The agency of wood: multisensory interviews with Art and Crafts teachers in a post-humanistic and new-materialistic perspective

Abstract

In this article, researchers from the perspectives of post-humanism and new materialism investigate the methodological possibilities and challenges offered by multisensory interviews with Norwegian Art and Crafts teachers regarding their practice theories connected to woodwork with primary school children. Author 1 has visited eight different schools, conducting multisensory interviews with eight different teachers in their different woodworking spaces. The authors, in active dialogue with post-humanism and new materialism, articulate how the “bodyminded” researcher, woodworking spaces, the children’s wooden artefacts-in-process and the structures making up practice architectures for woodwork in Norwegian primary schools have real, meaning-producing agency for the teachers’ practice theories about their teaching knowledge during the multisensory interviews. Finally, the article serves as a critique of the dominant form of mainly verbal interviews in educational research and instead feeds into an embodied, new-materialistic and ecological view on learning, meaning-making, communication and researcher-understanding.