternative way of being in the world with her
children: relational regulation. The goal is not to compare what two
different theories might say nor to use one reading to complement
another. Diffractive analysis aims to carve out what is new through
the interference. And, as is shown in Chapter 5, the interfering log
might also be an instrument, like the two-slit device, that can illu-
minate difference in how and what children learn.
While the use of apparatuses may seem more relevant to scien-
tific research than to social science research, what might they look
like in the social sciences? (And we might also ask the materialist
questions: how/when did distinctions between ‘hard’ from ‘soft’ sci-
ences become common? What changed as a result of this distinction?
What difference did it make to our thinking/being/becoming with this
figure 1.3 A visual of diffraction
distinction?) As well, we might ask, In what ways are education

researchers entangled in the ontology of educational sites? Inasmuch
as there are varieties of actual material arrangements used in educa-
tional research, we may well choose to see something like a video
camera, for example, or a particular analytical software program, as an
apparatus. Following Haraway’s quotation above, the test will be
whether it enables the making of consequential meanings. And
following Barad, an apparatus must be used to make phenomena and
not simply to measure pre-existing individuations or establish causal
relations between pre-determined entities. De Freitas (2016) writes, in
her proposal for diffractive experiments as a methodology for educa-
tion, that the apparatus must produce a new concept. For more on the
apparatus and diffraction, see Chapter 5.
This scholarship encourages educational researchers to examine
closely how physical locations; the objects available (furniture, books,
paper, computers, water, snowmobiles and so on); discourses on the
nature of ‘knowledge’ and learning (materialised in books, curriculum
documents and so on); political, educational and economic policies;
and material human bodies are ‘entangled’ and ‘intra-act’ with one
another, and further, to query how they are changing together and
how they might change together. The theory also alerts us to thinking
about how our research apparatuses (in a broad sense – including our
ideas about normal child development, appropriate practices and so on)
intra-act with the phenomena we are observing. Lenz Taguchi (2010)
for example, writes about how she and the teachers in a pre-school were
limited in analyzing two four-year-olds’ understandings and queries in a
particular pedagogical event because of, among other things, the devel-
opmental theory they knew and brought to their discussions of that
event. Allowing the children to work with different classroom mater-
ials produced new assemblages, which helped the adults to reframe
what they thought had been and was happening. They were able to
observe the ‘lines of flight’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987/2005, p. 37) that
the material children and the classroom materials took, the new and
unpredictable understandings and queries that arose, that they might
not have seen had circumstances been different.
conclusion
Coming from G7’s common commitments to working alongside
those who have too often been failed by institutional education, those
who have too often been seen as flawed in some way, we are searching
for what Foucault (1980) refers to as
those continuous and uninterrupted processes which subject our

bodies, govern our gestures, dictate our behaviours, etc. . . . we
should try to discover how it is that subjects are gradually,
progressively, really and materially constituted through a
multiplicity of organisms, forces, energies, materials, desires,
thoughts, etc. We should try to grasp subjection in its material
instance as a constitution of subjects.
(p. 97)
We think Foucault is here arguing for what new materialist theories

tell us to pay attention to: that which makes certain people, certain
bodies, seen as flawed, marginal, Other, and beyond educational

reach. We have attempted in this book to give varied examples of
how educational research might be done differently, so as to highlight
ways that educational discourse and research might go beyond where
we now are and give us new concepts to think with and new actions to
engage in that may have positive consequences in education systems
that are not often enough inclusive, experimental and generative of
new possibilities.
The title of our book refers not just to disrupting the boundaries
that have been drawn between those who can and those who cannot,
between subject and object, the body and the mind – boundaries that
are often taken for granted in the educational discourse – but also to
boundaries that have been drawn in educational research. It is in
inspecting these boundaries, such as those that separate the
researcher from the participant or the representation from the con-
cept, that we have found openings and imperfections that have
become our lines of flight. Figure 1.4 shows a drawing of circles
getting so big that only arcs on them are visible, with their centres
flying to infinity until they go so far away that the arc grows into a
line. Does the circle break or fold into a new dimension? Is a line just a
special kind of circle? These simple questions, which engage the real
and the virtual, are ones that geometers can ask. In this book, we’d
like to ask them as well, about how distinctions are made, how one
thing folds into another.
figure 1.4 Spider drawing: one thing folding into another

l i n e o f fl i g h t : m ov i n g f ro m t h e i n t ro d u c t i o n
t o t h e l a n g uag e c h a p t e r
To create flow in our work we have organised our chapters in ways
that we feel might allow experiences and key terms to meet and intra-
act so that our work together and apart is catalytic and complements
the movement of ideas and meaning. We decided to start with the
language chapter because it contextualises many of the issues, ques-
tions and considerations that are explored throughout the rest of the
book, laying down a foundation that can be folded and collapsed to
open up other ways for you as a reader, or us the writers, to extend
ideas across intra-transdisciplinary spaces of education and research.
In this chapter Kelleen and Diane provide a montage of current
approaches within their field of research – language education – and
demonstrate how aspects of new materialism have the potential to be
generative in this field, producing new ways of thinking and being,
including a reconceptualisation of language itself. They explore the
implications of conceptualising research as intra-active (Barad, 2007),
in which the researcher is inevitably entangled within the research
site, and question how they might engage in materialist fieldwork.
They discuss inherent tensions including how to portray forms of
matter, such as temporality, space and rhythm, as well as emotional
tone and ambient sound. This chapter also draws us into the world of
scholarly publications, and questions how research stories might be
told in academically acceptable ways within cultures in which posi-
tivist and post-positivist methods are often privileged. The world of
education is also evoked as they question how we as teacher-
educators might tell stories in ways that educate our students’ atten-
tion, rather than transmit ‘best practice’. Kelleen and Diane create
openings in their work pointing towards ways that different onto-
logical lenses might offer up potentialities and catalyse lines of flight
(Deleuze & Guattari, 1987/2005).
2 Materiality and Language
Learning in Classrooms
Rethinking Ethnographic Research
i n t ro d u c t i o n
Diane and Kelleen work in second and additional language education,
and the past two years with members of the G7 have provided us all
with an opportunity collectively to rethink language, language learn-
ing, fieldwork and reporting practices, to exploit the new materialism
or post-human theory that we find so exciting. Our reading and
research have persuaded us that a new materialist perspective on
second or additional language education research will require radical
rethinking of language learning not solely as an individual cognitive
accomplishment, and not only as a social practice, but also as ongoing
phenomena entangled with material elements in the world, including
human bodies, languages and a myriad of other environmental
‘things’. Language, for language educators, not only is the primary
means of talking about research findings but is central to what we
teach learners, and thus the new materialist claim that ‘language is
material’ requires particular scrutiny from us (MacLure, 2013a; de
Freitas & Sinclair, 2014; de Freitas & Curinga, 2015). We also agree
with MacLure (2013a), who contends that a materialist way of looking
at language and language learning will require reconsidering our
research practices, usually qualitative research practices (especially
participant observation) and research reporting practices.
In this chapter, we begin with a brief description of historical
and current approaches to the study of language education, and then
go on to examine how aspects of new materialism might be particu-
larly helpful in this field. We next consider how language itself is
reconceptualised through new materialist lenses. Revisiting our
reports from projects with children learning languages over the past
34
materiality and language learning in classrooms 35
few years, we describe how we are coming to new understandings of

what ‘fieldwork’ is and might be, and how inquiries and documenta-
tion of those inquiries from a post-human perspective will require us
to work in new ways.
d e v e l o p m e n t s i n l a n g uag e e d u c at i o n
research
Until about twenty years ago, the field of second or additional lan-
guage education research was dominated by a view of language learn-
ing, as Breen (2001) put it: as an ‘interface between learners’ mental
processes and the grammatical system of the target language’ (p. 173).
Much of that research focused on how cognitive and psychological
traits of learners might be revealed and what those might mean for the
acquisition of distinct language systems. The disciplines of psych-
ology, linguistics and later the hybrid, psycholinguistics, provided
the dominant theoretical approaches to language learning and teach-
ing, and as Long (1997) claimed: ‘social and affective factors . . . [were
seen as] important but relatively minor in impact . . . in both natural-
istic and classroom settings’ (p. 319).
However, beginning in the late 1970s and through the 1990s,
many language education researchers began to widen the disciplinary
scope of their work and thinking about how language learning takes
place in social contexts in which the particular positions of various
learners shape their learning. Sometimes characterised as the ‘social
or discursive turn’ in many fields in and beyond education, this
scholarship focused on how learners are connected and interdepend-
ent, located in relationships of power that are expressed in discourse
(Bourdieu, 1977; Foucault, 1977; Weedon, 1996) and in practices or
activities with other human beings. Bourdieu (1977), for example,
pointed out that the ‘right to speak’ is not distributed equally to all
and that social power is important in determining what opportunities
diverse learners have for language using and learning. He also noted
that individuals do not have unvarying rights to speech in the diver-
sity of fields in which they participate; in fields such as family, school,
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zusammengesetzt. Die Weltlichkeit der Mächtigen gebrauchte den
erwachenden bürgerlichen Freiheitssinn zu ihren Zwecken; und das
bürgerliche Genie diente noch der Autorität. Darum fehlt die höchste
Selbstverständlichkeit, die letzte Einheit; darum wurde dieser Stil
auch in der Folge so gründlich mißverstanden. Die Empfindung, die
das Barock geschaffen hatte, reichte nicht aus, um das
heraufkommende Zeitalter der bürgerlichen Selbständigkeit zu
regieren. Dazu bedurfte es noch einer anderen Eigenschaft: der
Bildung — einer alle einzelnen befreienden, revolutionierenden und
arbeitstüchtig machenden Bildung. Als sich diese Bildung dann aber
am Anfang des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts ausbreitete, erstickte sie
das künstlerische Temperament, ließ sie nicht Raum für naives
Formgefühl. Die Folge war, daß das Wissen um die griechische
Form aushelfen mußte, daß die lateinische Sprache auch in der
Kunst gewissermaßen zur europäischen Gelehrtensprache wurde.
Die Menschen brauchten Ruhe, um den ungeheuren Lehrstoff der
Zeit verarbeiten zu können. Darum konstruierten sie sich ein
beruhigendes Vollkommenheitsideal und folgten ihm als Nachahmer.
Doch davon ist im ersten Kapitel, wo die Lehre vom Ideal
untersucht wurde, schon die Rede gewesen.
* *
*
Die letzte Manifestation des gotischen Geistes fällt in die zweite
Hälfte des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts. Sie ist sehr merkwürdig und
psychologisch folgendermaßen zu erklären.
Die absichtsvoll geförderte moderne Bildung mit ihrer einseitigen
Geistesdisziplin hat das kritische Vermögen stark entwickelt, hat
zugleich aber auch die intuitiven Fähigkeiten verkümmern lassen.
Der empirisch vorgehende Verstand hat alle Erscheinungen des
Lebens zergliedert, hat sie wissenschaftlich erklärt und nur das
Beweisbare gelten lassen; die ganze Natur ist mechanisiert worden,
bis sie vor dem Geist der Bildungshungrigen dastand wie ein
berechenbares Produkt von Ursachen und Wirkungen, von „Kraft
und Stoff“. Es sind im neunzehnten Jahrhundert große Fortschritte in
der Erkenntnis dessen gemacht worden, was sich reflektiv
bewältigen läßt; erkauft sind diese Fortschritte aber durch eine
radikale Entgötterung. Welt und Leben sind ihres Geheimnisses
beraubt worden, sie hörten für die einseitig Intellektuellen auf, das
große Wunder zu sein. Die Folge davon war, daß mehr und mehr,
trotz des Stolzes auf die neuen Errungenschaften, die Stimmung
einer tiefen Verzweiflung um sich griff. In dem Maße, wie die Welt in
ihren kausalen Zusammenhängen scheinbar verständlicher wurde,
wuchs auch der Pessimismus. Die Mystik des Lebens schien
unwiederbringlich verloren, der Glaube war im Tiefsten erschüttert;
jedermann meinte hochmütig dem Schöpfer in die Werkstatt sehen
zu können; und der Mensch ist ja nun einmal so geartet, daß er nicht
länger verehrt, was er zu fassen imstande ist, weil er die eigene
Beschränktheit zu genau aus dem ständigen Verkehr mit sich selber
kennt. Während das Gehirn triumphierte, wurde die Seele elend.
Langsam spürten die Menschen, daß ihnen ein innerer Schatz
abhanden gekommen war, daß sie unvermerkt zu Fatalisten
geworden waren. Das Vertrauen auf sittliche Endziele des Lebens
ging verloren, und von den Gipfeln exakter wissenschaftlicher
Wahrheiten starrte der Bildungsmensch in das absolute Nichts.
Als dieser Zustand gefährlich zu werden drohte, hat der
menschliche Geist wieder einmal aus eigener Kraft ein Heilmittel, hat
er etwas wie ein geistiges Serum produziert. Es gelang ihm, wie es
ihm im Verlaufe der Geschichte schon unzählige Male gelungen ist,
die Schwäche in eine Kraft zu verwandeln, aus der lähmenden
Passivität der Seele eine neue Aktivität, aus dem Leiden eine neue
Willenskraft zu gewinnen. Als der Mensch verzweifelt in die von
seinem eigenen Verstand entgötterte Welt starrte, begab es sich,
daß sich in einer neuen Weise das große Erstaunen wieder
einstellte. Zuerst war es nur ein Erstaunen über die grausame
Phantastik der Situation, über die Kälte der Lebensatmosphäre,
dann aber wurde wahrgenommen, wie eben in dieser Gefühllosigkeit
des Lebens eine gewisse Größe liegt, daß im Zentrum dieser eisigen
Gleichgültigkeit eine Idee gefunden wird, von der aus die ganze Welt
neu begriffen werden kann. Das neue Wundern, das über den
Menschen kam, richtete sich nun nicht mehr auf das Einzelne der
Natur, denn dieses glaubte man ja ursächlich verstehen zu können,
sondern es richtete sich auf das Ganze, auf das kosmische Spiel der
Kräfte, auf das Dasein von Welt und Leben überhaupt. Mit diesem
sich erneuernden philosophischen Erstaunen aber tauchten zugleich
merkwürdige Urgefühle auf, Empfindungen von urweltlicher Färbung.
Ein neues Bangen und Grauen stellte sich ein, eine tragische
Ergriffenheit. Hinter der vom Verstand entgötterten Welt erschien
eine neue große Schicksalsgewalt, eine andere, namenlose Gottheit:
die Notwendigkeit. Und als diese erst gefühlt wurde, da stellte sich
auch gleich eine neue Romantik ein. Die Einbildungskraft trat nun
hinzu und begann die Erscheinungen mit den Farben wechselnder
Stimmung zu umkleiden. Alle zurückgehaltenen Empfindungen
brachen hervor und nahmen teil an der neuen, aus einer Entseelung
erwachsenen Beseelung der Welt. Auf dem höchsten Punkt hat sich
das analytische Denken von selbst überschlagen und hat der
Synthese Platz gemacht, das Verstehen ist einem neuen Erleben
gewichen.
Die Kunst aber ist recht eigentlich das Gebiet geworden, auf dem
dieses moderne Welterlebnis sich dargestellt hat. Wie neben der
einseitigen Bildungskultur, neben der Verehrung der Erfahrung als
Höchstes der Eklektizismus, die Nachahmungssucht, die
Unselbständigkeit und ein falscher Idealismus einhergegangen sind,
wie alle Künstler dieser Geistesart mehr oder weniger zur Sterilität
verdammt gewesen sind, so ist von dem neuen großen Erlebnis des
Gefühls, von dem produktiv machenden philosophischen Erstaunen
eine eigene optische Sehform abgeleitet worden. Diese Sehform,
aus der ein moderner Kunststil hervorgegangen ist und die in
wenigen Jahrzehnten in großen Teilen Europas zur Herrschaft
emporgestiegen ist, wird in der Malerei Impressionismus genannt.
Die Sehform entspricht genau einer Form des Geistes; dieses
moderne Geistige aber ist seiner seelischen Beschaffenheit nach
gotischer Art. Der Impressionismus ist die letzte Form des gotischen
Geistes, die bisher historisch erkennbar wird. Gotisch ist der
Impressionismus, weil auch er das Produkt eines erregten
Weltgefühls ist, weil ein Wille darin Form gewinnt, weil die Form aus
einem Kampf entspringt, weil er in die Erscheinungen die seelische
Unruhe des Menschen hineinträgt und weil er die künstlerische
Umschreibung eines leidenden Zustandes ist. Alles im
Impressionismus ist auf Ausdruck, auf Stimmung gestellt; die
Darstellung des Atmosphärischen ist nur ein Mittel, Einheitlichkeit
und Stimmung zu gewinnen; dieser Stil ist neuerungslustig,
revolutionär und hat von vornherein im heftigen Kampf mit leblos
gewordenen Traditionen gestanden. Auch im Impressionismus hat
die Kunst wieder protestiert und geistig vertiefend gewirkt. Sie hat
den Blick von der griechischen Normalschönheit der Klassizisten
heftig abgelenkt. Zudem handelt es sich um eine ganz bürgerliche
Kunst, um eine Offenbarung des Laiengenies. Diese neue Sehform
geht nicht dem Häßlichen aus dem Wege, sondern sie hat das sozial
Groteske geradezu aufgesucht; sie ist naturalistisch und romantisch
in einem, sie spürt im Unscheinbaren das Monumentale auf und im
Besonderen das Kosmische. Der einfache Entschluß zu neuer
Ursprünglichkeit hat eine moderne Formenwelt geschaffen, der
Wille, die Erscheinungen als Eindruck naiv wirken zu lassen, hat
einen Stil gezeitigt, in dem der Geist des Jahrhunderts sich
abspiegelt.
Auch in der Baukunst ist dem Klassizismus und
Renaissancismus des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts eine neue Gotik
gefolgt. Sie äußert sich in dem Interesse für groß begriffene und
symbolhaft gesteigerte Zweckbauten, die den Zug zum
Weltwirtschaftlichen, der unserer Zeit eigen ist, verkörpern; sie
äußert sich in einer neuen Neigung zum Kolossalen, Konstruktiven
und Naturalistischen, in der entschiedenen Betonung des Vertikalen
und der ungebrochenen nackten Formen. Gotisch ist das
Ingenieurhafte der neuen Baukunst. Und wo sich die Architekten um
rein darstellende Formen bemühen, um Ornamente und
motivierende Zierformen, da geraten sie wie von selbst in eine
heftige Bewegungslust, sie kultivieren die abstrakte Form und das
Ausdrucksornament. Die Linienempfindung weist unmittelbar oft
hinüber zum Mittelalter und zum Barock, ohne daß man aber von
Nachahmung oder nur von Wahltradition sprechen dürfte. Das am
meisten Revolutionäre ist immer auch das am meisten Gotische.
Und die profanen Zweckbauten nehmen, wo sie ins Monumentale
geraten, wie von selbst oft Formen an, daß man an
Fortifikationsbauten des Mittelalters denkt. Ein unruhiger Drang nach
Mächtigkeit, der die ganze Welt erfüllt, gewinnt in den
Speicherbauten, Geschäftshäusern und Wolkenkratzern, in den
Industriebauten, Bahnhöfen und Brücken Gestalt; in den rauhen
Zweckformen ist das Pathos des Leidens, ist gotischer Geist.
Überall freilich ist die neue gotische Form auch innig verbunden
mit der griechischen Form. Denn das Griechische kann, nachdem es
einmal in Europa heimisch geworden ist, nie wieder vergessen und
ganz aufgegeben werden; immer wird es irgendwie Anteil behalten
und gegenwärtig sein. Denn es enthält Lösungen, die sich dem
menschlichen Geiste um ihrer Allgemeingültigkeit willen aufs tiefste
eingeprägt haben. Es wird unmöglich sein, die griechische Form
jemals wieder ganz aus der europäischen Kunst zu entfernen. Jede
neue Manifestation des gotischen Geistes wird auf Mischstile
hinauslaufen. Entscheidend wird es für diese Mischstile aber sein,
wo der Nachdruck liegt, ob die Gesinnung mehr der griechischen
Ordnung oder dem gotischen Ausdruckswillen zuneigt. Daß auch die
ihrer Herkunft nach griechische Form im Sinne einer gotischen
Gesamtstimmung benutzt werden kann, hat dieser flüchtige Gang
durch die Geschichte bewiesen. Er beweist auch, daß der Geist der
Gotik unendlich verwandlungsfähig ist, daß er in immer neue
Formen zu schlüpfen vermag und doch stets er selbst bleibt, daß er
immer und überall bildend am Werk sein wird, wo der Willensimpuls
einer Zeit, eines Volkes oder eines schöpferischen Individuums sich
unmittelbar in Kunstformen verwandelt.
IV. Schlußwort
Ich begnüge mich mit diesen Anmerkungen über die

Stilbewegungen des gotischen Geistes und mache mit Bewußtsein
dort halt, wo die Kunst von den Lebenden nicht mehr historisch
gewertet werden kann. Ich vermeide es, von der neuesten Kunst zu
sprechen und von dem, was darin wieder auf eine Form des
gotischen Geistes hinzuweisen scheint; ich vermeide es, das Wort
„Gotik“ zum Schlagwort eines Programms zu machen und mit
Forderungen als ein Führer zu neuen Zielen des gotischen Geistes
hervorzutreten. Jedes hat seine Zeit und seinen Platz. Man kann als
ein heftig Wollender vor sein Volk hintreten, kann ihm neue Ziele
weisen, die man als segensreich erkannt hat, und kann die Besten
zur schöpferischen Unruhe, zu neuen Elementargefühlen
aufzuwiegeln suchen. Oder man kann, wie es in diesem Buch
versucht worden ist, rein der Erkenntnis folgen, kann versuchen, im
höchsten Sinn sachlich zu sein und naturgeschichtlich zu forschen,
wie die künstlerisch bildende Kraft des Menschen beschaffen ist.
Aber man kann nicht beides zugleich tun. Es versteht sich, daß der
heftig Wollende nicht seine Erkenntniskraft unterdrücken kann und
soll und daß der Erkennende nicht aufhören kann, einen
persönlichen Willen zu haben. Die Betonung muß aber dort auf dem
Willen, hier auf der Erkenntnis liegen, wenn nicht eine heillose
Verwirrung aller Begriffe die Folge sein soll.
Von dieser Verwirrung haben wir genug gesehen, haben wir
übergenug noch heute vor Augen. Die unendliche Unordnung des
Formgefühls, die bezeichnend für das neunzehnte Jahrhundert ist,
kann auf eine solche Vermengung des Willens und der Erkenntnis
zurückgeführt werden. Die Kunstwissenschaft, die berufen ist, der
Erkenntnis allein zu dienen, hat geglaubt, sie müsse führen, müsse
dem Künstler, dem Volke das Ideal zeigen und ein Gesetz des
künstlerischen Schaffens aufstellen. Und die Kunst anderseits, die
ganz ein Kind des Willens ist, hat sich aufs Gebiet wissenschaftlicher
Erkenntnis begeben und hat dort ihre beste Kraft: die Sicherheit der
instinktiven Entscheidung und die Unbefangenheit eingebüßt.
Es muß endlich wieder begriffen werden, daß alle
Kunstwissenschaft, ob sie die Kunst nun historisch, formenkritisch
oder psychologisch untersucht, nur konstatieren darf. Sie kann nur
empirisch hinter der Produktion einhergehen und aus einer gewissen
Distanz anschauen. Die Kunstwissenschaft darf keinen Willen, keine
programmatische Absicht haben: sie hat Naturgeschichte zu treiben
und alle persönlichen Sympathien und Antipathien dem Objekt
unterzuordnen. Es ist so, wie es in dem Gedenkblatt Wundts auf Karl
Lamprecht heißt: „Vorauszusagen, was die Zukunft bringen wird, ist
nicht Sache des Kunsthistorikers, und ebensowenig fühlt er sich
gedrungen, für etwas Partei zu ergreifen, was sie bringen könnte
oder sollte.“ Darum darf der Kunsthistoriker nicht diese Form
ablehnen und jene bevorzugen. Paßt irgendeine geschichtlich
gewordene Kunstform in eine Kunsttheorie nicht hinein, so ist damit
nichts gegen die Kunstform bewiesen, sondern nur etwas für die
Enge der Theorie. Auch Formen der Natur können ja nicht abgelehnt
werden; Kunstformen aber sind mittelbare Naturformen. Für die
Kunstwissenschaft besteht das Ideal darin, jenem imaginären Punkt
außerhalb des irdischen Getriebes nahe zu kommen, von dem
Archimedes träumte. Es darf für sie keine Rücksichten, keine
Grenzen geben, das Leben, die Kunst müssen ihr zu einem
ungeheuren Ganzen werden, und jedes Stück Kunstgeschichte muß
sein wie der Ausschnitt einer Universalgeschichte der Kunst. Auch
der patriotische Standpunkt hat keine Geltung. Das Wunder, wie alle
Rassen, Völker und Individuen an dem ewigen Leben der Kunstform
beteiligt sind, ist zu groß, als daß es nationalistisch eingeengt
werden dürfte. Muß aber so der nationale Standpunkt aufgegeben
werden, das heißt, darf der wissenschaftlich Erkennende an dem
triebartigen Willen seiner Nation nicht einmal teilnehmen, um wieviel
weniger darf er da seinem kleinen persönlichen Willen, dem Trieb
seiner Natur folgen und ihn in scheinbar sachliche Argumente
ummünzen!
Ganz anders aber als der Kunstgelehrte steht der Künstler da. Er
bedarf keiner Kraft so sehr als des Willens. Er kann Neues nur
schaffen, kann die lebendige Form nur hervorbringen, wenn er sich
einseitig für bestimmte Empfindungsmassen entscheidet, wenn er
eine Wahl trifft und rücksichtslos ablehnt, was seinen Trieb zu
hemmen imstande ist. Der Künstler darf sich nicht nur für ein
bestimmtes Formideal entscheiden, sondern er muß es tun, er darf
nicht objektiv werden, sondern muß lieben und hassen. Es ist sein
Recht, unter Umständen seine Pflicht, ganze Stilperioden
abzulehnen, ja zu verachten; nämlich dann, wenn seine
Schöpfungskraft dadurch gewinnt. Er darf geschichtlich gewordene
Formen der Kunst für seine Zwecke ändern, aus ihrem organischen
Verband reißen und umgestalten, sofern sein Verfahren nur zu etwas
wertvoll Neuem führt. Auch darf er alle Mittel anwenden, um seine
Zeit mitzureißen. Lebt der Wissenschaftler von der Vergangenheit,
so zielt der Künstler in die Zukunft, geht jener empirisch vor, so
verfährt dieser intuitiv. Um neue Formen, einen neuen Stil zu
schaffen, muß er spontan sein bis zur Gewaltsamkeit; er kann als
Handelnder nicht, wie der betrachtende Gelehrte, Gewissen haben.
Die Wahl wird ihm zur Pflicht in dem Augenblick, wo er sich für
bestimmte Formen entscheidet; aus der Fülle der Möglichkeiten muß
er die eine Möglichkeit greifen, die ihm selbst, die seinem Volke,
seiner Zeit gemäß ist.
Möchten sich dieses unsere Kunstgelehrten ebensowohl wie
unsere Künstler endlich gesagt sein lassen. Möchten jene ihre
Hände von der Kunst des Tages lassen, die sie mit ihren Theorien
nur verwirren, und diese auf den Ehrgeiz, wissenschaftliche Kenner
des Alten zu sein, endgültig verzichten. Und möchten die
Kunstfreunde sich klar werden, daß sie wohl beim Künstler wie beim
Gelehrten stehen können, ja sogar abwechselnd bei diesem oder
jenem, daß sie es aber nicht zur selben Zeit mit beiden halten
können, ohne weiterhin Verwirrung zu stiften. Was uns not tut, sind
reinliche Abgrenzungen. Diese Mahnung steht nicht ohne Grund am
Schluß dieses Buches. Sie soll, soweit es möglich ist, verhindern,
daß dieser kurze Beitrag zu einer Naturgeschichte der Kunst
programmatisch ausgenutzt wird, daß sich auf ihn die berufen, die
im Gegensatz zum griechischen nun ein gotisches Ideal verkünden
möchten, und daß auch diese Arbeit mit zur Ursache wird, das Wort
„Gotik“ zum Modewort von morgen zu machen. Diese Gefahr droht
seit einiger Zeit. Man spricht vom gotischen Menschen, von der
gotischen Form, ohne sich immer etwas Bestimmtes dabei
vorzustellen. So sehr ich selbst als wollender Deutscher, als triebhaft
empfindendes Individuum für die Zukunft mit jenen Kräften in
Deutschland, ja in Europa rechne, die vom Geiste der Gotik gespeist
werden, so sehr empfinde ich auch die Gefahr, die darin liegt, wenn
dem Worte „gotisch“ allgemeiner Kurswert zuteil wird. Das Wort
könnte dem Gedanken schaden, ja könnte ihn in falsche Bahnen
lenken. Wenn der Geist der Gotik sich in den kommenden
Jahrzehnten wieder eigentümlich manifestieren will, so ist es am
besten, das Wort „Gotik“ wird als Programmwort überhaupt nicht
genannt. Im stilgeschichtlichen Sinne wird das Neue um so
ungotischer aussehen, je gotischer es dem innersten Wesen nach
ist. Soll schon ein Programm verkündet werden, so kann es nur
dieses sein: Klarheit über das Vergangene gewinnen, mit eisernem
Willen, das eigene Lebensgefühl zu formen, in die Zukunft gehen
und, weder dort noch hier, sich vom Wort, vom Begriff tyrannisieren
lassen!
Druck der Spamerschen Buchdruckerei in Leipzig.

Fußnoten:
[1] Auch der alte Streit, wie im Drama die Zeit begriffen werden
soll, ist nicht zu lösen, wenn man die eine Art richtig und die
andere falsch nennt. Auch hier handelt es sich um dieselben
beiden Stilprinzipien. Denn es herrscht der große, naturgewollte
Dualismus der Form nicht nur in den bildenden Künsten, er ist
vielmehr auch in den Künsten der Zeit nachzuweisen. Und
naturgemäß hängen von dem Stilprinzip auch in der Dichtung und
in der Musik alle Einzelformen ab. Der Dramatiker, der im Sinne
des griechischen Menschen die Einheit des Raumes und der Zeit
als Grundsatz anerkennt, wird von diesem Prinzip aus sein
Drama im Ganzen und in allen Teilen aufbauen müssen; seine
Handlung wird durch den Zeitsinn ein besonderes Tempo, eine
bestimmte Gliederung, eine eigene Motivation erhalten, sie wird
ganz von selbst zur Konzentration, zur Typisierung und zur
Idealisierung neigen. Wogegen das Zeitgefühl, wie es zum
Beispiel in den Dramen Shakespeares so charakteristisch zum
Ausdruck kommt, die Handlung auflockern muß; es muß die
Handlung weniger dramatisch und mehr lyrisch und romantisch-
episch machen, dafür aber auch mehr theatralisch wirksam —
mehr sensationell in ihrer psychologischen Sprunghaftigkeit. Es
gibt ein Drama des gotischen, des barocken Geistes (seine
Entwicklungslinie ist von den alten christlichen Mysterienspielen
bis zur Shakespearebühne und weiter bis zur Romantik zu
verfolgen), und es gibt eines des griechischen Geistes, beide
Formen aber sind — unterschieden bis in die
Temperamentsfärbungen der Verse sogar — in ihrer Art
notwendig, beide können klassisch sein, weil es zwei Arten von
künstlerischem Zeitgefühl gibt. Es ließen sich überhaupt die
beiden Formenwelten in allen Künsten nachweisen — auch in der
Musik —; man könnte, von dem fundamentalen Gegensatz
ausgehend, eine Naturgeschichte der ganzen Kunst schreiben.
[2] Die Entwicklung drückt sich formal etwa so aus, wie Heinrich
Wölfflin es in seinem Buch „Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe“
dargelegt hat. Wölfflin hat, als vorsichtiger Historiker, der keinen
Schritt tut, bevor er den Boden untersucht hat, der seine Theorie
tragen soll, den Weg vom einzelnen Kunstwerk aus gewählt. Er
hat in seinem Buch die Formen und Formwandlungen des
sechzehnten und siebzehnten Jahrhunderts untersucht; dem
Leser überläßt er es, von den gewonnenen Erkenntnissen auf
das Ganze zu schließen. Seine Feststellungen lassen sich im
wesentlichen als allgemeingültig bezeichnen. Um die
Metamorphosen innerhalb eines Stils zu bezeichnen, hat er fünf
Begriffspaare gebildet, die sich folgendermaßen
gegenüberstehen: 1. das Lineare und das Malerische, 2. das
Flächenhafte und das Tiefenhafte, 3. die geschlossene und die
offene Form, 4. Vielheit und Einheit, 5. absolute Klarheit und
relative Klarheit. Mit diesen Gegensätzen läßt sich in der Tat
operieren. Doch könnte man vielleicht noch den viel zu wenig
bisher beachteten Gegensatz der warmen und der kalten Farben
hinzufügen. Wölfflin spricht nur von den formalen Wandlungen,
die sich vollziehen, wenn ein Stil aus seinem zweiten Stadium in
sein drittes eintritt. Nicht weniger bedeutungsvoll sind die
Wandlungen, die zwischen der ersten und zweiten Periode vor
sich gehen.
[3] Italien. Tagebuch einer Reise. Mit 118 ganzseitigen
Bildertafeln. 4. bis 6. Tausend (Leipzig 1916).
1. Höhlenmalerei, Bison. Altamira (Spanien)
2. Negerplastik, Tanzmaske. Aus Karl Einsteins
„Negerplastik“, Verlag der Weißen Bücher
3. Pyramide von Dashoor, um 3000 vor Chr.
4. Sphinx vor der Chefren-Pyramide, um 2800 vor Chr.
5. Die Memnonssäulen bei Theben in Ägypten, um 1500 vor Chr.
6. Säulensaal, Luxor, Ägypten, um 1400 vor Chr.
7. Löwenjagd, Relief, assyrisch. 7. Jahrhundert vor Chr.
8. König Assur-Bani-pal auf der Löwenjagd, Relief, assyrisch. 7.
Jahrhundert vor Chr. Aus „Der Schöne Mensch im Altertum“ von
Heinr. Bulle (G. Hirths Verlag)

Disrupting Boundaries in Education and Research Suzanne Smythe Full Chapter

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Disrupting Boundaries in Education

and Research Suzanne Smythe

In Disrupting Boundaries in Education, six educational researchers

suzanne smythe is Assistant Professor in Adult Literacy and Adult

cher hill is Assistant Professor of Professional Practice and an in-

margaret macdonald is Associate Professor in Early Childhood

diane dagenais is Professor in Language Education in the Faculty of

nathalie sinclair is the Canada Research Chair in Tangible Math-

kelleen toohey is Professor in the Faculty of Education at Simon

One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA

477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia

4843/24, 2nd Floor, Ansari Road, Daryaganj, Delhi – 110002, India

79 Anson Road, #06–04/06, Singapore 079906

Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.

It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of

© Suzanne Smythe, Cher Hill, Margaret MacDonald, Diane Dagenais,

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception

First published 2017

Printed in the United Kingdom by Clays, St Ives plc

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

ISBN 978-1-108-41566-8 Hardback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy

List of Figures page vi

1 Introduction: Theories of the Material 18

2 Materiality and Language Learning in Classrooms:

3 ‘Poo Theatre’: Young Children’s Dramatic

4 Education as Instauration: Extended Bodily Learning

5 Mathematics Learning as an Entanglement of Child,

6 ‘I See You’re a Little Confused’: Intra-action

Conclusion: Creating New Stories of Education and

P.1 Suzanne’s ‘messy map’, made during one of our

5.2 Calling out to Geoff 131

and technological aspects of our research and teaching contexts. Over

while deepening our critical perspectives and allowing an interroga-

other-material moments so as to honour the process and excitement

children of various ages, and our gendered rhythms as mothers and

figure p.2 G7 overnight retreat

research group from the other research colleagues we are associated

a rhizomatic fashion as they assemble with other multiplicities, cre-

Multiplicities are deﬁned by the outside: by the abstract line, the

Reading Deleuze was a struggle for some of us and we joked at times

Diane and Kelleen

technology, children, researchers and other adults better to be able to

Experiment and Constructive Mathematics (CECM) as a Master’s stu-

mathematics education researcher, I might also engage in an experi-

the ‘worlds’ differential becoming’? (Barad, 2003, p. 829). What would

(MacLure, 2013a, p. 659)

As a group, our introduction to new materialism was our reading of

we found resonances with different authors, such as anthropologist

understandings of social and natural phenomena through one another’

Deleuze and Guattari explain this contingency using the example of

figure 1.1 A visual of instauration (copyright Sam Uhlick, used with

implicated or instaurated in one another, or that together they form

figure 1.2 The two-slit experiment

developing Bohr’s ideas, Barad suggests that the experiment entails an

This example, albeit somewhat extraordinary, resonates strongly for us

In this way, method (measuring with an apparatus) gives rise to

figure 1.3 A visual of diffraction

distinction?) As well, we might ask, In what ways are education

those continuous and uninterrupted processes which subject our

We think Foucault is here arguing for what new materialist theories

bodies, seen as ﬂawed, marginal, Other, and beyond educational

figure 1.4 Spider drawing: one thing folding into another