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.