Notes on: Lanas, M., Rautio, P., Koskea, A., Kinnunen, SViljamaa, E and Juutinen J. (2017) Engagingwith theoretical diffraction in teacher education. Discourse: studies in the cultural politics of education. 38(4), 530--41 DOI: 10.1080/01596306.2015.1126917

Dave Harris

[This looks quite interesting because these are people who have tried to teach theoretical reflection to trainee students, and then looked to what they actually did. However, the usual findings of partial understandings and incoherent clusters of constructs selected pragmatically is now to be understood as 'theoretical diffraction' and there are implications for conventional forms of education which required discipline and the notion of answers. As a result,
I really don't know quite what to make of this. At first I read it as implying that we could see the common sense that seems to afflict practising teachers as diffracted, and therefore back off from any critical enquiry into it. Now I've read it again, it might be simply that seeing common sense as having diffractions that include past theories together with an amalgam of ideals and professional ideologies, might be just a way of getting us to investigate it more carefully instead of just seeing it as some irrational resistance. Even so, doesn't the term 'diffraction' imply some equality with explicit theorising?]

Resistance to theoretical reflection is well known, and often the students get the blame rather than pedagogical practice. Instead we should think about why some students 'don't want to hear what we have to say' (530). Student resistance protects us from thinking out our own work. Luckily, we found that 'our research problem ended up partly undoing itself' — 'there is theoretical diffraction' instead.

They start with Haraway on diffraction as an optical metaphor to record '"interaction, interference, reinforcement, difference"'. Barad says that reflexivity reproduces the geometries of sameness instead of being attuned to differences, especially those that we make when we attempt to produce knowledge. In education, diffraction tends to be confined to critical reflection on theories. There, reflection and reflexivity might 'document categories of difference' (531) but diffraction makes a difference and makes it matter. It enacts flows of differences according to Taguchi and Palmer. The point is to identify 'intra-activities that emerge in the intersection of data, theory, methodology and researcher'. We can apply this to the problems of engaging with theory in teacher education.

We examined theoretical reflection and also the need for '"transitional space"' where different ways of understanding and imagining can be cultivated, new excluded ways made visible. Initially they were puzzled about even how to go about this examination of how people might think in what looks like an impossible way.

They describe the way in which they teach theory to students — six of them to 140 punters. They want to avoid the problems raised by 'voice'as in St Pierre [which turns on the difficulties of arbitrating between different voices as I recall. Lather has a good discussion too -- eg narrative and representation of the other seems to be based on things like empathy and mutual knowing, but risk 'imperial sameness'(1).] and they want to not see students as autonomous subjects. So they formed 'a plural teacher educator–subject' for the six of them and a 'plural teacher-student subject' for the 200 students [weird — they coded and listed  individual responses?].

Everyone says we should do theoretical reflection in education, even to liberate students by helping them decide between contradicting discourses and thus not be subjectivated by one of them. This is seen as especially important after years of passive schooling. Students are still in that habit and 'have been subjectivated by it' (532). Their toolbox has already been filled. Reflection on the contents is required to avoid 'normalising discourses'. Teacher education, after all, can reproduce social life — '"theory produces people"' [another St Pierre]. Educators need to realise how they categorise children, gender, race, success and failure, and that contents of learning are not innocent but constitute the world and power production in it.

Theory can be taught as a catechism again a way of preventing thought [very common these days my view but with progressive 'theory' ]. It can provoke questions and open minds. Much will depend on what we think teachers will do with theory. They should think about their own practice, 'implicate their own teaching with theory', re-examining earlier personal ones if necessary. In particular they need to '"understand the processes through which students are made subject"' so they can resist '"particular forms of subjectivity"' [citing Davies and Banks]. However, students can 'present reflection' rather than engage in it [citing Atkinson here: [Atkinson, B (2012) Strategic compliance, silence, 'faking it' and confesssion in teacher education. Journal of Curriculum Theorising 28(1) 74--87
].

Teacher education should do '"epistemological gatekeeping"' [citing Kinsella and Whiteford]. This will involve rules of exclusion, boundaries, closures on what counts as legitimate and valid knowledge. However, often these are 'largely implicit, taken for granted and unacknowledged' (533). Disciplining the community is required, and the 'existing community of experts'also apply standards. What is needed is 'epistemic reflexivity' including who makes choices in the profession and how that affects theories. Reflection should be more than pragmatic and instead investigate knowledge claims, how they are accepted and constructed and in what social conditions. This may appear strange to the profession, even dangerous or absurd.

They describe their own approach, intending to use theory to provoke questions, enable different lives, think with and in practice and fully reflect 'contradictions and tensions between discourses in order to transform those structural aspects that hinder the accomplishment of educational goals' (533) [by doing a sociology of knowledge?]. They cite Segall to list three challenges — (a) 'reading without writing' where practitioners implement theories generated by others; (b) 'ignorance' where people refuse to acknowledge their own implications in information and dismiss the theory as not working before it has had a chance 'to break the learner' [Britzman is cited here as well], because understandings of teaching and children are at risk. Successful students in particular see critical reflection on teaching and learning as irrelevant and want to use their time to gain confidence rather than undermine that confidence; (c) 'reflection as an individual rather than a collective process', where the teacher sees herself as an autonomous and rational individual, and individuals supply answers unrelated to the work of others. In particular this diminishes social conditions of schooling and broader political social and economic discourses. [No connection with assessment and instrumentalism?].

They wanted students to generate theory not just consume it, to interrogate knowledge claims and to recognise the social dimensions of knowledge generation. They should be re-examining the theories that they already hold and acknowledging their impact on categories used. They found 'post structural theories of childhood' particularly relevant, through Britzman — development is not 'a correction for childhood', although that has been a dominant idea in the students' own education. They ran through the course twice — lectures, an assignment, and final workshop sessions. They kept notes of their own observations and experiences and met once a week to discuss them. The constant worry was that students had not learned '"correctly"' and did not reflect adequately.

They changed their assignment, hoping it would prevent students just presenting reflection or seeking the right answer. The task was to ask students to reflect on arguments based on the theories they had encountered, prompted by a statement '"the up-bringer makes the child"'. They were told the title from the first lecture. They could work in pairs. Mostly their essays discuss the theories mentioned in the lectures connected to their personal histories and experience and 'justifying the students' own ideas of school' (535). [I would love to know how they were actually assessed, whether they were graded. Essays discussing the theories that have been mentioned are not exactly the same as trying to work out the impact of those theories. If their own ideas of school were justified, was that defensively? Is that a success for theory or not?]. Then they had a month of workshops where students had to write learning journals and compile mini research designs: 'in one group the students carried a non-boiled egg with them for a week in order to try and interrupt their thinking and "default settings" in their everyday practices' [this is an exercise based on trying to make vulnerable teenagers aware of the responsibilities of having a kid, as I recall]. Another group re-read their own undergrad theses 'in order to analyse the construction of a child in their own work'.

What happened? It's not just an on-off matter. They compared assignment responses to 'spontaneous responses' of the kind they met in the workshops [they obviously suspected that the first ones involved students presenting learning in a conformist way]. They asked what had prevented learning with the essays and what the challenging responses in the workshops are actually asking.

They use this strange device of the plural subject instead of one student, although they deny this helps them make generalisations, especially stereotypes. They wanted the strange plural student subject to be 'as ambivalent and plural as any other subject: the outlines are temporary cuts', [concealing?] multiple voices and frameworks. It represents 'one affective complexity' but there is no single us. It is a version of what teacher educators construct when they think about addressing numbers of students and trying to anticipate their responses. [good point -- fictional subjects for Bourdieu].It helped them refer to the living body of the students. [Did they have thse fictions already and use them to select statements? Modify them after reading statements?]

They coded the essays, highlighting particular responses and filing them, thus producing 'one single response of one student–subject, as it were' (536). It is not the view of any particular individual student. There are internal conflicts and repetitions, just as in the actual essays. They placed all the repetitions together and saw how they differed from conflicting arguments [this seems to have helped them reduce the responses a bit]. Overall, they reacted to something that looked like 'a text produced by a subject engaged in a discussion, the content and participants of which we do not know'. Generally, essays also revealed a debate about what education or upbringing is — this was emergent, an occasion when students engaged us. [Subsequent coding?] revealed four 'different takes on education', most popular one first:

(1) 'education is adult influence over the child', although this is not entirely trouble-free and can produce ethical dilemmas
(2) 'education is responding to needs', which the educator knows
(3) 'education is a relationship between humans' with the personalities of both being important, and adults responsibility taking the form of obligation.
(4) 'education, environment and childhood are phenomena that produce each other', with the whole environment influencing education and producing 'children of certain kind [sic]'.

Then they wrote down the responses, 'fleeting comments, the spontaneous reactions, the silences, and the initiations' during the workshop discussions. Not all responses made sense. Some were frustrating or challenging and they were tempted to refer to them as 'student failure to present learning' (537). They discussed them collectively. They were sometimes too frustrated to engage with students or see what they were engaging with themselves — 'on/off thinking'. They made a deliberate effort to discuss what the responses were saying, not what was lacking in the challenging responses but what was present — the other discussions which challenged this one. They identified three possible '"clusters"' of topics in this student record:

(1) 'disciplining emotions and focusing on control and answers', the emotions of teachers as someone in charge. They were not sure if it was okay to feel insecurity or uncertainty. Some of the responses indicated polarised thinking where the teacher has all of the control or none of it. Empowering students was seen as depriving teachers of control. This was good for the children, though,  for example in providing a safe environment, and was generally doing the best for children.

(2) 'personalising school into the teacher and personally defending it'. This focused on the broader 'societal ethos of Finnish school as a saving grace'. This was personalised in the excellence of particular teachers. They had grasped the idea of the reflective practitioner developing their own responses, but had also been able to 'look away from the discourses within which they develop their teacher selves'. This led to them taking critique of those discourses personally as well, often polarising the question [the example involves interpreting a question about how students can be heard as a statement that students cannot be heard]. Questions about practice was seen as questions about teachers and their suitability, and in one case this led to a simple statement of belief in the teacher [the question was whether assessment is linked to power].

(3) 'prioritising practice over theory and seeing both as dogma' (538). This emerged in 'broader instrumentalist and school centred educational discourse' reducing the relevance of theories to immediate applications in schools, rather than something enabling, a skill. Theory was deemed irrelevant or inapplicable relying on a series of 'real and imagined factors'. Nothing that did not relate immediately was seen as relevant. On the occasions where theory was discussed more broadly, 'the discussion was multiple and theoretically rigourous' but as soon as it was located in schools it became 'repetitive of old norms, prioritise the school context over theory, and deemed theory is unfitting or irrelevant'. They already knew about practice and did not recognise anything left outside. In particular they 'tended to take a stand against questions without answers' saying that teacher education was meant to provide answers. Theory was similarly seen as dogma — for example one student apologised for falling short of theoretical expectations in her essay, [which might mean not explicitly siting or quoting them]. Despite the fact that there were lots of theories referenced implicitly
[All good stuff so far, but then…] Theoretical reflection is not a simple on-off question. Student teachers do do theoretical discussions although this is patterned by existing discourses. We can grasp it as diffraction, because there is no simple mirroring and sameness [between explicit theory and working ideologies]: a range of theories pass through obstructions and become spread unevenly. We can now make sense of these topics 'as interference patterns created by waves interfering with each other'. Theory becomes diffracted as it passes through these various topic clusters. The original intention to get students to reflect and generate theory, and critically interrogate it can now be seen just as 'one more cluster in which the theories twirl' (539). This is just like what Davies says about a diffractive approach which apparently opens a space of encounter, some '"immanent subjective truth"', which becomes true in the encounter; something experimental, something that does not fix analytic or educative processes into a methodical set of steps, but rather '"seeing how something different comes to matter"' [but the students' responses are of course conservative, closed, designed to stave off experiment, not a bit interested in truths, emergent or otherwise, certainly not a methodical set of steps, to be sure, but rather managing and denying anything that might come to matter from theory]

So we can now see the entangled structure of [students] ontology, just as diffraction suggests. [We can now reassure ourselves…] Students are not disinterested in theory. We have just not recognised the diffractive nature of their theory. We have been dogmatic in suggesting a particular notion of theoretical reflection where students are told to reflect on something. This naïvely assumes that we can undo or discharge previous discursive practices, instead of seeing them as clusters which pattern diffraction. [So can we do anything as educators?]

Student teachers have to make sense of discourses in the same terms as the existing community of experts, 'in order to be understandable', [real apology here] and, especially in preservice teacher education, this community is not academics but practising teachers in the field. Even so, the 'practising teacher' is a construct, 'a faceless construction' composed of all previous experiences, media images, input from peers and their own processes of subjectivation. In Finland, teachers do enjoy professional autonomy and respect [which props up this conventional view --and makes theorists timid?]. Nevertheless 'it is the students' idea of a practising teacher' which is generalised to this apparent community of experts, and there are 'epistemic practices' including maintaining 'epistemological borders' to defend this idea.

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