Emergent experiences of primary aged participants in an after-school drama club

This thesis explores what happens when children explore Shakespeare through drama in an after-school club. It draws on data generated from a ten week after-school club in which a group of 21 Year 6 children explored Shakespeare’s Macbeth using the practice of drama. The research is positioned within the poststructuralist paradigm and draws on Deleuzo-Guattarian (2004) concepts, including affect, emergence, assemblage and the metaphor of the rhizome, alongside thinking from Law (2004) on the role of method in producing realities. The research develops a suite of methods to explore and analyse the experience of individuals within the club. These include methods selected to generate data during the running of the club, including recording of the club using GoPro camera from different perspectives, interviewing ‘in the moment’ and to review, and the use of Actor’s Notebooks (including the researcher’s reflective journal from her experience of the club as a participant observer). Approaches to analysis are developed appropriate to the poststructural methodology and in ways that contribute further to research already applying Deleuzo-Guattarian concepts within literacy studies. Approaches to analysis include the development of a collection of metaphors to support thinking with the data, including a film strip, rhizomic mobile and use of storying. These approaches support thinking with the data in ways that enable stories to be told that explore the potential experiences of individuals through their collective assembling within the club. The analysis considers both human and non-human actors within what assembles and how their intra-action had potential to affect what emerged. Actors considered within what assembled include human actors, texts, material items, feeling histories (Ehret and Hollett, 2014) and embodied, cultural and social histories (Medina and Perry, 2014). Data and analysis resulting from the club and approach to analysis have resulted in three contributions to knowledge:

•A suite of methods to explore multiplicity, potentiality and emergence within educational experience, with the potential to further contribute to poststructural and postqualitative debates within literacy studies and education more broadly.

• A contribution to how affective atmospheres, assemblings and emergence can be understood in relation to literacy studies and educational experience more broadly.

•A new conceptualisation that I term ‘participant-educator’. This details how the theoretical concepts of assembling, emergence, multiplicity and potentiality, alongside the tool of allegory, can be used to sensitise educators to the complexity of educational experience, enabling them to work as participant-educators who are sensitive and responsive to individual experience.