Abstract

This presentation explores the importance of recognising and interrogating multiplicity when researching interactions through and around texts. We present ‘stacking stories’ of children’s engagement with a virtual world accessed in a classroom, taken from different perspectives on what happened as children traversed virtual and physical sites. We explore how easy assumptions about children’s meaning-making are problematised as the stories articulate with each other in complex ways, and how this use of stacking stories has led us to draw on Deleuze’s ideas of the baroque (1992) when investigating classroom literacies, to suggest a nuanced interpretation of on/offline meaning-making that acknowledges fluidity and instability and also ‘a strong phenomenological realness’ (Kwa, 2002:26).

Pre-session reading: Deleuze, G. (1992). The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. Kwa, C. (2002). Romantic and Baroque Conceptions of Complex Wholes in Sciences. In J. Law & A. Mol (Eds.), Complexities: Social Studies of Knowledge Practices (pp.23-52). Durham: Duke University Press.