Deconstructing the Scene of Teaching, Learning, and Education Research: A Post-critical Dialogue

This text enacts a form of deconstructive inquiry into the scene of teaching, learning, and educational research as it reflects on a participatory exploration of the school garden. The characteristic features of the post-critical dialogical approach we take – putting two columns in play – actively decenter meaning in the interpretive moments of the act of reading as writing. The point of entry attempts to broach the set of systemic hierarchical relations underlying the relations of power and knowledge in the scene of teaching, learning, and educational research. Specifically, the ethics and politics of its representation, the practices it enacts, endorses, and tries to reproduce. Respecting what Jacques Derrida has called the “exigencies” or norms of a classical protocols of reading and writing, it interrogates the representation of qualitative inquiry and the conditions of its interpretability as the working-out of ideas through language in the power and knowledge of a shared space of meaning-making. The text exemplifies what a deconstructive mode of intervention would actually look like and do as qualitative inquiry and how its praxis of productive resistance could enable an ethical reform of the scene of teaching, learning, and educational research.