Leveling up to honour ethical relationality: pedagogical documentation as methodological entanglement

ABSTRACT

Education today is not simple nor does it occur in isolation. Educators, now more than ever, are teaching within the global context of calls to action for truth and reconciliation with Indigenous communities around the world and a growing awareness of the damage caused by unsustainable human consumption of the environment. Drawing from an ongoing professional development project involving educators across four childcare centres, this article explores “leveling up” using Pedagogical Documentation and Barad (2007) diffractive thinking to explore new ways to help our human-centred and colonised minds understand Indigenous world views and see ourselves as part of the environment. The way we view PD must be considered critically, knowing that when we work to name, produce, catalyse and move learning forward we must also attend to how various matters have come to matter and how we (as observers and documenters) are part of this relational encounter. What we name as educative in the teaching and learning processes rests on our world view. This article addresses the question: How might leveling up and diffractive methodology inform our use of Pedagogical Documentation and take us beyond traditional human centred and bounded ways of seeing the world and curriculum?

KEYWORDS:

• Pedagogical documentation
• diffractive methodology
• relationality
• human centricity
• world view
• leveling up

Introduction

Pedagogical documentation (PD) as defined by Dahlberg, Moss, and Pence (1999), is both content and a guided learning process that includes discussion and interpretation of teaching and learning encounters. Using PD in dialogue or discussion “in process”, with children help to illuminate participants’ interests, skills, ideas, and theories (Edwards, Gandini, & Forman, 1998; Giudici, Rinaldi, & Krechevsky, 2001) and has also helped educators’ deepen their understanding and interpretation of their own teaching and interests as they co-construct next steps in curriculum or project planning (MacDonald & Hill, 2018). PD, as a teaching and reflective method, also takes into account students’ funds of knowledge (Gonzalez, Moll, & Amanti, 2005; Moje et al., 2004), unique dispositions, interests, creativity, humour, and so forth, as it helps to re-represent student and educator inquiry in meaningful ways. More recent reviews of Pedagogical Documentation have discussed it as an act of transformation in participatory professional development (de Sousa, 2022); noted the implementational challenges of PD (Yılmaz et al., 2021); recognised parent and teacher communication around PD (Chng, Waniganayake, & Andrews, 2022), and called out the misappropriation of Pedagogical Documentation when it is used as a tool to demonstrate curriculum compliance (Giamminuti, Merewether, & Blaise, 2022). With reference to PD, Lenz-Taguchi (2010) has suggested that we ask ourselves “what kind of knowledge we produce with the tools or ‘apparatuses’ we use in our learning activities with children and students” p. 63. Lenz Taguchi’s question animates the importance of seeing PD as a tool in inquiry and curriculum development and importantly reminds us of the need to consider the relationship that PD has to knowledge production as theory and practice become pedagogy.

As pointed out by Knauf (2022), historically, Pedagogical Documentation plays a central role in curriculum development in the programs originating in Reggio Emilia, Italy and/or programs throughout the world that have been inspired by their approach. The process of actively documenting children’s engagement during learning explorations and within ordinary moments (Fu, Stremmel, & Hill, 2002) helps educators to enact a pedagogy of listening that facilitates the negotiation of teaching and learning (Forman & Fyfe, 2012; Rinaldi, 2021). This approach is participatory in nature, seeing the child as actively participating in their learning environment and has been lauded as a socio-constructivist approach (Knauf, 2022; Edwards, Gandini, & Forman, 1998). The participatory nature of PD rests on an image of children as capable of engaging in discussion, debate and complex thinking around their interests, inquiry questions and observations. PD makes the processes of learning and/or ordinary moments visible and provides a progressive way to create engagement among all the actors involved in the teaching and learning process. However, in its original form, it remains selective and human- perhaps even child-centric.

To date, educators have not attended carefully to ourselves as producers of knowledge, that is, as documenters in this methodological entanglement. Further, in our project planning, we, that is, educators and/or researchers, have yet to engage diffractively to look differently at the ways in which PD creates agentic cuts in the material encounters it both identifies and produce as part of the curriculum planning process. In this paper, PD is understood as a pedagogical method in this methodological and agentic entanglement that can be examined reflectively and diffractively (Lenz-Taguchi, 2010) to address the practice-oriented question:

How might “leveling up” and diffractive methodology inform our use of Pedagogical Documentation and take us beyond traditional human centred and bounded ways of seeing the world and curriculum?

This question is asserted with the assumption that PD, as a pedagogical method employed by educators and researchers, includes the presence of representational elements (photos, narrations of learning) that constitute agentic cuts. PD entangled with the materials, educators, children, and parents across time in the interest of curricular development is both a trace and a process. Our selective gaze through PD must therefore be considered critically, knowing that when we work to name, produce, catalyse and move learning forward, what we attend to and how we name these actions and feelings – matters. Our selective gaze as observers and documenters is part of this kinetic encounter. In our turn towards reconciliation we must ask, how are we attending to our relationships with First peoples, the land, air and water? And how are these calls to action reflected in our documentation and pedagogical encounters? How are we honouring and attending to our relational connections and the need for respect, relevance, reciprocity and responsibility (Kirkness & Barnhardt, 1991) in both human and beyond human curricular encounters and how have we come to recognise that our work in early childhood education is positioned historically, currently and futuristically.

Reflection~diffraction~dialogue: as an encounter to honour ethical relationality

Barad uses the methodological device of diffraction in their thought experiments to avoid a mirroring of the same that typically comes when using reflection or even critical reflection and the traditional bounded ways we view ourselves as “researchers”, “teachers” and the children as “students” and the materials and concepts we work with as discrete and inanimate within a time frame.

In their discussion of diffraction, Barad (2007, 2014) draws on their background in quantum field physics and the work of physicist Niels Bohr to highlight the relationship between our being~becoming¹ and our ways of knowing. Here, they propose that the two are one, namely, that method and practice, knowledge and knowing are combined when we attend to the apparatus and observer together as part of the deep situational context that creates a “cutting together apart” of the very patterns that we set out to observe and understand. Once we see ourselves~children~materials~culture as a kinetic whole that produces understandings, then we can begin to understand how entangled and complex teaching~learning is and that the methods we use to teach are truly and deeply part of who we are and what we bring to the moment. Here, teaching~learning must be seen as an ethical encounter (Dahlberg, & Moss, 2005). As stated by Barad (2007),

Cuts are agentially enacted not by willful individuals but by the larger material arrangement of which “we” are a “part”. The cuts that we participate in enacting matter. Indeed, ethics cannot be about responding to the other as if the other is the radical outside to the self. Ethics is not a geometrical calculation; “others” are never very far from “us”; “they” and “we” are co-constituted and entangled through the very cuts “we” help to enact. Intra-actions cut “things” together and apart. Cuts are not enacted from the outside, nor are they ever enacted once and for all. (pp. 178–179)

As suggested by Olsson (2009), using diffraction, experimentally we can create new ways of seeing to disrupt and re-configure our safe and fixed ways of understanding how our practice and who we are as educators and researchers “becomes with” the encounter itself and contributes to a material production. By diffracting the traditional boundaries that separate educator, learner, theory, and practice, from the material, we as passive observers and documenters are combined with the pedagogical method we use and the children and material that are part of the encounter. This fluid and wholistic view changes classroom events and can help us question the boundaries between ourselves and our practices and moreover between human and non-human. It also helps us question the fixedness of the moments that we document and importantly how we come to understand agency and the separability between observed and observer. Traditionally educators and researchers have held on to the certainty and separateness of teaching practice from self and often been caught up in cycles of setting up lessons or provocations for learning and then positioning ourselves as observers to determine how children take up these invitations. Somehow, in doing so we have become very skilled at objective observation and a detachment as though we are not part of the picture. Barad (2007) proposes the term “intra-action” to oppose a bounded encounter that continues to maintain the status quo that we know when we examine “interactions” between teacher, child, material, concepts. As explained by Barad (2007),

The notion of intra-action (in contrast to the usual “intraction”, which presumes the prior existence of independent entities or relata) represents a profound conceptual shift. It is through specific agential intra-actions that the boundaries and properties of the phenomena become determinate and that particular concepts (that is, particular material articulations of the world) become meaningful. (p. 140)

In working through events using a diffractive method, we can explore the in-between, the rhizomatic and the alternative assemblages and use these to disrupt conventions and make space to see ourselves in the pictures as we engage with pedagogical documentation and inquiry. Rather than simply reflecting on the same practices or versions of the same practices that are conceptually bounded in interaction, i.e. the same bounded ways, educators and researchers can challenge themselves to see teaching in different post-human ways, and to challenge human exceptionalism and as Barad (2007) asserts, “while being accountable for the role we play in the differential constitution and differential positioning of the human among other creatures (both living and non-living)”. (p. 136). This may help us to explore the emergent qualities of becoming educators with and through other(s) and to take up the work of connecting in relational ways in both human and non-human encounters as we let ourselves see and feel fluid/temporary pedagogical intra-actions that are not already bound and configured but emerge through engagement and intra-actions.

Lenz-Taguchi (2010), inspired by Barad’s work, helps us to understand intra-active pedagogy. As she notes:

In an intra-active pedagogy the emphasis is on an interdependent and mutual “listening” and observing that expands the focus from merely dealing with the intra- and inter-personal relationships in and between children and adults and what is said and done, to be inclusive of the performative agency of the material in the intra-actions of learning events. (p. 65)

This is significant because it helps researchers and educators understand the ways in which we often over emphasise isolated human conduct void of context, (either human or non-human) and the ways that relational encounters with others, (human and/or material and/or the natural environment) take place fluidly within in our learning environments to become part of what is produced in learning. While this may not act immediately as a way to understand indigenous points of view that honour and value nature as part of a wholistic encounter, it can act as a way of disrupting our exclusively human centred or child centred ways of approaching pedagogical encounters and help us to break our habits of reifying and territorialising individuated human learning.

Pedagogical method

In this section of the article, I now turn to the pedagogical method that we have been experimenting with in our practice with Pedagogical Documentation.

On a weekly basis, approximately 5 educators from four centres, a lead curriculum pedagogue, and myself have been gathering virtually throughout the academic year to view traces of documentation (photographs and descriptive narrations) of the explorations of children in each centre. We also meet in person in a group of 12–15 educators once every month to discuss scholarly readings in relation to our curricular work. During these gatherings, we continue to have representation from each of four centres (an infant and toddler centre, two centres for children aged 3–5 years and a school age program) as well as the curriculum pedagogue and myself.

We do this to catalyse further thinking and feeling related to our pedagogical practices and our use of PD. Here, we move closer towards intra-active pedagogy and create a post-human disposition that de-centres the human. In our pedagogical method, it has been our practice to gather and discuss the pedagogical documentation offered by educators in dialogue with scholarly writings that inspire and deepen discussion. This pedagogical method has been taken up to catalyse further thinking and feeling related to the documentation itself and/or the projects PD represents.

In the following article, I illustrate our shifts towards diffraction and the more than human by featuring a pedagogical documentation that was developed by two Infant and Toddler educators, Naoko and Marta. Their documentation narrated the children’s explorations of moss on walks around a childcare centre located on a university campus, in an outdoor kitchen play space, and during indoor explorations. Prior to this evening meeting and because of the moss exploration, we all read the chapters Learning to See and The Web of Reciprocity from Indigenous botanist and scholar, Robin Wall Kimmerer (2003) in her book, A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses. During our meeting, we wanted to put in motion and dialogue the documentation of the children’s explorations of moss, with Robin’s scholarly indigenous writing about moss and considering ourselves as part of the encounter.

In both the virtual weekly and the monthly in-person meetings, it is not our intention to engage in dialogue to “fix” problems or to immediately make suggestions about next steps in project-based learning, although sometimes our comments drift into naming possibilities or ways to view the children’s curiosities and admittedly these comments sound like ways to proceed. Where possible, however, we try to model and initiate comments and perhaps more appropriately ask questions to provoke thought and animate possibilities. We typically begin by discussing the traces and the meanings that the images and actions hold for the educators. Lately, I have found myself commenting on my desire to hear the voice of the educator and surface the educators’ own engagement in a bigger way to demonstrate the relational entanglement among the educator(s), children, and materials. In doing this, we hope to “go beyond” an immediate human centred focus on the children’s interests to honour the educators’ connection to the encounter and the material agency within the encounter. To “go beyond” we imagine ourselves seeing from a “level up” so that we may include ourselves and the flow among agents (both human and non-human) and to better imagine how the agents intra-act within these moments. To open ourselves to other possibilities and interpretations we offer each other alternative agential cuts, by asking questions and trying to surface other ways of knowing in a diffractive attempt to reconfigure the boundaries of human and non-human subject and object. In doing this, we resist representing and naming (languaging) the same theories and teaching qualities that have been identified in the past and aske ourselves the defractive questions: What does this encounter produce? And how are these traces part of our becoming a relational community that includes non-human elements? This latter question is very significant given the strong ethos the childcare society has around social and environmental responsibility and within our province and nationally, our Calls to Action by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (2015) to “integrate Indigenous knowledge and teaching methods into classrooms” (p. 7). Our re-examination of our pedagogical encounters created small but significant openings and a beginning to work towards reconciliation and calls to reconnect to the land and place, when, for example, we ask: “What does it mean to be in relationship with the land?” (British Columbia Early Learning Framework, 2019, p. 78).

Our Childcare Centres are located on the traditional and unceded territories of the Sәl̓ilw̓ әtaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw (Squamish), k^w ik^w әƛ ̓ әm (Kwikwetlem), and x^w mәθk^w әy̓әm (Musqueam) nations.

It is important, for us to start off in a good way by situating ourselves in the context of community as we discuss inquiry and particularly how our inquiry informs our ways of living and being in the world. As another starting point, we acknowledge that methodologically we are moving away, and through Practitioner Inquiry by folding in New Materiality, and experimenting with new ways of making Practitioner Inquiry methodologically fluid and experimental through diffraction. This approach is not simply additive but also is NOT entirely dismissive of rationalistic ways of reflecting on, observing and researching the world and traditional Practitioner Inquiry practices (Shagoury Hubbard & Miller Power, 2003). In this, we acknowledge the value of a holistic approach to avoid reductionism and allow incorporation of critical reflection or reflexivity (an important cognitive perspective) with experimental diffraction as a method to deepen our emotive, sensory, and relational orientations. In doing so, we wish to move with and through our rational being into a “living with” and “sensing the world” to becoming human~non-human~researchers~educators~learners. The moss project came about because of the educators abilities to listen deeply to the children and view their explorations as an opportunity to explore, live with and sense the world. The use of critical reflection and reflexivity are essential to awaken our consciousness and situatedness (Kemmis & Smith, 2008), and to alert our minds to bias and presumptions about ourselves, and the child within the learning context. However, to go beyond critical reflection and reflexivity is essential so that we can attend to the ways that new connections and agentic cuts emerge and act in the spaces between our traditional bounded ways of knowing and doing during these encounters. In other words, critical reflection and reflexivity are part of our pedagogical method, but it is essential to go beyond these ways of knowing so that we might see differently and engage with other ways that the world might be if we diffract the boundaries of human, non-human, researchers, educators, learners.

Our ways of becoming educator: honouring ethical relationality

We are committed to entering this work respectfully in “ethical relationality”. Working ethically and relationally forces us to continually examine our positionality as researchers and practitioners. This is of itself an important disposition that involves humility in approaching our relationships with each other, as if for the first time. We attempt to do this without assumptions about what the encounter means by bracketing our assumptions so that we can look and feel beyond them. This includes our relations with all matter and beings (the earth, animals, plants, humankind, materials, and the more than human technologies, etc.). This work is not a simple linear process where we are able to attain completion or closure but a reaching from behind and ahead in all of the world’s complexity to both be and become better with others in each moment of each encounter. We are continually humbled by things we have yet to learn and resist the linearity of time to develop “the answer” to our inquiry questions. Instead, we see this work as part of Barad’s notion of spacetimematterings where time can be seen as part of what they describe as “iterative intra-actions” or “the dynamics through which temporality and spatiality are produced and iteratively reconfigured in the materialization of phenomena and the (re)making of material-discursive boundaries and their constitutive exclusions” (Barad, 2007). Engaging with these “spacetimematterings” (Barad, 2007) defies linearity and static representation and compels us to continually and restlessly question and wonder again and again as contexts and materials re-formulate themselves within different assemblages within and across our memories of the past and within and beyond present and past traces.

Reflection, and even critical reflection and reflexivity, involves the production of static representations of a reality that is assumed to be pre-existing and stable (Barad, 2007), reproducing “the Sacred Image of Same” (Haraway, 1997). This example considers lines of thought that bounce off bodies and entities that are bounded in traditional ways. We are apt to receive the same reflective patterns given our commitment to initially seeing properties bounded traditionally, that is, in the same way as always. For example, seeing the child as an independent entity, an educator who is separate from the encounter, the material as a body or object that exists somehow in a world again separate from our own, where we typically have power over it. In contrast, diffraction invites interference, illuminates differences, and reconfigures boundaries to produce something new (Barad, 2007).

Here, various bodies are not pre-exiting but continuously assembling and re-assembling to produce difference and becomings. By suspending or seeing beyond our traditional ways of viewing the encounter, diffraction can spread practice in unimaginable ways. This is not to say that diffractive practice should replace reflective practice, but rather that researchers can embrace both methods, by working in and beyond reflection in a “yes and” approach. In this way, we may see agency forming among elements in the encounter, not a bounded educator but an openness, an invitation from the educator, not the space of a courtyard or playground but the elements in the encounter, not simply the moss as a material to be handled and manipulated by children, but possibly moss as an invitation to create an agentic cut that re-connects us to nature and eco-possibilities that compels kindness and care and conversations about the place of moss in the forest and through time.

Using pedagogical documentation

We have been following the “Moss project” at the Infant and Toddler centre since it began in the Fall of 2022. The educators shared the children’s discovery of moss and the children’s curiosity about its texture and qualities. The children’s wonder and pursuit of moss drew the educators in and created a “moss” entanglement. Moss was featured in many ordinary moments, and the children’s explorations of moss were documented across time. During our weekly virtual meetings, these PDs were shared with other educators, the lead Curriculum Teacher, (Natsuko) and myself (Margaret). We all commented and asked questions and also began living with the moss, vicariously through the documentation and these conversations. Not all educators were able to join us for each of our weekly meetings so Natsuko and I asked the lead teachers at the Infant and Toddler centre if they would share their documentation during our in-person monthly meetings. To provoke further discussion and to set in motion a relational approach with the moss, we also asked the educators to read “Learning to See” and “The Web of Reciprocity: Indigenous Uses of Moss” from Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses, by Robin Wall Kimmerer (2003). Our intention was to put in dialogue the PD of the Moss project with the readings about moss and to record our conversation as part of our own inquiry into diffraction. Along with our main question:

How might “leveling up” and diffractive methodology inform our use of Pedagogical Documentation and take us beyond traditional human centred and bounded ways of seeing the world and curriculum?

our sub-question became:

How might diffractive thinking inform our understandings and interpretation of Pedagogical Documentation in dialogue with Indigenous scholar and author Robin Kimmerer, to take us beyond traditional human centred and bounded ways of seeing the world and curriculum?

I (Margaret) began our evening listening circle with a land acknowledgement to recognise our presence on the unceded and traditional territories of the Sәl̓ilw̓ әtaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), k^w ik^w әƛ ̓ әm (Kwikwetlem), and x^w mәθk^w әy̓әm (Musqueam) nations. I also reviewed some of the ways in which we have been discussing PD and inquiry by re-iterating the following propositions that we have been engaging with:

The teacher we are or the teacher we are becoming is related to how we come to know.

• This position connects Ontology~Epistemology.

• In an experimental action-oriented Inquiry approach we recognise that teachers themselves are researchers and that the children, method and materials are also part of this entanglement.

• If we engage in a diffractive view we shift away from questions like: What are the child’s interests? What is the child doing or saying? TO: What has this material encounter produced? (a more diffractive question that dissolves the boundaries between child, teacher, material).

In Diffractive thinking, we try to disrupt traditional boundaries between object and subject, past and present, here and there by breaking down traditional boundaries.

• In doing so, we begin to understand how our teaching and learning propositions can emerge from entanglements of people and things, theory and practice, reflection and diffraction, and include other ways of seeing the world that refresh and enliven us.

At our evening Listening Circle, the PD was shared through projected slides from a PowerPoint presentation. The lead teachers at the Infant and Toddler Centre, Naoko and Marta took turns highlighting key aspects of the documentation and shared their journey with the moss. We then invited other educators to comment.

Findings

As Natsuko and I planned our evening session, we wondered how the educators might take up Kimmerer’s stories and the pedagogical discussion of moss. In the readings, Kimmerer shares her journey to discover the indigenous names for moss and found there were many types of Indigenous names for moss in the Onondaga language. She also mentioned several Latin names for moss that she had studied and was familiar with as a botanist. We wondered how the educators would possibly take up the naming of moss and their own experiences and naming practices. From Kimmerer’s reference to the Latin names for moss we also began to wonder about naming practices in general, and the pitfalls of educators naming or teaching names of moss as an activity in and of itself that we did not really want to encourage (over other possibilities). Natsuko shared that in her meeting with the educators who were involved in the moss project, she discovered that they were cherishing the process of exploring moss as well as their personal learning journey of Truth and Reconciliation. The educators had started to see these two experiences coming together. Natsuko also introduced the educators to the book “The Great Blanket of Moss” written by Celestine Alek, a Coast Salish author (Aleck & Good, 2016). Subsequently, the educators at the Infant and Toddler centre read “The Great Blanket of Moss” to the children. Since that introduction of the book, the educators started to notice the children mentioning moss as blanket and their use of moss to cover rocks and pinecones during their explorations. Natsuko noted from Kimmerer’s writing that, ‘while Indigenous people saw moss as diapers, insulation in boots, or sanitary pads for women in their relationship with moss, the children [at the Infant and Toddler Centre] are touching, noticing, and experiencing moss [and] seem to recognise the absorbent and insulating quality of moss, which appears as a blanket in their play”. During our discussions in the evening listening circle, the educators also noticed how the children saw moss as a protagonist.

From Naoko and Marta’s PD of the moss exploration, the children notice “look moss has branches”!

This was fascinating to us, as we considered the photo and our own impressions of the moss and branch entanglement. Other educators recalled their own childhood experiences of moss and shared both the names they had for moss in their home languages and their own childhood explorations of moss. In these ways, moss began to reach through time and form, as well as world views. We recognised that the children brought our attention to the moss in different ways, and with and through the children’s eyes and the memories of the educators we were able to produce different views of the moss. In our entanglement with the children, moss, documentation and Kimmerer’s writings, we noted that the children were noticing moss in a way that the educators had not, the children saw moss in every outing and were connecting deeply with the moss. One educator noted that, when we remember our childhood, it is either a sight, a smell, a feeling – we do not always remember the names. For the children, the moss produced a feeling of warmth and protection as they used it to blanket other objects. In the classroom and the outdoor kitchen, the educators also observed the children engaging with moss playfully and symbolically as it represented food and a material that could be cooked with and shared.

To encourage the educators to engage with their memories of moss diffractively, I asked them to recall their feelings of moss. The discussion meandered broadly to include recollections of whether or not the educator had interacted with moss at all. Some educators recalled growing up in very urban environments where they had not played with moss. Others recalled a patch of moss, the texture and the shade that they associated with it. Another educator mentioned softness, and used several words: soft, cold, carpet, dry, black, green – it can be everything, a blanket.

The discussion also wandered from reflective answers about the presence and language of moss and what the moss represented to diffractive responses about what the moss produced as a feeling. For example, Natsuko’s answer involved a discussion about the expression “a rolling stone gathers no moss” and included different meanings cross culturally. Her interpretation of the meaning was that of the value of moss as representing wisdom; whereas, in a North American interpretation the expression “a rolling stone gathers no moss” more likely represents a reference to action and movement. In a diffractive way, the feelings that moss produced were those of warmth and blanketing akin to the story by Celestine Alek and Robin Kimmerer’s discussions of moss as a blanket and having different practical uses given it absorbent and insulating properties. In these ways moss produces care and protection.

Conclusion

In our attempt to enter a post-human view of practitioner inquiry using new materiality, we recognise that where we start in our sensitivities to each moment of each research encounter is already a complete part of the phenomenon of becoming an educator.

Using the perspective of the more-than-human, it forces us beyond traditional rational boundaries to see and see again in open and restless ways where theory and practice are experimental and our movement towards becoming educator is never fully complete (Olsson, 2009). At the same time, we also must see the human together with the tool and material and cultural intentions as entangled. This is done to honour ethical relationality, not only our human relationships but our respect and ethical ways of being and becoming with the more than human environment.

With this, we recognise that our proposed experimental encounter with a Post Human Practitioner Inquiry may still incorporate a type of analysis through reflection, critical reflection and/or reflexivity and diffraction that is cerebral, but is as we are fond of saying it is a “yes and” approach that challenges our research binaries and the idea of statements of truth that create finality and delineation of the same boundaries and categories. To engage further, we need to move forward past our certainty to a place of restlessness, wonder and complexity. While certainty may hold some satisfaction in creating closure around the inquiry question (a solid answer to a question, a decisiveness), certainty is also a dialogue killer. It creates an end to the journey rather than a beginning. It prevents our entry into continual problem posing and experimentation with practice and replaces it with a statement/end/truth/stance. Methodologically, we endeavour to make visible our post-human approach to Practitioner Inquiry, beginning with the assumptions and bounded practices that restrict us and the binaries that create regimes of truth that we document and narrate. We do this to develop a disposition to wonder with the children and our colleagues and not only to generate answers to the questions but to learn to love and engage with the questions themselves (Shagoury Hubbard & Miller Power, 2003), to begin to see Inquiry as generative and having catalytic and dialogic validity. Using this reflective and diffractive approach, we endeavour to both know and sense differently by including ourselves in our inquiry questions and the environmental “context” as an agential force that is also a relational protagonist.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Margaret MacDonald

Margaret MacDonald is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University. Dr MacDonald and her students have been working with educators at UCC since the centre opened in 2012. Her research interests include parental inquiry, philosophical inquiry with children, Pedagogical Documentation, and curriculum development in early childhood education.

Notes

1. Please note the use of the ~ is intended to help the reader imagine fluidity and proximity between the two connected words to dissolve real or imagined boundaries.