Playing in the gym, boxing in the
classroom: A diffractive approach to music, embodiment and affect in childhood
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José J. Roa-Trejo[†] |
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Alejandra Pacheco-Costa |
Abstract
Embracing the more-than-human paradigm in educational research allows to attend the intricacy and multilplicity of classroom situations. This research focuses on a music event in a primary education classroom in which several agents intertwine. Thinking-with-theory upon this event allows us to create new knowledge and to avoid limiting strategies that often insist on what is already known. Data is presented as an audiovisual vignette, and a multi-layered diffractive analysis is applied, where bodies, sound, movement, and memory entangle, and where affective encounters in/through music emerge. Each diffraction enables us to regard the event from multiple lenses, drawing on more-than-human and new-materialist concepts such as affect, spacetimemattering and intra-action. Through this analysis, the research delves deep into the convergence of materializations and embodiments within a child's apparent distraction, revealing the nuanced ways in which children derive meaning through their bodies, sound, space, memory, and affect. In this process, it is possible to reflect beyond representational logic perpetuated by adults and teachers at school, and to attain a deeper understanding of the embodied essence of meaning-making. We provide insights into how children make meaning in/through/with bodies, sound, space, memory and affect, and how they escape the fixed relations of the classroom as proposed by adults/teachers.
Resumen
Adoptar el
paradigma más-que-humano en la investigación educativa permite atender a la
complejidad y la multiplicidad de las situaciones que se dan en el aula. Esta
investigación se centra en un evento musical en un aula de educación primaria
en el que se entrelazan varios agentes. Pensar-con-la-teoría sobre este
acontecimiento permite generar nuevo conocimiento evitando estrategias de
lenguaje reductivas que a menudo conducen hacia lo ya conocido. Los datos se
presentan como una viñeta audiovisual, y se aplica un análisis difractivo de
múltiples capas donde cuerpos, sonido, movimiento y memoria se entrelazan, y
donde emergen encuentros afectivos en/a través de la música. Cada difracción
nos permite contemplar el acontecimiento desde múltiples ópticas, recurriendo a
conceptos más-que-humanos y neomaterialistas como la difracción, el afecto, la
dispersión espaciotemporal y la intraacción. Mediante este análisis, la
investigación profundiza en la convergencia de materializaciones y corporeizaciones
dentro de la aparente distracción de un niño, revelando las formas en que los
niños generan significado a través de sus cuerpos, los sonidos, los espacios,
la memoria y los afectos. En este proceso, es posible reflexionar más allá de
la lógica representacional perpetuada por los adultos y los profesores en la
escuela, y alcanzar una comprensión más profunda de la esencia corporeizada de
la creación de significado. Aportamos ideas sobre cómo los niños crean
significado en/mediante/con el cuerpo, el sonido, el espacio, la memoria y el
afecto, y cómo esto escapa a las relaciones fijas del aula propuestas por los
adultos/profesores.
Keywords / Palabras clave
Education, Childhood, Learning processes, Sound, Music, Classroom, Literacy, Play.
Educación,
Infancia, Proceso de aprendizaje, Sonido, Música, Aula, Alfabetización, Juego.
1. Introduction:
The more-than-human turn in educational research
Research has addressed the emergence of posthumanism as a way to
understand the contemporary world (Braidotti, 2013), the relevance of matter
agentialities (Murris, 2022), and the idea of the child as full and able when
we decentre the focus from the humanistic binaries (Murris, 2016). Therefore,
posthumanism has been described as an ethic-onto-epistemological way of
thinking which requires engagement with reality by doing, being and knowing
(Kuby and Rowsell, 2017). Being a complex and multidimensional concept,
posthumanism is related to other theoretical and poststructuralist theories,
such as new-materialism, affect theory or more-than-human thought. Whereas
posthumanism comprehends several theories that reject human supremacy beyond
other entities, the more-than-human approach considers things to be the result
of the coexistence of a boundless diversity of bodies (Price and Chao, 2023).
In our research we adopt a more-than-human thinking, as it stresses on the
multiplicity and fluid nature of worlds, where human beings are deprived of any
superiority (Tsing, 2015).
The more-than-human lens in research aims to decentre the (white,
cisgender, middle-class, European) human, and more specifically challenges an
idea of human ‘as fixed and neutral’ (Hackett, 2022, p. 247). More-than-human
research in education has offered new perspectives in fields such as literacy
studies (Hackett and Somerville, 2017; Murris, 2016), social sciences (Adams
and Kerr, 2021) or sonic studies (Gallagher, 2016). In this context, our
research follows the path laid by Elwick et al. (2019) or Wargo (2018), who
posit the need for more research in music education from a more-than-human and
new-materialist perspective. This approach may shine a light on the subtle
networks of relations taking place around matter, music and childhood, which
may be shadowed by other theoretical approaches focused only on the human.
2. Theoretical Framework
2.1. More-than-human intra-actions in the classroom
More-than-human
thinking puts mind and body on an equal footing. Bodies are considered as a
whole, erasing ‘the natural and fixed dividing line between interiority and
exteriority’ (Barad, 2007, p. 136). They have memory and react beyond the power
of mind, and their sensitive capacities define cognition (Dernikos, 2020).
Accordingly, the world is understood with, in and through bodies, and the
experience of reality is ‘embodied’ in constant intra-action between human and
non-human (Lenters and McDermott, 2019). Bodies acquire an abstract dimension
based on their indeterminacy and may be described as ‘part of the self, being,
becoming’ (Zhang, 2022, p. 1). From this perspective, bodies defy the
language-based model of society, in which children are ‘not-complete’ until
they reach a mature level of verbal communication (Murris, 2016).
More-than-human thought of/about/with bodies lets us notice children’s bodies
as sensing, relational and thoughtful entities (MacRae, 2020), valuing their
material, non-representational and non-linguistic ways of meaning-making
(MacLure, 2016).
Through the
more-than-human lens, human and non-human operate at the same level, and the
world is created in their intra-actions. Like Barad (2007), we avoid the term
‘interaction’, that would entail agency coming from outside, and adopt
‘intra-action’, which carries the sense of emergence from the inside.
Intra-actions erase the boundaries between object and subject, as agents do not
pre-exist subjects (Guyotte et al., 2020). More-than-human agents, on the
contrary, come-to-be and become entangled in a constant and dynamic process of
creation (Kuby and Rowsell, 2017), where matter is something that ‘becomes’,
instead of something that ‘is’ (Coole and Frost, 2010). Thus, causality is not
a linear sequence of cause and effect, rather it must be reconsidered starting
from intra-actions. For instance, in a classroom setting this intra-action may
take place involving ‘a coat, a chair, a pen, an iPad, a computer screen, the
atmosphere, the temperature, just as much as any human’ (Taylor, 2016, p. 17).
Intra-actions emerge
as unintentional processes of meaning-making, the unpredictable consequences of
the relations between matter and discourse, and the energies and potentialities
generated within them (Hacket et al., 2017). These unexpected emergences may be
shaped as distractions. In this sense, distractions in educational contexts,
especially in those related with arts education (Hackett et al., 2017), have
been regarded as unplanned emergences, potentially valuable for education
(Rautio, 2018). Distractions from teacher-led classrooms and planned learning
tasks open up possibilities of a non-linear understanding of education
(Springgay, 2020). In them, children’s refusals to follow the path designed by
adults have been described as opportunities for exploring affective relations
in childhood, and as ‘a space for something else to take shape’ (Truman et al.,
2020, p. 234).
The more-than-human
view of education challenges the predictability and linearity of educational
processes led by a human/adult/teacher. It has enabled new possibilities for
addressing what happens in a classroom (Kuby et al., 2018) where,
traditionally, teachers and education systems design and organise a
human-centred learning (Murris, 2022). Moreover, there is a concern regarding
the relations between the students and the non-human world around them, or the
agentialities of non-human bodies (Powell and Somerville, 2020). Paying close
attention to the more-than-human world in the classroom enables researchers and
teachers to understand the ways in which children intra-act with bodies,
matter, time, and space, and ‘can lend us insights into understandings about
children and childhoods often obscured by our assumptions and desires’ (Yoon
and Templeton, 2019, p. 57).
2.2. Sounding/ed affects and moving memories
Affect has been
defined as the capacity of affecting and being affected in a reciprocal and
relational way, something found 'in those intensities that pass body to body
(human, nonhuman, part-body, and otherwise)' (Seigworth and Gregg, 2010, p. 1).
We adopt this neo-Spinozan approach to affect, an intensity characterised as a
relational and social force (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004). In it, affect emerges
in between the human and non-human, triggering connections and entanglements
(Barad, 2007). Affect moves, is embodied, and shows how experience is
transmitted physically from one to another (Hackett et al., 2017). The idea
that everything in a molecular level is vibrating (Bennett, 2010) can lead us
to consider that all bodies, ecologies, feelings, experiences, and events have
the potential to affect others (Gershon, 2013). Moreover, embodied affect
leaves a trace that constitutes the memory used by bodies to ‘bring up to date
the present’ (Massumi, 2015, p. 8).
One of the bodies
moved in/by affects is sound (Gershon, 2016). More-than-human research has
attended to sound from two perspectives: as a phenomenological agent, in which
sound is a vibration across bodies, and as a social agent, described as a
relational force (Wargo, 2018). In this second sense, sound possesses an affective charge and may be defined as a resonant force able to move
bodies (Gershon and Appelbaum, 2020). Gallagher (2016) has described sonic
affect as the vibrational intensity of all bodies, human and non-human,
entailing other sound layers that can be activated, related to feelings,
meaning, cognition and memory. Bodies are affected by sound owing to the
vibrational potentialities of corporeal and sociocultural means (Henriques,
2010). Thanks to this force, sound is a breeding ground for the emergence of
events (Wargo, 2018), such as those related to movement and kinetics. Hackett,
MacLure and MacMahon (2020), for instance, considered sound to be a key agent
when they explored how the outdoors in school spaces triggered meaningful
relations between children, matter and senses. Thus, bodies are also unfolded
into sound, moving them to new fields and empowering multiplicity (Dernikos et
al., 2020). Sound can also be seen as a carrier of meaningful vibrations that,
unlike words, conveys representational and non-representational codes
(Gallagher et al., 2018).
Posthuman research has linked sound and
movement, considering them as ‘world forming practices’ (Hackett and
Somerville, 2017). They have been also described as ‘knowledge in motion’
(Wargo, 2017), and essential to understand children’s becomings (Yoon and
Templeton, 2019). Accordingly, movement has become essential in the reading of
phenomena from a more-than-human perspective. It has been described as
unpredictable and rooted in a continuous entanglement with the environment
(Hackett and Rautio, 2019). In a school context, the classroom has been
analysed regarding its restrictions to movement (Kirby, 2020), which hinder the
dynamic intra-actions of spaces and bodies (Dernikos, 2020). As Powell and
Somerville (2020) state, movement, sound, matter, and bodies connect to enact
learning and being, as part of an intra-active and never-ending meaning-making
process. Children-objects and elements-movements collectively produce sounds,
vibrations, rhythms, and intensities in which valuable meanings are made
(Powell and Somerville, 2020).
Furthermore, the more-than-human approach to movement, sound and
education offers new insights into the ways in which children materialise music
in school settings (Gershon, 2018). What in the beginning could be considered
to be a mere distraction reveals a complex network of actions in which memory,
affect, matter and sound are intertwined (Springgay, 2020). In this way,
more-than-human readings of classroom phenomena lead us closer to children’s
meaning-making processes, understanding knowledge as emergent and embodied and
‘not restricted to bound individual or subject silos’ (Burnard et al., 2021, p.
117).
Space, time and matter
coexist as inextricable and non-linear agents (Barad, 2007). According to
Barad, 'the past was never simply there to begin with, and the future is not
simply what will unfold; the “past” and the “future” are iteratively reworked
and enfolded through the iterative practices of spacetimemattering' (2013, p.
28). Considering that the world is in a constant state of ‘becoming’ in which
space and time are reiteratively materialised, the role of memory itself is
unstable and troubled. Memory can be understood not just as a way to represent
past moments in the present, but as the reconfiguration of past in the present
and the understanding of ‘ongoing openness of the narrative to future
retellings’ (Hristova et al., 2020). This ontological conceptualisation of
memory highlights its emergence as something unconscious, visceral, and
intrinsic to bodies (Hackett et al., 2017), connecting past, present and
future.
We can conclude that
sound, like affect, is dynamic and transient, and can only be recognised in the
moment and through the reactivation of the embodied memory in/with sound
(Revill, 2016). According to Henriques (2010), ‘affect is expressed
rhythmically’ (p. 58) and can make previously acquired knowledges clear for all
to see through the nonconscious memory of the body (Gershon, 2013). These
knowledges are part of bodies’ history, understanding history as the emergent
record of human and non-human intensities that overlap (Tsing, 2015). Tsing
used matsutake mushrooms to illustrate those material ‘tracks and traces’
(2015, p. 168) which remain in bodies, fostering entanglements and taking part
in memory. As Tsing explains, mushrooms become part of the trees they inhabit,
and their remains come-to-be traces speaking of their past and future. Thus,
embodied memory is entangled with place, time, movement and meaning-making
(Hackett et al., 2020).
More-than-human theory
provides a complex framework in which meaning-making may be fostered through
the intra-actions and affective encounters taking place in a classroom setting.
Within this conceptual frame, our general aim is to look at children’s school practices through
a more-than-human paradigm, attending to sound, movement, and memory. More
specifically, we aim:
-
to explore the possibilities of diffractive analysis in addressing the
intra-actions of children, bodies, sound and memory in a primary school
classroom, and
-
to (re)consider affective encounters in childhood as
non-representational ways of meaning making in/through music.
3. Methodology
More-than-human thinking is both a theoretical framework and a
methodological approach that rejects representationalism and challenges the
constraints of traditional qualitative methodologies. As a method, it tries to overcome
the ontological attitude adopted by researchers who assume the role of
individual and external observers as they look upon the world from outside
(Hackett and Rautio, 2019). In the representation of reality, researchers build
barriers between objects and identities, thus creating dichotomies and
hierarchies of values opposed to movement, change and emergence (MacLure, 2013;
Shannon and Truman, 2020). On the contrary, we consider ourselves as entangled
with inquiry, and our intra-actions create knowledge far beyond the use of
representation through verbal language and interpretation (Kuby and Rowsell,
2017). Data in this research is considered a construction, the materialisation
of an assemblage composed by human and non-human agents that is subject to our
experience as researchers who are part of the event (Ellingson and Sotirin,
2020).
Our analysis is framed within a wider project developed over two years in
low-income schools in the south of Spain. This project applied a classroom
ethnography design (Green and Bloome, 2005) and involved a team of three
researchers participating in the classroom tasks, interacting with the children
and designing specific actions. The children’s parents, teachers and school
were aware of the research’s aims and scope, and signed an informed consent
agreement, according to the policies of the University of Seville. All the
names in this article are pseudonyms.
From all the data gathered, we have selected a tiny scene from a music
lesson. It took place in the second year of our project, when most of the
children were six years old. The scene was video recorded on a mobile phone by
one of the researchers sitting at the back of the classroom, which the
researchers considered to be less intrusive for the children. Data from this
recording were combined with the researchers’ field notes and conversations
with the children and their teacher, Virginia. When Virginia started her work
with this group in the previous year, she made an effort to improve the
children’s behaviour in the classroom, such as by encouraging them to raise
their hand before speaking, keep silent and sit still. By the time this scene
took place, the children were familiar with these requirements.
Our initial aim when we recorded the session was to focus on the teacher.
However, as we noticed what was happening in the back rows, we shifted our gaze
to the children’s divergent actions. In this process, we assume our role as
data-involved researchers, as our vision was never innocent or objective
(MacLure, 2013). It was during the revision of our data from a more-than-human
lens that we noticed the subtle network of intra-actions taking place, and the
clues it provided regarding the children’s response to music in the classroom.
Our analysis applies diffraction as a way to attend to the multiple
layers of reality (Barad, 2014; Murris and Bozalek, 2019). The concept of a
diffractive approach comes from quantum physics and, as explained by Karen
Barad (2007), implies that one single event may be broken down into different,
overlaying parts, in the same way in which light is spread (diffracted) when it
encounters certain objects. Diffraction considers the multiple layers
concurring in an event (Barad, 2007), described as the intra-action between
materiality and discourse (Jackson and Mazzei, 2023; Murris and Bozalek, 2019).
In Barad's words, diffraction means thinking ‘constructively and
deconstructively (not destructively)’ at the same time (2014, p. 187), similar
to the many thin fibres comprising a strong rope. This attitude towards
analysis avoids building hierarchies between the perspectives overlying in the
event (Jusslin and Østern, 2020) and implies attention to minor details (Barad,
2007).
We also apply diffractive analysis as a way of ‘reading the data while
thinking with theory’, aiming to produce new knowledge while avoiding reductive
language strategies (Jackson and Mazzei, 2023). Thinking with theory also
enables us to create new connections between the phenomenon and the diversity
of perspectives that enhance the researchers’ insight. Ultimately, diffractive
thinking offers new lenses that contribute to understanding the intensities
beyond the power of conventional qualitative methods (Murris, 2021).
4. Results: A vignette
In our analysis, we focus on the vignette contained in the opening bars
of this article. However, we acknowledge the limits and constraints of words as
means to represent the world. The vignette is therefore complemented by its
recording (Figure 1) from the researchers’ device/lens, and along with the
written text, is the departing point for our diffractive reading with theory.
Figure
1. Phenomenon’s video recording: https://shorturl.at/dprwH
It is Wednesday, 9.30am. The children are sitting in
pairs in the classroom, looking at the blackboard and the digital blackboard.
We call it a digital blackboard although in fact it is an A2 sized sheet of
white paper taped to the wall. Today’s lesson topic is the letter ‘z’. Virginia
wants to improve the writing and reading skills of her pupils and she
frequently uses music to reinforce their literacy skills. She asks the children
to watch a YouTube animated video, consisting of a brief explanation of the
letter and how to write it, some words including it, like ‘zoo’, ‘Zumba’ or
‘zone’, and a final song. Virginia has used this kind of video very often, and
every time the children watch a video, they learn to sing the final song and
copy the moves and gestures. From the back of the classroom, I can see Martin
sitting two rows in front of me. Although he usually tries to engage in the
classroom activities, he gets distracted easily. At home he stays up late
watching TV or playing videogames. Today he seems restless; he fidgets at his
table or at the tables close to him, swinging on his chair and trying to talk
with his friend sitting behind him. Virginia seems to pay no attention to him,
and she goes on with the lesson asking the children about their favourite place
to play. She asks all of them, one by one, and Martin says he likes to play
boxing at the gym. As Virginia continues asking the other children, he starts to
move like he is boxing. When the song
begins, Martin starts dancing like he was boxing: fists above the chin height,
knuckles facing upwards, raised shoulders and sometimes throwing punches in the
air. At Virginia’s request, the children propose some gestures to accompany the
song’s lyrics: animals in a zoo going to Zoe the zebra’s Zumba lesson. Martin
proposes some movements mimicking a duck, but Virginia chooses another child’s
suggestion. Martin continues boxing and moving his head to his right, as if
dodging a blow. The children start singing the song and doing the gestures at
the same time. Sometimes Martin starts to join in, but he goes back to his
boxing. Danny, a friend of Martin sitting in front of him, tries to imitate his
movements, but not for long. Some other children encourage Martin to sing and
copy the song, but he pays no attention. The children spend about ten minutes
learning the song and singing it along with the video. After that, Virginia
moves on to the next task.
5. Diffractive analysis
Primary
education classrooms are full of moments like the one depicted in this
vignette. A child moves, acts, or answers on his own, regardless of the
teacher’s instructions. Most of these events take place unnoticed and are left
aside, considered as brief breaks in the school activities. In our research, we
embrace Mazzei and Jackson’s concerns (2023) about ‘thinking otherwise’ in
educational research, and we move towards a more-than-human reading of this
vignette. Through a diffractive multi-layered analysis, we read it with theory
and delve into the multiplicity of agencialities, embodiments and affects that
emerge when we apply an otherwise lens.
5.1. First diffraction: Sound and music
agentialities
The phenomenon in our vignette gathers the intra-actions of bodies,
Martin, music, children, the teacher and the classroom. Our vignette
comes-to-be in Martins’s embodied materialisation of the video’s song, which
raises questions about the phenomenological nature of music. Music exemplifies
Rousell’s (2019) concerns about artworks as the representation of the artist’s
will. In this sense, artworks are representational in essence, determined by
the humanistic logic of binaries (artist-public, mind-matter, idea-representation).
The song in our vignette and its intra-actions in/with the classroom has an
agential dimension that detaches it from this human/artist-centered
perspective. Therefore, we envisage music as equating to sound, vibration and
resonance, according to Powell and Somerville (2020, p. 846): ‘We consider
music in its “rawest” form as an integral participant in the more-than-human
world’.
In the intra-action of Martin and the song, music becomes a
more-than-human agent in the classroom and, together with Martin’s movements,
and it enables the emergence of a newly created world in the classroom
(Thompson and Biddle, 2013). As we shift our focus from Virginia’s suggestions
towards Martin, this intra-action emerges as a new layer in the classroom. The
multidimensional spaces cohabiting the classroom defy the linearity of space
and time in educational settings (Murris and Kohan, 2021). Moreover, children’s
perceptions of time and causality challenge linearity (Kuby et al., 2018) and,
thus, ‘throughout children’s lives their language and literacy development is
enhanced by non-linear approaches characterised by creative practice, rather
than the overemphasis on linearity and chronology that pervades educational
discourse today’ (Hackett and Somerville, 2017, p. 388).
Martin’s movements to the song are not aligned
with Virginia’s aims when she asks the children to suggest some gestures. The
iteration of the classroom dynamics made it easy for the children to understand
what was expected from them (Brownell, 2019), namely, to sing the song along
with movements related to its lyrics. Given his awareness of that, Martin's
suggestions match these expectations and contradict his own boxing practice. In
this renunciation of his own embodiment of the song, as well as in the other
children wanting him to follow the rest of the classroom (Figure 2), power
relations emerge amid intra-actions with sounds and the way in which sound
should be materialised (Gallagher, 2011).
Figure 2. Martin's
classmate urges him to follow teacher's choreography
5.2. Second diffraction: Affect and
embodied discourses
The intra-actions in the classroom may be
described, following Massumi (2015), as an affective encounter emerging
unexpectedly. Martin is affected by the music, as he is compelled to move when
he listens to it. Music is affected in Martin’s movements, sparking a new set
of meanings distanced from songs used at school to learn grammar. As described
by Dernikos et al. (2020, p. 6), affect, conceived as a bodily impulse, ‘can
start out as a sensory experience or charged habit, but then, quite
unexpectedly, surge up in ways that intensify the capacity of bodies to act and
be acted upon’. Thus, the music in the video embraces Martin’s experience in
the sports centre when he boxes. Affect, as an intensity in its Deleuzian
conception (Buchanan, 2021), acts as a relational force that involves other
more-than-human bodies (the boy in front of Martin when he tries to move as he
does [Figure 3], the boy on the right, the table, the chair, the song, the
researcher’s perspective). They become entangled in what may be named an
assemblage, according to Deleuze and Guattari (2004), formed by bodies linked
in intensities and affect in a dynamic and ever-changing way (Buchanan,
2021).
Figure 3. Danny joins Martin and starts doing
boxing movements
The intensities and affects linking the more-than-human bodies in this
assemblage are not linguistic. Instead, they arise in movements, gestures and
expressions, set by/among/with the children, and detached from the teacher’s
linguistic discourse. These embodied intensities have been related to the ways
in which children make meaning in the classroom (MacLure, 2016), and challenge
the bodily and spatial restrictions of the school context (Kirby, 2020). In our
vignette, movement is limited by the classroom layout, with children sitting
facing the teacher and the screen. The more-than-human value of the ways in
which children think with bodies (Hackett and Rautio, 2019) leads us to
consider Martin’s assemblage with music, table, and other children as an embodied
emerging world (Hackett and Somerville, 2017), that overlaps adult linguistic
supremacy (Yoon and Templeton, 2019).
The linguistic adult approach is followed by
Virginia in her instructions to the children, related to the notion of
‘symbolic play’ (Ruiz and Abad, 2011), where movement is supposed to
‘represent’ the song’s lyrics, thus creating a binary of lyrics/music.
Representational thinking establishes a unique way to live predetermined forms
of learning experiences (Rousell, 2019), where learning is a linear and
unidirectional process (Zembylas, 2016). Therefore, Martin’s movements don’t
fit with Virginia’s idea of being a ‘duck’ (‘in the duck zone’, in the song).
Dernikos (2020) defined these decisions about what could be learned, said and
done as ‘doing school’. Virginia is ‘doing school’ through the spatial
relations she fosters (or not) during the activity, and also through movements
and sounds involved in the classroom dynamics. All in all, this phenomenon
underscores the classroom hierarchies between proper and non-proper responses
to representational ways of understanding music and movement (MacLure, 2016).
5.3. Third diffraction: Traces of a
non-linear memory
Karen Barad’s agential realism rejects the idea of linear causality and
asserts that humans are no longer ‘pure cause or pure effect’ (Barad, 2007, p.
136). However, memory has a relevant role in affects (Dernikos, 2020) and may
be associated with the traces left behind (Tsing, 2015). Accordingly, ‘the
world “holds” the memory of all traces; or rather, the world is its memory (its
enfolded materialization)’ (Barad, 2013, p. 29). The traces of boxing emerge in
the classroom as Virginia asks about her students’ favourite place to play, and
Martin answers that he likes boxing at the gym (Figure 4).
Figure 4. Martin answers to the question: ‘What
is your favourite zone for playing?’
Traces of boxing become present in Martin’s movements, along with
reminiscences of the new Fortnite boxing choreography launched a few days
before, and memory weaves with movement and bodies, as well as sound and music
(Revill, 2016). In our vignette, Martin moves like boxing before listening to
the song, and the song re-activates movement when its momentum seems to fade.
Traces are not a linear sequence, or a cause-effect connection. Rather, the
video’s song, Virginia’s questions about playing, movement and more-than-human
bodies are a non-linear becoming of traces. Martin’s memories become present in
the classroom, and these ‘traces’ come-to-be in their materialisation with
music and sound.
According to this non-linear perspective of memory, Virginia’s question
does not unleash movement, because it is already present. Thinking with
Massumi’s (2015) conception of memory, Martin’s embodiments are an activation
of future memory by/with/in the music (Jackson and Mazzei, 2023). Memories are
made by Martin in the present to be used in the future when the present will be
past. Memories remain embodied in Martin, like traces ‘waiting’ to be triggered
by a future intra-action with ‘letter Z’, ‘boxing’, ‘the duck zone’ or the
Zumba music, transcending and transforming space, time and matter/sound
(Hristova et al., 2020).
5.4. Fourth diffraction: Distractions
and the emergence of the unknown
The classroom in which this phenomenon takes place, its furniture and
even the children’s movements, can be recognised as part of a ‘constrained’
system (Kuby et al., 2018, p. 152). Children remain seated and are allowed to
move the upper part of their bodies and their feet. Movements are controlled
and organised by the teacher, who decides which ones are permitted and which
are not (Gallagher, 2011). Although Virginia doesn’t sanction Martin’s
movements, this spatial restriction is understood as natural by the children
when they urge Martin to follow the movements proposed in the classroom, or
when he himself suggests more acceptable movements. Snaza and Sonu (2016) have
highlighted the implicit ideology of the limits in this asymmetry of student
and teachers in terms of space and movement: ‘the teacher controls and the
students are controlled; the teacher knows and the students are deficient in
knowledge’ (p. 34). Differing from the teacher’s expectations may therefore be
considered as ‘bad behaviour’ (Snaza and Sonu, 2016). Movement limits and
restrictions may be regarded as a colonised understanding of what is suitable
for the classroom (Dernikos, 2020), and end up with Martin’s
non-representational embodiments being left aside.
More-than-human research does not recognise distractions as a sign of
disruptive behaviour but regards them as a part of emergent systems to be
embraced (Rautio, 2018). Attention to distractions may highlight the different
ways in which learning is produced in the classroom. There, students may be
bored or distracted, and at the same time they are being creative (Gershon,
2018). Martin’s materialisation of music, memory and affect helps us to immerse
in children’s world-forming practices, especially when they do not follow the
teacher’s purpose and challenge what learners should do (Boldt and Leander,
2020). Memory, movement, and music emerge in Martin’s embodiment and subtly
defy the task proposed by the teacher, detaching the song from the iterative
and tamed school practice (Springgay, 2020). Martin doesn’t manage to sing the
song or to perform the gestures accepted by the teacher. However, he is not
refusing the activity or the music, he is proposing something that diverges
from the teacher’s representational thinking, thereby generating meaning and
knowledge in the process (Truman et al., 2020). Affect and intensities guide
Martin’s meaning-making towards a view far from the colonialised, linear and
unidirectional learning archetypes of school (Dernikos, 2020).
6. Conclusions
The diffractive analysis performed in this article has underscored the
ways in which sound articulates the affective encounters and intra-actions
emerging in the classroom. The many layers conveyed in this phenomenon
(re)configure the world, in a way similar to that described by Jusslin and
Østern (2020). Among these layers we find Virginia’s task, Danny’s mimicking of
Martin’s movements, the memory of boxing and the Fortnite choreography, the
spatial restrictions to movement, or our presence at the back of the classroom.
Their entanglement gives way to a network in which all the agents be-come in
the intra-actions, and are re-materialised in their connectivity.
The re-configuration of space brings out the multiple ways in which
memories emerge and disappear simultaneously in world-forming processes led by
movement (Hackett and Somerville, 2017). Matter/sound are also reconfigured
when Zoe’s Zumba is no longer a song for learning the letter ‘Z’, but a song in
a gym. In the intra-actions, Zoe’s Zumba has become part of an entanglement of
connected spaces and memories, a Fortnite experience, boxing and movement.
Space, time and matter cannot be separated because they are entangled (Kuby and
Rowsell, 2017), like Martin’s embodied memory which merges past, present and
future.
Our diffractive analysis highlights how the distraction in our vignette
becomes a way of meaning-making and being-in-the-world for Martin. We assume
that in distractions, children avoid reproduction and are open to new becomings
(Truman et al., 2020) which conflict with the adults’ understanding of the
world in which they are mere recipients of inputs designed by the educational
system and transmitted by teachers (Murris, 2016). In contrast, we propose
more-than-human bodies (sound, tables, light, children) as agents that
intra-act with the children in their meaning-making. Thus, we consider sound in
the educational context as an affective force that goes beyond the idea of
sound as a product of disruptive behaviours or as a ‘distraction to learning or
other significant educational ways of being’ (Gershon, 2018, p. 27).
In affective and embodied encounters, children challenge the
representational understanding of music and sound. The representational
intentionality of adults (like Virginia’s aim to represent lyrics with specific
movements) clashes with embodied, affective, emergent and trace-based ways for
children to be-in-the-world. Attending to more-than-human bodies as discourse
leads us to understand the non-representational ways in which children make
meaning, where affective intensities become agents and replace the linearity of
the word-gesture sequence. In this sense, affective and embodied intra-actions
in the classroom become an opportunity for ‘interrupting and remodulating
dominant modes of power and rigid normativities’ (Dernikos et al., 2020, p.
19).
The diffractive reading of the classroom’s
phenomenon may help teachers to reconsider all the intra-actions that converge
in daily learning situations (Burnard et al., 2021), beyond the human-centred
and teacher-led practices. This relational perspective of education leads “to
the construction of a fairer educational system that favours overcoming
barriers based on race, gender or age” (Torres-Bejines et al., 2024). Valuing
more-than-human affective intra-actions provides teachers with a better
understanding of children’s being-in-the-world; a focus on children’s
non-representational and embodied experience of sound may lead to more
inclusive and children-centred classroom practices.
While this research
allowed us to look at classroom situations otherwise, it is relevant to
acknowledge some inherent limitations in it. The first one is the nature of
post-qualitative method itself, which implies an approach to data in which the
researcher is part of the phenomenon. Although we are exerting an influence on
children recording the session, the researchers’ participation in the event is
limited to the back of the classroom, with a limited perspective and
agentiality in the event that constrain our immersion as researchers in the
phenomenon. Different intra-actions could have arisen if researchers were next
to children, dancing, or taking decisions about the course of the class. The
second limitation, being at the same time an invitation for further research,
is the scarcity of specific research analysing music in educational contexts
from a more-than-human lens. In this sense, ‘thinking-with-theory' feeds on
existing conceptualisations and reflections as sources for reading otherwise.
The lack of literature focused on music and childhood suggests that many
elements remain unexplored and, in so far as this field is being developed,
enriching lectures will emerge regarding music/sound and memory, embodiments,
matter and discourse.
Fundings
This paper is part of the R&D&I
project PID2019-104557GB-I00, funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033/, and
the I+D project Project P20-00487, funded by European Regional Development Fund
(ERDF) and Junta de Andalucía. Special recognition to Universidad Loyola
Andalucía, in gratitude for the Research Assistant grant that made possible
this research. We thank the children, parents and teachers who have taken part
in this research, for their collaboration and trust, and Dr. Hilary McQueen for
their careful review of the text.
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