Conference Agenda

Recent curriculum reform in Norway (LK20) emphasizes creativity, exploration, and interdisciplinarity as core educational values (Utdanningsdirektoratet, 2020). The curriculum also embraces complexity and openness within and across subjects. In drama education, these ambitions call for pedagogical approaches that move beyond representational models of teaching and learning, where knowledge and learning outcomes are fully predefined. This paper examines how drama education in upper-secondary schools can be approached as a performative and diffractive educational practice, responding to these curricular invitations by re-imagining what teaching, learning, and researching within drama education can be(come). By engaging diffractive patterns as an educational potential, the paper asks: How can following diffractive patterns in drama education create learning processes that foster curiosity, creativity, and interdisciplinarity in Norwegian upper-secondary schools? This question also invites for further inquiry on drama education on a European and international level, created from the stance within drama education in Norwegian upper-secondary schools.

Positioned within performative research (Østern et al., 2021; Østern et al., 2024) and a/r/tography (Irwin, 2004; Irwin & Springgay, 2008), the study challenges conventional distinctions between pedagogy, research, and artistic practice. The paper further explores how a performative orientation disrupts traditional reform pedagogy, drawing on Dewey’s (1916) pragmatist thinking while critically engaging established frameworks in drama education (Heggstad & Heggstad, 2022; Kirk & Krøgholt, 2018; Sæbø, 2016). This opens a space for re-thinking drama education as a relational, aesthetic, and artistic event rather than a representational pedagogical practice.

Engaging diffractive theory by following “differences that make a difference,” the paper attends to how differences and entanglements are constantly produced and reconfigured through intra-actions, highlighting new possibilities for knowing and being (Barad, 2007; Juelskjær, 2019). Teaching, learning, and research are understood as entangled practices in which knowledge is not represented but created through intra-action among bodies, materials, space, time, text, and curriculum (Østern et al., 2021; Szatek, 2023). Intra-action emphasizes that entities do not preexist their relations but emerge through ongoing mutual constitution (Barad, 2007). Rather than treating these elements as stable categories, the study approaches them as fluid and entangled, raising questions such as: What can time become when learning unfolds non-linearly? What can bodies do when knowledge emerges through affective and relational engagement? What can text become when it operates as material, action, and event rather than representation? And what can an audience become when actor and spectator are not separate roles but entangled practices within unfolding educational situations?

Through a series of performative learning processes, the study examines how diffractive patterns can open educational spaces that invite exploration, creativity, interdisciplinarity, uncertainty, and curiosity. These spaces allow curriculum aims, students, teachers, and the more-than-human to co-create learning, rather than positioning learning as the execution of predefined objectives. Approached in this way, diffractive patterns in drama education invite an ethical responsibility, where knowledge emerges in relation to what unfolds in the moment.

By engaging drama education as performative research, the study positions the artist/researcher/teacher not as an external observer but as a participant and co-creator. This de-centered position challenges dominant notions of control, predictability, and efficiency in educational research and practice, offering instead a pedagogical orientation that concerns risk-taking and relational matters (Østern et al., 2021).

In this presentation we will share our post-qualitative new materialist methodological approaches to learning in museums and heritage sites. This approach has been developed over a decade and involves the blending of roles as we embrace practices of researcher/ visitor /makers producing arts-based outcomes alongside scholarly outputs. This work begins with traditional historical inquiry and then enhanced by the embodied encounter in the museum space. Subsequently the arts-based work explores the interconnections of theory, matter, affect and history. Learning in museums and at heritage sites is always mutli-layered and the complex tensions of history require teachers and students to be critically reflective and to be open to different ways for engaging with those histories. Taking this deep dive into post-qualitative and new materialist methodologies in museums, which often deal with difficult histories, creates an opportunity for the learner to be entangled in the affective and relational encounters and in turn be reconfigured by the experience. The outcomes of this work might be thought of as speculative fabulations (Haraway, 2016b); multi-layered creations that evolve from walking, talking, listening, drawing, stitching, drawing, and writing. We are deeply conscious of the way in which this work is shaped by our own ethico-onto-epistemologies (Barad, 2007) and our work demands critical reflection on researcher positionality.

In this presentation we will trace a series of encounters with place, matter and history at museums and heritage sites. At each site we have employed historical inquiry, alongside, walking methodologies (Springgay &Truman, 2019) and arts-based responses. These sites include museums, foundling homes sites, holocaust memorials, exhibitions, ‘old town’ sites tracing signs of vital matter and lingering histories. In each location we have sought representations or traces of the absent child in curated exhibitions, heritage sites but also in historic locales that have been subsumed and used for new purposes. This work has occurred in the UK, Italy, Czech Republic, Germany and Bosnia Herzegovina. At each of these sites we, as researchers, became entangled in the relational encounters of the vitality of matter, affect and an ethico-onto-epistemological unfolding. Often these research encounters include the unanticipated, the obscure, and the serendipitous bringing a new level of richness to the project. The arts-based products include spontaneous drawings done on site, more intricate pencil art works, digital art productions, reproductions of baby dresses and hand stitched brevi with enclosed prayers. Each production reflected the representations of histories of absent, isolated or surrendered children and their mothers. These are often difficult and sad histories thus posing the potential risks as well as opportunities for thinking differently about place, matter and loss. Women’s arts and craft work can create connections across time and generations; as acts of memorialisation (Whitty, 2019) as a witness to the past (Fisk, 2019), as a gift (Clarke, 2016), and as an activity for “embodied and hand(y) knowledge making” (Goggin, 2012, p33-4). We regard such feminist arts-based productions as a means for engaging in an ethics of care across time and place. In each of our encounters at the museums or heritage sites and the subsequent research creations, we found ourselves to be reconfigured by the experience. In this presentation we will seek to trace this reconfiguration by revisiting the sites, showing the products and sharing the ways in which this approach has been personally and professionally enriching.

Research into arts education typically examines the objectives, content, procedures, and assessment of teaching practices, student learning, and organizational initiatives. A bibliometric analysis by Fontan and Martínez-Rodríguez (2024) reveals that publications on arts education fall into two main areas: teaching and learning processes, and therapeutic processes in community and social interventions. Specifically, this analysis identifies, in the first area, the following research issues as predominant during the period 2000-2025: formal education in the school environment and the curriculum; the development of creativity; and higher education and teacher education. This analysis shows that research focuses on “what is done,” but is rare on what these practices do in the lives of schools, students, teachers, and families.

Examining what arts education proposals and practices do aligns with the new materialist approach, which focuses on the “agency” of things—or, as Jane Bennett (2010) puts it, on what things do rather than what they mean. As Tota and De Feo (2022) point out, this means attending to the structuring properties of art and its artifacts in educational environments, rather than their structured properties. It requires acknowledging art’s agency and performative nature—its capacity to shape learning processes, relationships, and the subjectification of those involved. This perspective reframes arts practice as agency: the right to act.

We pursued this direction in a recent study linked to the European EXPECT_Art project, investigating the epistemic communities associated with arts education practices in two schools (Hernández-Hernández, Espinosa & Ruiz, in press). This research enabled us to catalog the observed artistic practices and organize them according to three frameworks: arts education, education through the arts, and the use of art in education.

Building on this framework and research experience, this paper examines how artistic practices operate as forces within the classroom and how they are articulated in subsequent interviews with participants. As lived experiences, the arts can position participants in unexpected ways when they allow themselves to be affected. This study draws on Deleuze’s notion of affects, understood as movements or shifts from one state to another that emerge in encounters between bodies (Deleuze, 1998). These affective movements persist beyond the immediate experience, leaving traces that can be recognized in what participants later recount. The paper therefore focuses on these echoes of experience as they appear in the oral testimonies shared through interviews, of those involved in and reflecting on the artistic practices developed within the research project.

Emphasizing this dimension contributes to the field by strengthening the connection between research in arts education and the affects that artistic practices have on people's lives, beyond their planning and implementation. In line with the new materialist concern with what practices do, the paper's focus extends beyond researchers' observations or interpretations. Instead, it seeks to understand arts education through how students and teachers articulate the ways these practices affect them, shape relationships, and reconfigure their positions within the school environment.

This approach aligns with perspectives that understand artistic practice as a form of knowledge production enacted through practice itself, as proposed by Barrett (2007). From this standpoint, art functions as an epistemic practice that generates understanding through doing. Similarly, following Hickey-Moody (2016), this paper considers art as having the capacity to reconfigure what participants are able to understand, produce, and connect with in educational contexts. Attention to the affective traces articulated in participants’ narratives allows us to explore how artistic practices operate as agents within educational environments, contributing to processes of learning and subjectification in schools.