Crocket, KathieClaiborne, EliseGrant, Jeannie2024-09-172024-09-172024-09-16https://hdl.handle.net/10289/16922Poststructural theory has informed my professional practice in secondary schools for over 25 years. Poststructuralism called me to notice that humanism produces a normal-abnormal binary. This constructs a diversity-difference dualism that operates through the New Zealand Curriculum to define diversity only in relation to cultural difference. While such a framing of diversity presents cultural difference positively, as something to be valued, celebrated, and normalised, the emphasis on cultural difference potentially marginalises disability and LGBT+ difference, positioning them as abnormal. My concern that the intelligibility of diversity in secondary schools is being constrained by the dominance of humanism in Western-anglophone pedagogies provides the impetus for my research project since this construction has implications for how secondary schools prepare young people for a diverse world. In my role as a teacher/counsellor, I noticed that disabled and LGBT+ identities are considered more vulnerable and at-risk of harm. Professional practice in schools focusses on meeting learning needs and reducing risk of harm. Curriculum content currently emphasises self-responsibility and social justice discourses that present difference as a serious, moral-ethical concern to develop empathy. Queer-posthuman pedagogies underpinned by poststructural theory offer an alternative epistemological orientation to difference/diversity that secondary school education in Aotearoa/New Zealand has yet to access in teaching practice. Over two decades, I experimented with forms of facilitation to access posthuman knowledge. This culminated in a collaboration with Philip Patston, a queer-disabled comedian and diversity consultant, to develop a philosophical inquiry process aimed at senior students, called Diversity Inquiry (DIVINQ). The process aims to explore diversity beyond dualisms by employing encounters with difference through humour in a Community of Inquiry format. To date, DIVINQ has run in two large Auckland secondary schools. Through this doctoral study, I set out to investigate how DIVINQ might work as queer-posthuman inquiry. A key focus is how humour-laughter is recruited through a form of trickster co-facilitation to trouble humanist fields of thought. The research project employs a Foucauldian and Deleuzoguattarian conceptual framework that draws on cymatics as a metaphor and metaphors from The Matrix film . The project utilised a practitioner-based autoethnographic approach. Data collection involved interviews with co-facilitators and nine past participants of DIVINQ. Analysis took up posthuman-new-materialist practices of reading data through Foucauldian cues such as discourses and problematisations, and Deleuzoguattarian cues such as assemblages and affects. Findings show that institutional dividing practices are obscured and limit young peoples’ exposure to forms of functional difference/disabilities. Health education draws on bio-medical knowledge that circulates developmental and hygiene discourses. Young people learn to manage risk and take responsibility for their wellbeing. Teaching assemblages employ strategies to negotiate moral taboos of sex-sexuality and construct a safer space to ask questions. These assemblages reinforce ignorance as lack of knowledge and reify normative ideas of sex, gender, and sexuality. In traditional classroom teaching, disciplinary power monitors student behaviour. Humour and laughter, when plugged into such assemblages, function to release tension but also to police social norms. DIVINQ’s rearrangement of objects, use of The Matrix film, and playful performances, disturb institutional hierarchies to construct a trickster facilitation position. Philip’s lifelong experimentation to resist deficit ideas has developed his posthuman knowledge of difference. His stand-up comedy fine-tuned his trickster approach to facilitation. Philip’s rebellious and ironic humour retuned participant encounters with material disability by troubling problematisations of difference. The affective forces of laughter generated by his humour produced an intimate, playfully relaxed environment. In this new space, participants were more comfortable to ask questions and to take risks with ideas. Co-trickster facilitation disturbed rational-reason inquiry skills by initiating thought through affective shocks. The absence of meritocratic measures of success accelerated participants’ desire to engage in DIVINQ. As opposed to producing shame, not knowing and confusion were experienced as pleasurable enlivenment. After finishing school, participants were more open to a broader concept of normal and, subsequently, the notion of difference-as-other resonated with less intensity. Participants developed a greater sensitivity to the positioning effects of language and noticed when their thinking was recaptured by normative, binary ideas. As a result of DIVINQ, participants sought further opportunities to learning through encounters with difference. This project makes a case for DIVINQ to be regarded as a form of queering-posthuman assemblage. It presents humour as a disturber of discourses and laughter as a material-affective force, both of which construct a space to defamiliarise humanist habits of thought. The thesis discusses aspects of trickster facilitation that manages to retune Communities of Inquiry practices to produce a pedagogical practice of epistemic vulnerability. It examines the lasting effects of DIVINQ, which are discussed in terms of a potential emergent posthuman subjectivity oscillating between human-posthumanist fields, and it considers the ethical implications of these effects. This project contributes to the field of poststructural informed pedagogical practice in secondary schools. The research offers DIVINQ as an example of a queer-posthuman form of philosophical inquiry by articulating how trickster facilitation can ethically recruit humour to trouble humanism. In the emergent area of future-oriented education, the project offers a reconceptualisation of what it means to work in new partnerships and with a diversity of knowledge.enAll items in Research Commons are provided for private study and research purposes and are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated.queer pedagogyposthuman pedagogyhumourphilosophy for childrensecondary schoolsdiversitydifferenceLGBT+disabilityfuture oriented educationtrickster facilitationThesis