Session Information
Symposium
Contribution
Nonrepresentational Theory challenges me to imagine what pedagogy might become when we put everything on the same plane of immanence and call it material. In this way, non-representational theories challenge educational researchers to theorize something like affect as equally viable and relevant in educational philosophy. I find calls to attend to dispositions frequently commensurate with representational assumptions. I maintain that representational assumptions reproduce assumptions of inequality in at least two ways. First, in fixing “desirable” dispositional traits, representational assumptions ahistoricize and decontextualize traits from their relations. Secondly, a classic assumption of inequality materializes when a Cartesian separation of body and mind is upheld in calls for professional role over personal dispositions (Buchmann,1987; Ruitenberg,2011). Such a disembodiment not only reproduces inequality, but it also utterly undermines the performative impetus that putting all things on the same plane of immanence makes possible and generative. In dis-positioning representational assumptions, I explore how we might perform non-representational approaches to dispositions--namely, through affective attunements--that perform practical verifications of equality. In challenging educators and educational philosophers to go beyond representational assumptions about dispositions, non-representational theories affect education in ways that are more-than-representational (Lorimer,2005). I experimentally embody more-than-representational affective attunements through evocation of a metaphor: vocal performance. I explore how resonance, timbre, and sonority figure as generative lines of flight between my experience as a vocal performer and my efforts to theorize affective attunements as non-representational performances of pedagogy. I then turn to the audience, inquiring as to other performative modes that rely, at least in part, on affective attunements and challenge representational assumptions in educational philosophy. Fendler (2014) mixes the equality assumptions of Rancière with the performative impetus of NRT. I call these non-representational performative insights “non-pedagogical”. Proceeding in a radical spirit of material equality, “non-pedagogy” performs as if (p.5) anything is possible and everything is material, narrating and translating all other actors “as if they are non-representational” (pp.11-12) too. This suggests that if we are willing to put all dispositional traits and approaches on the same plane of immanence and if we are willing to treat students and student-teachers as emancipated, we could proceed both bodily and experimentally in theorizing dispositions. In remaining embodied and proceeding experimentally, educators (like singers) can bring our fullest selves to bear on curricular performances and “[put] a premium on the corporeal rituals and entanglements embedded in embodied action rather than talk or cognitive attitudes” alone (Vannini,2015,p.4).
References
Buchmann, M. (1987). Role over person: Justifying teacher action and decisions. Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research 31(1), 1-21. Fendler, L. (2014). The ethics of materiality: Some insights from non-representational theory for educational research. In P. Smeyers and M. Depaepe (Eds.) Educational research: Material culture and its representation (115-132). Dordrecht: Springer. Lorimer, H. (2005). Cultural geography: The busyness of being ‘more-than-representational. Progress in Human Geography 29(1), 83-94. Ruitenberg, C. (2011). The trouble with dispositions: A critical examination of personal beliefs, professional commitments and actual conduct in teacher education. Ethics and education 6(1), 41-52. Vannini, P. (2015). Non-representational research methodologies: An introduction. In P. Vannini (Ed.) Non-representational methodologies: Re-envisioning research (Routledge advances in Research Methods) (1-18). New York: Routledge.
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