Year: 2019
Type: editorial
Abstract: This first issue of RERM in 2019 presents three articles that share various connections with each other.The first article "Storying Diffractive Pedagogy, Reconfiguring Groupwork in Early Childhood Teacher Education" is written by doctoral student (and now, Dr) Anna R Moxnes in collaboration with Professor Jayne Osgood.The authors investigate the affective flows and material intra-actions that unfold in micro-moments in Early Childhood Teacher Education (ECTE) within observations of student teachers' cooperative work.Their theoretical framework materialises Donna Haraway's SF philosophy (1997, 2004 and 2016) which brings practices of Speculative Fabulation, Science Fiction, Science Fact, So Far, String Figuring and Situated Feminisms together as a means to reconfigure the primacy of 'critical reflexivity' in ECTE.Inspired by Erin Manning, the authors attend to what else is produced during groupwork, through their excavations and speculative wonderings, they go on to argue that 'diffractive pedagogy' might open up possibilities for student-teachers to move beyond a narrow concern with critical reflection.Diffractive pedagogy is offered as a slippery, contingent, relational, emergent, speculative and ultimately less certain concept than critical reflection.Introducing diffractive pedagogy into debates about ECTE offers a generative rupture; an opportunity to extend conceptualisations and practices.The next article in this issue is "Thinking/writing within and outside the IRB box" written by LJ Slovin and Paulina Semenec.In their paper the authors offer ethical disruptions of data in qualitative research that were presented through mutual discussions about the authors' doctoral research projects.The article focuses on two tensions about applying to a university's Institutional Review Board (IRB).The first tension relates to the discomfort that is encountered from the inherently narrow assumptions within the IRB application about research participants.The discussion in the article addresses how it might be possible to work with/in but also outside of the constraints that characterise the IRB.The second tension moves into a more experimental space.The authors offer to write 'outside' of the IRB boxes as a form of critique, but also as a way to produce more affirmative ways of thinking about what else can be thought and done within university IRB structures.The article focuses in particular on the ways that "data" is contained within IRB boxes.The authors conclude by offering some additional questions that this process of thinking/writing in togetherness has generated.The third article is also written by two early career researchers about their experiences of doctoral research.James Burford and Catherine Mitchell authored: "Varied starting points and pathways.A duo-ethnographic exploration of 'diverse' students' uneven capacities to aspire to doctoral education".Within the paper, the authors grapple with the problems that the language of 'diversity' presents in multidirectional work.They highlight issues of social justice by arguing that the language of 'diversity' effectively works to obscure the varied experiences of those gathered underneath its umbrella (Ahmed, 2012).The article builds upon existing debates about widening participation in higher education, arguing that nuanced accounts of 'diversity' and doctoral aspiration are required.The authors present a duo-ethnographic text about two doctoral students' pathways to study.While both students may be positioned as 'diverse' within institutional equity policies -as a sexuality minority student, and a working-class woman of Māori and European heritage -they reveal dissimilar expectations of what university study was or could be.These histories of imagining what university might be shaped their trajectories into and through doctoral study.Drawing on Appadurai's (2004) work, they argue that aspiration can be a transformative force for 'diverse' doctoral students, even if the map that informs aspiration is unevenly distributed.The article makes two primary contributions.First, a call for more multifaceted understandings of
DOI: 10.7577/rerm.3411
Language: English
Subfield: Cultural Studies
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Quality education
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4256106959