Context and problematic

In an ‘Age of Uncertainty’ education is challenged to go above and beyond the usual way schools have functioned.  This presentation takes us to an exceptional primary school in a peri-urban location in Australia that is carefully paying attention to community knowledge and the experiences of those in the immediate locale who live precarious lives and who are from diverse cultures including Aboriginal. The first and third authors have been researching with the headteacher for over a decade and have witnessed the ways teachers have been finding ways to attend to all kinds of matter, including mud.  We focus on an event which we have called ‘Encounters with Mud: Purity and Danger’ in which two parents interact with their baby as part of a Curious Play Activity designed to bring communities members into the school grounds.  The Curious Play Activity took place in an Indigenous garden, named the Buggeiri area of the school. This is a quiet place with water holes, native trees, animals, sand, a beehive and wooden seats arranged in a circle. We use the event to explore carnal knowledge, vibrant matter, creative immersion, and cultural resistance with a nod towards Mary Douglas’s (1966/2002) seminal work.

We employ a diffractive methodology (Barad, 2007), which starts in the midst of things with a rich description of an event in the Buggeiri indigenous garden witnessed by the headteacher and the third author. The first diffraction is based on the headteacher’s notes written after the ‘Encounters with Mud’ event as he reflects and worries about the seemingly unequal attention given by the mother and father to their baby as she immerses herself in messy play with fake mud. The second diffraction opens up further musing about the role of fathers living precarious lives based on the third author’s and a co-researcher’s conversations with fathers attending the Curious Play activity. The child-mother, child-father interactions are next diffracted through Daniel’s Stern’s (2010) concept ‘Forms of Vitality’ and Jane Bennett’s (2010) ‘Vibrant Matters’ to speculate about the affective charge of matters such as mud, bodies and the aesthetics of play areas which include mess. This diffraction involves our collective academic reading and conversations among the three authors, which opens up issues of freedom and constraint alongside social class, poverty, gender and race. The fourth and final diffraction involves the first and third authors rifting off Mary Douglas’s text ‘Purity and Danger’ to think about social norms (Hegarty, 2007) the force of actions once framed within institutional contexts such as schools, and the potential for artful resistance by whom and where. The diffractions have been created with a commitment to an ethico-onto-epistemological (Barad, 2007) approach to research which recognises that stories are interventions that become actants in their own right and have the capacity to move others for good or ill. We tell diffractive stories in order to spread hope among the teaching profession in Europe and beyond strangled by neoliberal, capitalist and colonial policy contexts.

Significance and implications for education Along with other scholars working in the area of post-human, new material feminist studies our longitudinal research in this exceptional primary school is attempting to shift how research is undertaken and understood as we face an uncertain future where conventional research methods are inadequate. We start by standing in the midst of activates and stay long enough and with an open, attentive and non-judgemental presence. By working alongside teachers we describe events in order to surface that which is hidden and silenced by dominant education policy agendas emanating from global actors based in Europe (OECD, UNESCO, World Bank) and dominant social norms to hint at the forces of resistance that accompany any people or place where oppression is felt, and experienced through lack of jobs, resources or voice. Over a considerable period of time, the teachers in this exceptional school have been paying attention to these forces as deep seams of knowing by viewing children’s actions as nexus of forces that are generative and at times dangerous. By paying attention to the affective forces that bubble from the ‘trouble’ (Haraway 2016) and by working collectively we tilt the gaze and see/feel the strength that lies beside oppression to think differently about education. Our contribution is primarily methodological as it involves diffractive story telling, theoretical in that we draw on various scholars in our diffractions and obliquely related to the global education reform movement and standardising practices across OECD countries.

Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant Matter: a political ecology of things. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Douglas, M. (1966/2002) Purity and Danger: An analysis of concepts of pollution and taboo. London and New York: Routledge Classics. Hegarty P. (2007) Getting dirty - Psychology's history of power. History of Psychology, 10, pp 75-91. Harroway, D. J. (2016): Staying with the Trouble. Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Pres. Stern, D. N. (2010) Forms of Vitality: Exploring Dynamic Experience in Psychology, the Arts. Psychotherapy, and Development. Oxford: Oxford University Press.