More-than-Reflective Practice: Becoming a Diffractive Practitioner

Abstract

Since Donald Schön’s seminal address to the American Educational Research Association in 1987, reflective practice has become a cornerstone in both in-service and pre-service teacher education. Reflective practice rests on an assumption of teachers as independent subjects, capable of cognitively assessing cause and effect relationships to enact change.  New materiality theories however, can augment professional learning in ways that broaden, deepen, and disrupt educative practices through the metaphor of diffraction. Diffraction illuminates differences and disrupts boundaries; whereas reflection involves a mirroring between subject and object that highlights sameness. Diffractive methods create openings for new understandings and ways of becoming; focus attention on how differences are materially constituted and come to matter; interfere with common notions of relationality, self, and practice; and invite the continuous (re)configuration of life in schools. Although diffractive methods are becoming more common in educational research, there are few applications within the realm of practice. This article explores three interrelated ways of going beyond reflective practice and inviting diffraction into the field of professional learning.