The agential torrent: an a/r/tographic exploration of face-to-face classroom encounters
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After two years (2019-2021) of frustrating online crisis teaching in response to COVID-19, I came to a new appreciation of what I had previously taken for granted in my classroom teaching experiences. Provoked by a tangible feeling of loss, this thesis investigates the abiding question of how to better understand and describe the experience of bodies participating in an educational setting. Using a/r/tography and self-study research methodologies, and by applying the onto-epistemology of agential realism and an embodied cognition framework, this paper and graphic novel examines the agential and embodied nature of face-to-face classroom interactions (both human and non-human). The paper attempts to describe the intensely interconnected, multifaceted, and overwhelmingly complicated relations (involving actants) continually forming and reforming - a torrent of agency. Three a/r/tographic renderings are employed in the graphic novel: (1) intra-actions between agential classroom bodies are comprised of waves; (2) the nature of these multi-layered and interweaving intra-actions is entangled; and (3) the ongoing and discursive nature of these intra-actions results in emergence. This resplendent maelstrom of classroom phenomena is contrasted with the diminutive and capitalistic neoliberal educational narrative. The research was provoked by the imposed juxtaposition of these two paradigms during the onset of COVID-19 and subsequent moves to sustain society and the education system through online crisis learning. The paper concludes with discussion questions as prompted in the graphic novel to further the reader’s collaborative study of face-to-face learning.