Abstract:
Researching e-learning and e-teaching in higher education brings with it new contexts to explore as physical and digital spaces/places multiply and participant identities become distributed across time and space/place. Significantly, 'researching' and following people, materials, technologies, and spaces become ever more complex in digital academe. This paper explores the methodological research choices made as part of a PhD study titled: "Researching e-Learning and e-Teaching in Higher Education: Choreographies of Identity and Spatiality" that challenged 'traditional' humanist research boundaries by advocating 'radical' poststructuralist analytical sensibilities to advance analysis of e-learning and e-teaching as sociomaterial and affective practices that emerge through human-material-spatial choreographies (arrangements). To research e-learning and e-teaching more richly in their emergent material, spatial and social complexities, we need to move beyond traditional humanist boundaries of what we look at, and therefore shift how we look at, and consequently how we write about e-learning and e-teaching. The paper makes a case for drawing on poststructuralist transdisciplinary approaches using the material semiotics of Actor-Network Theory (ANT) and Non-Representational Theory (NRT) to facilitate generative conceptualisations to accent the spatial, material and affective dimensions of e-learning and e-teaching. By researching beyond disciplinary boundaries, we can enrich our understanding of e-learning and e-teaching to embrace the more than human to inform research, pedagogy, educational design, and educational philosophy. By dissolving human/material boundaries and verbal/visual boundaries, productive and evocative possibilities emerge to facilitate different ways of 'performing' e-learning and e-teaching. To 'perform' the ontological research positioning, the research metaphor of "choreography" is invoked to enact a performative (emergent) relational worldview which underpins the transdisciplinary approaches chosen, where everything and everyone emerges in-relation to the other. The choreography metaphor also works to inspire and re-enchant research writing beyond 'traditional' academic genres.