Recent curriculum reform in Norway (LK20) emphasizes creativity, exploration, and interdisciplinarity as core educational values (Utdanningsdirektoratet, 2020). The curriculum also embraces complexity and openness within and across subjects. In drama education, these ambitions call for pedagogical approaches that move beyond representational models of teaching and learning, where knowledge and learning outcomes are fully predefined. This paper examines how drama education in upper-secondary schools can be approached as a performative and diffractive educational practice, responding to these curricular invitations by re-imagining what teaching, learning, and researching within drama education can be(come). By engaging diffractive patterns as an educational potential, the paper asks: How can following diffractive patterns in drama education create learning processes that foster curiosity, creativity, and interdisciplinarity in Norwegian upper-secondary schools? This question also invites for further inquiry on drama education on a European and international level, created from the stance within drama education in Norwegian upper-secondary schools.

Positioned within performative research (Østern et al., 2021; Østern et al., 2024) and a/r/tography (Irwin, 2004; Irwin & Springgay, 2008), the study challenges conventional distinctions between pedagogy, research, and artistic practice. The paper further explores how a performative orientation disrupts traditional reform pedagogy, drawing on Dewey’s (1916) pragmatist thinking while critically engaging established frameworks in drama education (Heggstad & Heggstad, 2022; Kirk & Krøgholt, 2018; Sæbø, 2016). This opens a space for re-thinking drama education as a relational, aesthetic, and artistic event rather than a representational pedagogical practice.

Engaging diffractive theory by following “differences that make a difference,” the paper attends to how differences and entanglements are constantly produced and reconfigured through intra-actions, highlighting new possibilities for knowing and being (Barad, 2007; Juelskjær, 2019). Teaching, learning, and research are understood as entangled practices in which knowledge is not represented but created through intra-action among bodies, materials, space, time, text, and curriculum (Østern et al., 2021; Szatek, 2023). Intra-action emphasizes that entities do not preexist their relations but emerge through ongoing mutual constitution (Barad, 2007). Rather than treating these elements as stable categories, the study approaches them as fluid and entangled, raising questions such as: What can time become when learning unfolds non-linearly? What can bodies do when knowledge emerges through affective and relational engagement? What can text become when it operates as material, action, and event rather than representation? And what can an audience become when actor and spectator are not separate roles but entangled practices within unfolding educational situations?

Through a series of performative learning processes, the study examines how diffractive patterns can open educational spaces that invite exploration, creativity, interdisciplinarity, uncertainty, and curiosity. These spaces allow curriculum aims, students, teachers, and the more-than-human to co-create learning, rather than positioning learning as the execution of predefined objectives. Approached in this way, diffractive patterns in drama education invite an ethical responsibility, where knowledge emerges in relation to what unfolds in the moment.

By engaging drama education as performative research, the study positions the artist/researcher/teacher not as an external observer but as a participant and co-creator. This de-centered position challenges dominant notions of control, predictability, and efficiency in educational research and practice, offering instead a pedagogical orientation that concerns risk-taking and relational matters (Østern et al., 2021).

Methodologically, the project is informed by performative inquiry (Leavy, 2017; Østern et al., 2021) and a/r/tography (Irwin, 2004; Irwin & Springgay, 2008), where knowing emerges through entangled artistic, pedagogical, and analytical practices. Rather than separating data generation, analysis, and interpretation into distinct phases, the research process unfolded performatively (Barad, 2003), allowing teaching events to be revisited, re-worked, and diffractively read through theory (Barad, 2014). Diffractive analysis was employed not as a technique of comparison, but as a way of reading insights through one another, attending to how theory, practice, bodies, materials, and institutional conditions intra-act in the production of knowledge. Research material was created through a series of performative teaching processes conducted in collaboration with students at two upper-secondary schools. The researcher occupied the position of artist/researcher/teacher, engaging directly in the design, facilitation, and unfolding of the teaching practices. Not as an observer, but as a participant within the activities. The material includes reflective and poetic writings and drawings produced by both students and the artist/researcher/teacher, video and sound recordings from the teaching processes, as well as embodied memories from participation in the events. These materials were not treated as representations of practice, but as active agents within the ongoing research process and were engaged performatively (Østern et al., 2021). Analytical attention was directed toward moments where time, body, space, text, and audience/participant were reconfigured through teaching practice, opening alternative pedagogical possibilities. Ethical considerations were approached through an ethico-onto-epistemological lens (Barad, 2007), attending to how responsibility is continuously distributed across students, teachers, materials, and situations. Within this diffractive and performative orientation, the teacher’s role is de-centered through the positioning of the artist/researcher/teacher, while students participate as co-creators of knowledge and meaning. This requires continuous attentiveness to accountability, care, curiosity, and risk-taking within each classroom context, highlighting ethics as a dynamic and entangled practice.

This paper sketches how following diffractive patterns within drama education can function as an educational potential in upper-secondary schools, aligning with curriculum reforms that emphasize creativity, exploration, and interdisciplinary learning. By approaching the core elements of theatre and drama; time, body, space, text, and audience/participant as performative and entangled dimensions rather than fixed pedagogical components, drama education emerges as a site where learning is created through ongoing intra-action. Across the teaching processes, time, body, space, text, and audience/participant became entangled: time became body, and body became time. Text emerged through these intra-actions not as a fixed object, but as something shaped and transformed by bodies and temporal rhythms. Words became gestures, gestures became speech, speech became rhythm, and rhythm created space. Space itself was continually reconfigured through these entanglements, functioning both as a medium and a co-creator of learning possibilities. Audience–participant relations were not separate positions but relational practices within these diffractive patterns; observing, acting, and participating were inseparable. These intra-actions opened a field of questions and pedagogical possibilities: What can bodies become in relation to time? How does text emerge when entangled into movement and space? What forms of attention, curiosity, and creativity are enabled when these elements diffract through one another? In the presentation, a diffractive “map” will be sketched as a visual metaphor for how such practices may be enacted in upper-secondary drama classrooms, illustrating relational processes and educational potential rather than fixed models. The study suggests that following diffractive patterns in drama education can offer a drama educational potential that works with curricular aims through performative exploration rather than predefined outcomes. It also raises broader questions for discussion: How can teachers be supported in taking pedagogical risks within institutional frameworks? What forms of assessment might align with diffractive and performative learning processes?

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