Playing in the gym, boxing in the classroom: A diffractive approach to music, embodiment and affect in childhood

Resumen

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.