Animating the experiences of TEFL/SL graduate international students at a Canadian university with new materialities concepts, we seek an understanding of agentive navigation of pedagogical ecologies as a double becoming (Massumi, 2015, p. 124). We offer possibilities for de-territorializing the field of TESL/TEFL through diffractive interferences of existing discursive structures.
Our presentation animates the flow of experiences narrated by international students enrolled in a TEFL/SL graduate program at a Canadian university with concepts from new materiality theories (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987; Manning & Massumi, 2014; Massumi, 2015), for an understanding of how the ecologies of spatio-temporal pedagogical spaces are encountered, navigated, and transformed physically and speculatively. Using an assemblage of conversations from interviews, classroom observations, and course assignment responses, our presentation evolves through various agentive becomings of student-teacher-researcher subjectivities, during their varied academic, pedagogical, and social relationalities during the graduate program. A new materialities perspective of agency shifts focus from the individual to the indeterminate and unexpected affective intensities generated from the various entangled assemblages within pedagogical spaces. Manning (Massumi, 2015) considers these affective moments as speciations (p.122), drawing within them other events, subjects, and objects from the past that constitute the ecological context of the present moment. We unfold the narratives of three students in the program who articulate the entanglement of their pedagogical relationships, as agency is performed as the material-discursive-subject-object entanglement of diffractive interferences and patterns generated within various contexts of affective ecologies. These diffractive patterns emerge in their relational entanglements through literacy interventions, pedagogical re-conceptualizations, and alternative literacy practices, as these students navigate within, and evolve strategies through the various pedagogical ecologies that embody them. As researchers, we are entangled with them as assemblage, propelled into the pedagogical enactments of the past, and participate in their speculative becomings in the future that coalesce in the multiple pedagogical moments in the present. Massumi (2015) terms this interstitial process as a double becoming (p. 124), where the environment and the individual are reciprocally impacted through affective resonances. The presentation offers possibilities for de-territorializing the field of TESL/TEFL through diffractive interferences of existing discursive structures.
