A Diffractive Reading of Multiliteracies, Participatory Teacher Action Research and Cultural Historical Activity Theory: Entanglements and Insights in Indigenous Language Teaching

This article examines the onto-epistemological-methodological grounding of a conceptualization of praxis in the context of Indigenous language teaching for maintenance and revitalization.  We conduct a diffractive reading (Barad, 2007) of cultural historical activity theory (Vygotsky, 1978; Engeström, 2001) and PTAR (Kemmis McTaggert 2005; Siekmann et al., 2019) and pedagogy of multiliteracies (Cazden et al., 1996; Cope Kalantzis, 2009) to gain new insights into the commensurability of their ontological assumptions and epistemological underpinnings. First we contextualize of our work with-in Indigenous educational communities. Next, we explain Barad’s diffractive methodology and discuss our three insights: 1) the entanglement of being-knowing-doing grounds theory-practice or praxis; 2) cyclic and iterative design cycles in PTAR foster teacher agency; 3) recognizing tensions and contradictions are necessary to facilitate the transformative action of praxis. Our conclusion explains the entanglement of theory-practice in terms of praxis that is based in intra-action. In our conclusion, we propose using a diffractive methodology to read theories through rather than against one another makes visible the intra-theorical conceptualizations as an alternative to discussing these as inter-actions among theoretical concepts.