DIFFRACTIVE ENCOUNTERS WITH EMPIRICAL AND THEORETICAL UNDERSTANDINGS OF CHILDREN’S CREATIVITY IN SCIENCE ENQUIRY

Abstract

Diffractive methodology is a recently established alternative to the interpretivist approach commonly used in educational research. Unlike epistemological practices grounded in representation, it recognises knowledge making as performative and emergent from difference. This paper offers new insights into diffractive readings in early childhood science education through experimentation with entangled empirical video data, theoretical perspectives and transdisciplinary space. A methodological contribution is made by showing how critical points of difference are created when video footage of shared understandings held by early childhood practitioners encounters existing research on early childhood science education diffractively. These points of difference are made to matter and illuminated as affecting emergent new connections which can reconfigure dominant ways of understanding creativity in early childhood science education. In doing so, children’s creative knowledge making practices in science enquiry are (re)presented as expansive, material knowing which is enacted at once through talk and materials.

Keywords

• new materialism
• diffraction
• early childhood
• science education
• creativity
• videography
• transdisciplinary