Storying Diffractive Pedagogy: Reconfiguring Groupwork in Early Childhood Teacher Education

Abstract

This paper aims to investigate the affective flows and material intra-actions that unfold in micro-moments in Early Childhood Teacher Education (ECTE)withinobservations of student teachers’ cooperative work. Putting to workHaraway’s SF philosophy (1997, 2004 and 2016)we work towards reconfiguringthe primacy of critical reflection, and the cultivation ofreflexive practitioners by troubling pedagogical practices such as groupwork that claim to generatecritical reflexivity. We ask what else gets produced during groupwork and argue that diffractive pedagogymight open up possibilities for student-teachers to move beyond anarrow concern with critical reflection.By playingwith rhythm and plasticitywestretch established ideas aboutECTEand offer diffractive pedagogy as a slippery, contingent, relational, emergent, speculativeand 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.