Conference Agenda

Dominant traditions in physical education (PE) have framed movement primarily through natural science paradigms and physical skill models, positioning teachers as technicians who apply behavioral principles, established categorizations and performance pedagogies. This narrow view risks reinforcing ableist perspectives and elitist norms. What makes movement education distinctive in PE, is its potential to value both the concrete (skills, performance) and the abstract (principles, concepts) as intertwined and embodied phenomena that can promote inclusive, and holistic forms of learning. Thus, teaching about movement in PE entails moving beyond scientific reasoning alone, toward creating pedagogical conditions of non-representational thinking and action.
In the present study, these conditions are dealt with through the concept of intellectual acrobatics. Via a Deleuzian perspective, intellectual acrobatics refers to a process of destabilizing and reassembling established assumptions and categorizations, by inviting pedagogy to take bold conceptual and practical leaps. As such, the aim of this study is to examine whether and how intellectual acrobatics can position pedagogy-as-creation in PE, enabling teachers to think and work with movement in ways that generate new, yet-to-be-realized possibilities.
By using Deleuzian notions of thinking-with-signs, I initially explore dogmatic images of thought within PE and their implications for how movement is taught and learned. Afterwards, the concept of intellectual acrobatics is suggested as an alternative approach for reimagining movement education within PE. Running, as an example of locomotor movement, is used to illustrate how intellectual acrobatics can open multiple ways of encountering signs in, with, and about learning to run, each demanding equally diverse pedagogical responses. I finally consider the capacity of this concept to reorient contemporary PE, offering new perspectives for how movement might be understood and taught.

This study explores how metaphor writing supports future teachers in
shaping their professional identities and responding to the complex
challenges of our time. Metaphors are approached as “technologies of the
self” (Foucault, 1988), enabling student teachers to reflect on who they
are and who they aspire to become in a world marked by uncertainty,
interdependence, and crisis.
Through the creation of metaphors (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980) about ‘the
environmental education teacher’, participants engage deeply with their
own experiences, articulating evolving understandings of teaching,
responsibility, and care. These figurative expressions serve as sites for
both personal reflection and collective meaning-making, revealing how
teachers’ ethical sensitivities emerge in relation to others and to the
more-than-human world.
Metaphor writing in this study was embedded within three university
courses, where relational interaction, dialogue, and self-reflection
formed the core of pedagogy. In these participatory spaces, students
explored how their experiences, perceptions, and aspirations could be
expressed and reimagined through metaphor, positioning learning as
relational, embodied, and transformative.
By foregrounding creativity, collaboration, and reflection, the study
contributes to the qualitative research community by demonstrating how
imagination and affect can engage future teachers with global and local
crises. It advocates for pedagogies grounded in imaginative,
self-reflective practices that foster resilience, ethical responsibility,
and transformative teaching. Metaphor writing emerges thus as a generative
approach for reimagining teacher pedagogy in response to the
interconnected challenges shaping education today.

Young children’s excited curiosity, wonder and adventurous pursuit of experience epitomise a world-in-formation. Their educational journey either expands or curtails their creativity, imagination and empathy. Neoliberalist values and institutional pressures in Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) in England often pressurise educators into outcome-focused teaching, forcing them to navigate complex political terrain (Moss, 2024). I focus on the hope offered by the alternative of a pedagogy of adventure, encouraging children to go knowingly into the unknown and to pursue their rhizomatic desire lines, as they seek to share everyday spaces with the human and more-than-human.

Through autoethnographic narrative from a nursery, I show that giving time and space to children’s ‘becoming-with’ allows a growing resonance with the world, challenging dominant egocentric values (Biesta, 2013). Two children noticing a spider’s web became a powerful story as data and of data, permitting a turning and re-turning (Barad, 2007). It led to thinking with data, allowing it to thicken, becoming more than itself (Ungar, 2017) within its wider narratives. Slow pedagogy (Clark, 2023) created entangled spaces and places. The children’s subsequent decision-making evidenced the affective condition of (be)longing, enmeshing their past, present and future hope (Kraftl, 2024).

The children’s thirst for (lost) knowledge and their subsequent attachments to the more-than-human, to place and to space evidence the joys which transcend standard boundaries. Methodologically, using this data from the ‘unruly edges’ (Tsing, 2015) unearths sensory, affective connection and new ecological possibilities. It places ECEC settings as potential democratic sites at the centre of interconnected communities.

In this paper, we explore collaborative scribbling, drawing, and writing as a research approach and how drawn and written marks became entwined with our thinking, creativity, and everyday lives over a period of three years. This paper presentation draws on a previous study in which literature’s thing-power created movements in student teachers’ learning diaries during a university course on children’s literature and drama in early childhood teacher education. To explore the affective and material power of literature, we employed a creative approach of visually playing with scribbles, sketches and collages when tuning into the movements we could sense in the learning diaries. The collaborative process became affective, embodied, material, and achronological, and extended across several events, modalities, and platforms. Here, we explore a new line of thought and inquiry about the continuous presence of movements, tensions, and meaning-making through written and drawn marks —lines that are not straight but quivering, remaining as visible moments of dialogue. For this paper, we each chose an event that felt significant from our previous study to continue to draw from, with, over and along those quivering lines. At the same time, we explore how they bend and move as part of our shared analytic processes. We are curious about the productive and nonsensical movements of quivering lines and messy marks as part of academic research and life; such marks are always collaborative, material and relationally performed. Thus, we ask: What playful, unruly, insipid and consequential meanings and relations can these marks perform?

This paper explores the ontological possibilities of in-service teachers’ engagement in deep listening (Gershon, 2020; Oliveros, 2005) with children. Deep listening is “a fully embodied attention to another’s expression so deep that you can hear the alignment between her intentions, attentions, and expressions” (Gershon, 2020, p. 1170). Deep listening is a means through which teachers can make space for a deeper, embodied understanding of children’s emerging knowledge and identities, “in an apprenticing rather than a hierarchical expert relationship” (Watkins & Lorenz, 2002, as cited in Laryea, 2018, p. 3). Using concepts centered in diffractive methodologies (Barad, 2007) I explore the nonhuman agency of deep listening within the embodied practice of in-service teachers in a graduate-level teacher learning program. Teachers in this language and literacy program engage in recursive inquiry cycles based in asset pedagogies (Paris, 2012; Paris & Alim, 2014, 2017) using video analysis of their interactions with children that are based in rural and urban settings in Alaska.

Alaska Native scholars forward the importance of deep listening in pedagogical spaces (John Shields, 2018; Kawagley, 1995; Merculieff & Roderick, 2006). According to Kawagley, “To the Yupiat, listening not only with the ears, but with the mind and heart are essential to becoming aware of patterns and events that reflect natural laws” (1995, p. 2). Merculieff and Roderick admonish western educators to “stop talking” in their work in Alaska Native classrooms.

Working diffractively from data fragments that “glow” (MacClure, 2013, p. 661), I seek to understand what is created when teachers engage in deep listening in their learning-practice (Strom & Viesca, 2020) with children. What agentic role can deep listening (silence, awareness) play in the educative entanglements in which teachers are becoming alongside children within their learning-practice (Strom & Viesca, 2020)? What becomes in those spaces of deep listening?