Abstract:
This project examines the use of visual representation via digital portfolios to support the deterritorialisation of the concept of teacher intentionality within early childhood education. Underlying this project was a desire to problematise notions of intentionality within early childhood teaching and to capture the voices of those involved in different spaces or places within this process. Through this problematisation the Deleuze and Guattarian notion of deterritorialisation was utilised to challenge positioning of teacher intentionality within current early childhood discourse.
The project is a venture between two lecturers and four graduated students involved in an early childhood graduate teacher education programme. This project emerged from a process of course redesign. The course redesign utilised opportunities for visual representation through digital portfolios, to enable students, alongside course lecturers, to explore and deterritorialise the concept of intentionality within teaching. A Deleuze and Guattarian informed theoretical gaze was used to frame the visual portfolios, with particular attention given to notions of encounters with difference, lines of flight, and rhizomes.
On completion of the course the authors approached four graduated students asking if they wished to share their experiences of using the visual representation through digital portfolios. The project participants (ourselves the presenters and four graduated students), each wrote a short 500-word reflective account on our experience using visual means to capture, explore and represent developing thinking of intentionality within teaching. In addition, participants produced a two-minute video recording showcasing our respective visual representation and talking to the experience. These reflective accounts were epistemologically situated within an interpretive paradigm, informed by understandings of lived experience and subjective reality aligning with qualitative research design in an attempt to engage with the world-life in a thoughtful and ‘awake way’.
Three main themes emerged from thematic analysis of the video and text accounts: meta-awareness, becoming, and staying with discomfort. The reflective accounts showcased the potential of the visual mode as an alternative means of representation beyond the written text. The visual representation of emerging and developing thought facilitated a rich inquiry into teacher intentionality as a potentially non-linear multifaceted phenomenon. Our understanding of the intentional teacher is one who not only undertakes this learning journey with tamariki (children) through sustained shared learning processes, but who also provokes lines of flight for learning through intentionally-planned (and unplanned, but welcomed) provocations with difference.
The project is a venture between two lecturers and four graduated students involved in an early childhood graduate teacher education programme. This project emerged from a process of course redesign. The course redesign utilised opportunities for visual representation through digital portfolios, to enable students, alongside course lecturers, to explore and deterritorialise the concept of intentionality within teaching. A Deleuze and Guattarian informed theoretical gaze was used to frame the visual portfolios, with particular attention given to notions of encounters with difference, lines of flight, and rhizomes.
On completion of the course the authors approached four graduated students asking if they wished to share their experiences of using the visual representation through digital portfolios. The project participants (ourselves the presenters and four graduated students), each wrote a short 500-word reflective account on our experience using visual means to capture, explore and represent developing thinking of intentionality within teaching. In addition, participants produced a two-minute video recording showcasing our respective visual representation and talking to the experience. These reflective accounts were epistemologically situated within an interpretive paradigm, informed by understandings of lived experience and subjective reality aligning with qualitative research design in an attempt to engage with the world-life in a thoughtful and ‘awake way’.
Three main themes emerged from thematic analysis of the video and text accounts: meta-awareness, becoming, and staying with discomfort. The reflective accounts showcased the potential of the visual mode as an alternative means of representation beyond the written text. The visual representation of emerging and developing thought facilitated a rich inquiry into teacher intentionality as a potentially non-linear multifaceted phenomenon. Our understanding of the intentional teacher is one who not only undertakes this learning journey with tamariki (children) through sustained shared learning processes, but who also provokes lines of flight for learning through intentionally-planned (and unplanned, but welcomed) provocations with difference.