Designing and studying teaching that stage productive interferences among theories, artifacts, and practices so new relations, judgments, and forms of learning can emerge by reading classroom elements through one another and noticing how differences take shape and with what consequences, treating pedagogy as a material-discursive arrangement that participates in making what counts as learning.
Diffractive pedagogies extends diffraction from a metaphor and analytic practice into the design and enactment of teaching. Building on Haraway’s invitation to attend to “differences that matter” in situated worlds and Barad’s agential realism, diffractive pedagogy treats classrooms as entangled arrangements of humans, tools, texts, histories, and affects. Instead of looking for a stable picture of teaching effectiveness, it follows how patterns emerge when different elements meet: assignment prompts with platform affordances, feedback practices with student composing rhythms, institutional policies with instructor care work. The term “apparatus,” from Barad, is useful here: Instead of the usual connotation of just a device, the apparatus is the concrete configuration of materials, concepts, and practices that makes some things visible and others less so. A diffractive pedagogy lives in this apparatus design and in the careful reading of its effects.
With Haraway’s figuration work, diffractive pedagogy crafts situated “contact zones” where ideas, bodies, and tools intra-act. This is a consequential encounter that produces new contours of authorship, creativity, and responsibility. Diffractive pedagogies are thus experimental and ethical. They compose conditions for learning that are responsive to the forces already at play, attend to exclusions and emergences, and trace how pedagogical decisions reconfigure relationships, identities, and possibilities. Rather than a set of steps, they are a stance and a set of design habits: composing encounters, noticing interference patterns, and iterating the apparatus in response to what the patterns make felt and thinkable.
Diffractive pedagogies align with postqualitative inquiry by treating method, theory, and practice as mutually shaping. They approach classrooms as assemblages with distributed agency, in line with Deleuze & Guattari’s attention to composition and emergence and Bennett’s account of lively matter. Analysis becomes a practice of tracing how agential cuts are enacted in pedagogy: where boundaries between author and tool are drawn, how evaluation criteria focus attention, which bodies and materials are amplified or quieted. This orientation resonates with affect theory (Ahmed, Massumi), since the felt atmosphere of a class is not taken as an interior state but as an outcome of circulating forces, stories, and things. In research terms, diffractive pedagogies invite study designs that generate data from the relations among artifacts, sensations, and discourses, and that treat apparatus design as a central analytic decision.
In AI-entangled writing classrooms, diffractive pedagogies help surface how authorship and learning are enacted across prompts, interfaces, revision trails, citation practices, and feedback. Reading assignment language through model affordances clarifies how certain moves become legible as “original” while others vanish. Reading instructors’ reflective journals through platform interaction logs and policy statements makes perceptible how specific affective climates arise, such as vigilance, curiosity, or relief. Designing the apparatus diffractively might involve inviting students to annotate their process across human and model contributions, foregrounding the temporalities of drafting, and treating rubrics as living documents that are revised in response to the interference patterns observed. This approach supports accountability without collapsing it into detection, and it opens creativity to include the composition of relations among writers, tools, and texts. It also helps instructors iterate practices in response to emergent effects, for example by adjusting feedback protocols when certain prompts consistently amplify formulaic outputs or dampen student risk-taking.