A Diffractive Reading of Multiliteracies, Participatory Teacher Action Research and Cultural Historical Activity Theory: Entanglements and Insights in Indigenous Language Teaching

This article examines the onto-epistemological-methodological grounding of a conceptualization of praxis in the context of Indigenous language teaching for maintenance and revitalization.  We conduct a diffractive reading (Barad, ۲۰۰۷) of cultural historical activity theory (Vygotsky, ۱۹۷۸; Engeström, ۲۰۰۱) and PTAR (Kemmis & McTaggert ۲۰۰۵; Siekmann et al., ۲۰۱۹) and pedagogy of multiliteracies (Cazden et al., ۱۹۹۶; Cope & Kalantzis, ۲۰۰۹) to gain new insights into the commensurability of their ontological assumptions and epistemological underpinnings. First we contextualize of our work with-in Indigenous educational communities. Next, we explain Barad’s diffractive methodology and discuss our three insights: ۱) the entanglement of being-knowing-doing grounds theory-practice or praxis; ۲) cyclic and iterative design cycles in PTAR foster teacher agency; ۳) recognizing tensions and contradictions are necessary to facilitate the transformative action of praxis. Our conclusion explains the entanglement of theory-practice in terms of praxis that is based in intra-action. In our conclusion, we propose using a diffractive methodology to read theories through rather than against one another makes visible the intra-theorical conceptualizations as an alternative to discussing these as inter-actions among theoretical concepts.

Keywords:

praxis , participatory teacher action research , multi-literacy , indigenous languages