Conference Agenda

Studies of educational ecologies are now so well established as to be commonplace (e.g., Author 1, 2017; Jackson, 1968; Thorne, 1993). It is certainly the case that educators note important lessons learned in their sociocultural roles as educators and it is equally common to note how students can and do educate one another. As educators and qualitative researchers, we understand the idea of being educated as an integral aspect of living and believe formal educational ecologies are a deeply significant, (more than) human right.

Yet, such studies of educational ecologies most often conceptualize young people in general, and young people of color in schooling in particular, as those in need of education. Drawing from two different longitudinal studies of young children in educational ecologies, this performative paper seeks to interrupt these studies to more directly consider the question: what does it mean for qualitative researchers to take children of color seriously as educators?

Although differing in context and purpose, our studies of sonically adaptive public play spaces and children’s use of songwriting to express academic content are parallel in their ethical commitments to young children, communities, and education with sounds. In thinking through our work individually and in conversation, it became clear that we, like many educators and those whose scholarship is with young people, understand children as educators. Yet, there are comparatively few qualitative studies of educational ecologies that center children as teachers and adults as students.

In similar fashion, in qualitative research, children are more often seen than heard. We mean this in a literal fashion: we read children’s words or watch them on videos where their actions are often secondary to their sounds. To these ends, this sonic scholarship (e.g., Bull & Cobussen, 2022) expresses important lessons from children-as-educators, providing an opportunity to truly listen and learn.

Arts education has become a focal point of interest across academic, practical, and political spheres. It is increasingly viewed as a vital context for experiencing, negotiating, and learning forms of creative coexistence, life orientation, and self-efficacy. In this light, questions surrounding resonance within and through cultural education have gained renewed urgency. In times characterized by growing uncertainty, heightened societal fears, threats to democratic cohesion under populist pressures, and the escalation of armed conflicts, there is a pressing need for spaces that promote creative expression, open dialogue, and cultural visibility.

In collaboration with a practice-based partner—an interdisciplinary production and performance venue in Leipzig—this project explores how spaces of resonance, both verbal and non-verbal, can be intentionally designed to invite participation, enable meaningful engagement, and support the exploration of diverse ways of creating and living together.

We ask: What makes spaces for experience and creativity resonate? How do such spaces influence participants, and in turn, how do they foster a sense of self-efficacy and belonging? How do they invite reflection on self-image, personal goals, and life circumstances? To explore these questions, we design and research various creative spaces, each centered on expression through language or sound. Through these low-threshold offerings, we seek to understand how personal creative narratives—both verbal and sonic—can generate spaces of resonance, thereby enabling new forms of expression, engagement, and negotiation.

To accompany the open and evolving process of spatial design, the research adopts a process-oriented, posthuman paradigm. This framework draws on participatory and (post)qualitative methodologies to examine how these creative environments emerge, transform, and invite participation beyond human-centered paradigms.

This paper presentation will explore a qualitative study of the utilization of havruta-style text study to read and analyze primary sources in a social studies/history methods course. This style of text study is rooted in a traditional Jewish style of textual learning, where men studied complex texts in the Yeshiva (Shulman, 2008). At the heart of havruta is partner text study, where dyads or triads of students closely read and examine a text. As part of this, partners corroborate, disagree, and question to delve deeply into the meaning of a text (Shargel, 2019). Our research goal was to: a) investigate preservice teachers’ understanding and interpretation of primary sources using havruta-style text study, b) examine preservice teachers’ willingness to use this method in the middle and secondary classroom, and c) consider how to apply this method to the scholarship of teaching and learning. Recently, educators have been experimenting with this style of text study in secular contexts. There have, however, been only a few studies that consider the impact of havruta in secular settings, such as English classes and first-year college seminars (Shargel, 2019; Wright, Bergom, & Brooks, 2011). To date, there are no extant studies of preservice teachers in universities preparing for public education using havruta-style text study. Our qualitative study is based on three semesters of data collection with three groups of preservice secondary social studies/history teachers, where we took fieldnotes, conducted debriefs after each havruta session, and did a final focus group interview at the end of each semester. We used thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006) to code the data.Our research aims to add to the repertoire of havruta instruction by creating new knowledge of using this method for preservice teachers in public education.

The paper examines how the scientific and professional foundations of education can be reimagined phenomenologically through the reversible relation between perception and world. Educational science offers both general and specific concepts that address the lived problems and possibilities of teaching. Yet these terms often acquire meanings within institutional contexts that exclude the very experiences they aim to describe. Institutional discourses, dominated by nominalization, tend to dissolve the intimacy between word and experience (Nilsen, 2021).

Drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s later writings on language, visibility, and the flesh, teachers’ professional language emerges as an effort to restore contact between the linguistic shell and the lived gesture, allowing speech to pervade speech in a porous renewal of expression (Kaushik, 2025).

As professional practices mimic the methods and attitudes of science, they risk falling into the same pitfalls that Merleau-Ponty cautions against, unless they remain thoughtful of their origin in lived experience. Seen in this light, professional language and communication are reconsidered not as systems of control, but as movements within a field of reversibility where expression loosens articulation and exposes the fragile juncture of body and world, thought and gesture.

From this view, ethics emerges through exposure, excess, and reversibility, modes of unsettling the professional that transform authority into responsiveness. Such modes open a space where teaching and research become practices of contact rather than mastery, grounded in the risk and ambiguity of a shared thought’s body (1968).

Kaushik, R. (2025). The problem of speech in Merleau-Ponty. Philosophies, 10(3), 50. https://doi.org/10.3390/philosophies10030050

Nilsen, A. C. E. (2021). Professional talk: Unpacking professional language. In P. Luken (Ed.), The Palgrave handbook of institutional ethnography (pp. 359–374). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54222-0_25

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1968). The visible and the invisible: Followed by working notes. Northwestern University Press.

What I explore in this paper is what might unfold through playful and speculative dialogues with the haunting and absences of early childhood education (ECE). By using ideas from hauntology (Derrida 2006), I think-with possible future(s) by looking at what is making itself known as an absent-presence. For educational research, hauntology can provide tools for considering how the past might be at work as hidden silences and absences. With the figuration of data-ghost(s) I think with what lingers, troubles or is silent as hauntings. As a fluid methodological move, I create data-ghost(s) with artwork to speak of, to and with the ghostly. With such ghostly presences, I attend to what went unnoticed or was ignored. By re-turning to pedagogical documentation practices with imagery and narratives of learning events, I slow down and linger with events I had not paid attention to before to notice what has been absented but still having an influence. With data-ghost(s), I make greedy magpie-like borrowing from arts-based research practices to consider theory, speculation and research work in relation. Speculating with absences leaves space for otherwise possible future(s) to unfold with hauntological imaginaries in-between liminalities of past-present-future(s). I do this by first attending to what interrupts and re-turns in dialogue with the words of Derrida. Then I use data-ghost(s) creations by imagining digital artworks as an absent-presence. With these data-ghost(s) I imagine possible future(s) involving teacher education. But speculating with the ghostly invites attention to documentation’s own desirings and dialogues that silently go on in-between past-present-future(s). What I propose is that hauntings trouble and generate speculative openings. Such spaces bring attention to what is missing from documentation along with possible future(s) for practice and research. But what haunts is an unreliable kind of data where documentation itself might reveal its own wants and desires.