Reflecting and reflections today are being understood as a vital part of learning processes. Critically reflecting on one’s own experience not only is assumed to holding advantage in terms of consolidation and retention of knowledge; but it bears the potential for transformative and expansive learning through changing conceptualization and worldviews (for an overview cf. Rogers, 2001). Integrating reflections into pedagogical arrangements has been highlighted with respect to the development of competences, as becoming competent involves personal transformational processes and self-awareness (e.g., Mezirow, 1991). However, developing students’ reflexivity proves a challenging undertaking, since the entanglements of professional identities with personal trajectories can easily lead to frictions in the pedagogical process (Fladkjær & Otrel-Cass, 2017). To add insult to injury, teachers all too often pretend on being able to take a neutral stance when “facilitating” reflective activities and neglect their own entanglements and frictions.

In the present paper, we share a journey of understanding the intricate interplay between students’ reflections in a pedagogical activity, and our own entanglements with them, both as teachers facilitating these reflections, and as researchers struggling to interpret them. The context of this study was a project at a university built on the pedagogical foundations of Problem-based Learning (PBL). Despite of the well-elaborated benefits of PBL for learning and competence development, students struggle to reflect on their own professional identity, and to communicate their competences on the labor market. Under this focus, we explored new pedagogical approaches to reflections by engaging a group of 12 students in a series of reflective activities, and collected data while simultaneously revising our own pedagogy in a series of micro action-research cycles (Mills, 2014).

In this paper we will analyze, juxtapose and questions the processes we encountered under a reflective perspective to highlight what new understandings we gained. Being reflective as part of research has been described as a useful tool to disentangle complex material and personally embedded narratives (Fook, 2011; Hickson, 2016). However, reflections and reflexivity has also been critiqued lately as providing an all too cognitivist and therefore disembodied view on  the pedagogical process (Hill, 2018) and for not providing ample conceptualizations for the entanglements and materiality of learning (Bozalek & Zembylas, 2017). Some researchers argue therefore, that research perspectives need to move away from a self-affirming reflexivity towards an “uncomfortable reflexivity” (Pillow, 2003, p. 188).

Over the course of the project, we embraced the critique expressed towards reflexivity and reflections as part of our research methodology, as we felt that new perspectives were needed to deepen our understandings of the entanglements between our participants, ourselves and the technology involved in the process. Inspired by research in the field of primary teacher education (Moxnes & Osgood, 2019; Moxnes & Osgood, 2018) we embraced the concept of diffractions introduced by Donna Haraway (2018/1997) and Karen Barad (2014; 2007) to trouble rather than to streamline pedagogies through a research-based positioning. However, diffraction should not be seen as a counter-concept to reflection (Hill, 2018). Instead, by “cutting together appart” (Barad, 2014, p. 168) concepts, Bozalek and Zembylas (2017) argue for an acknowledgement that the “‘entanglement’ of reflexivity and diffraction is one that includes continuities and breaks rather than a ‘story’ of one vs. the other” (p. 9). In our analysis we are troubling this with yet another entanglement, the intra-actions between ourselves as teachers and researchers. By analyzing these two processes as simultaneous and entangled, we dive into an understanding of research on pedagogical processes that is by itself pedagogical.

We are basing our elaborations on empirical material collected during the project, in which students were engaged over three semesters in total. The body of material comprises the reflective prompts offered to the students and the documented materials of their activities (physical and digital artifacts such as drawings, animated photos, websites etc.), and the pedagogical reflections and choices on the side of the research team, documented in field notes, reflective audiotapes and email-communication; additionally, videotaped and transcribed material from three workshops, two of them with the participating students only, and one with the students and external participants, the stakeholders of their education (e.g., labor market representatives). Methodologically, we are following the example provided by Moxnes and Osgood (2018), who applied Haraway’s (197) and Barad’s (2007) ideas that “diffractive methodology is a critical practice for making differences” (Moxnes & Osgood 2018, p. 300) to understand reflective practice in early childhood education. Through what is called “diffractive reading” we are interpreting the material at hand with theory and sensitivity to the intra-action of time, space, matter and ourselves. Diffractive analysis, rooted in the notion of Haraway (2000), should be considered as “a metaphor and a strategy for making a difference in the world that breaks with self-reflection and its epistemological grounding” (Bozalek & Zembylas, 2017, p. 1). Following Bozalek and Zembylas (2017), our analysis is guided by understanding diffraction as “(..) a process of being attentive to how differences get made and what the effects of these differences are.” (p. 2). Concretely, the analysis is based on thick descriptions of situations that created frictions in the flow of the process of facilitating the students. We are exploring these by defining the core, boundaries and dynamics in and by itself; however, as a practice of “world-making” (Juelskjær & Schwennesen, 2012, p. 12) , we are also and simultaneously questioning our own choices as researchers and pedagogues to define these situations based on beliefs about reflection and reflexivity. Preliminary, the following situations have emerged from the material: (1) A situation in the first workshop in which an invitation to students to openly reflect on their own competences was understood as an instruction to follow; (2) Struggles with maintaining momentum with student reflecting over their competence development in an online-tool; (3) An uncomfortable situation in the workshop with labor marked representatives, who confronted a student about the relevance of their reflective activities.

Although our analysis is still on-going, we can preliminarily conclude that our diffractive reading of the pedagogical process of initiating and facilitating reflections allow for perspectives to emerge that were not visible to us before; specifically: - Understanding and critiquing the concept of reflections and reflectivity as a pedagogical approach for students’ competence development; - Disentangling (yet not dissolving) the situatedness of the pedagogical process and the research process. Permeating both points, our analysis substantiates the critique of reflective pedagogy based on Hill (2018), who argues that this practice is creating the impression of an objective and representational world, where recurring themes and patterns can be expected to be produced by the students. The diffractive perspective sharpens points out differences and varieties in the reflective processes of the students here; moreover, by focusing on our own intra-actions, our role as facilitator-educators in enforcing specific notions of how reflections needed to be done became obvious. As “(r)esearch practices are entangled with ethics, accountability and responsibility” (Juelskjær et al., 2020, p. 2) the diffractive perspective allows also for a reading of everything deviant or sub-standard in the pedagogical process beyond classifying categories, by focusing on how these are intra-action as constituting differences and to what effect. By this, this analysis encourages higher education teachers to become a “diffractive practitioner” (Hill, 2018); by examining ourselves in relation to (all) practice we were engaged in (i.e., both the pedagogical and the research perspective); by understanding our own role in the world’s becoming in the sense that “the teacher is not viewed as a per-existing, distinct entity, but rather materially constituted through intra-action among bodies, both human and non-human” (Hill, 2018, p. 9); and by engaging in diffractive practices that are generative rather than descriptive.

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