Swimming lessons : learning, new materialisms, posthumanism, and post qualitative research emerge through a pool poem

This article shifts from the formal learning spaces of school and university to an Australian public swimming pool to playfully engage some of the dilemmas that recent theory poses for curriculum studies. The article enacts multiple diffractions (Barad, 2007) as theory becomes swimming and swimming becomes theory, and ideas and movements are themselves diffracted or changed by the writing of a poem. What does the pool teach us? What is learnt at the pool? How does learning emerge at the pool? Physics, chemistry, biology, and artistry combine, as multiple human and non-human bodies intra-act (Barad, 2007), calling each other into being in this exploration of how distributed agencies and fractal causalities (Bennett, 2010) change how learning might be thought, represented, and swum. The poem incorporated here serves as provocation and inspiration for other scholars struggling with these educational dilemmas and interested in arts-based research.