Diffractively narrating teacher agency within the entanglements of inclusion

ABSTRACT New materialist thought complicates humanist conceptions of agency that inform the trope of ‘change agent’ which has been foundational to the scholarship on teacher preparation for inclusive education. This paper describes a preliminary exploration of a new materialist approach to the narrative inquiry of teacher enactments of inclusion. I begin with a brief interpretivist account that privileges the agency of Elizabeth, a novice teacher prepared within a disability studies informed teacher preparation program. Subsequently, in a move characteristic of a new materialist diffractive reading, I read into and through that account using the framework of agential realism to situate Elizabeth among multiple human and non-human agents. I argue for debility as a foundational construct to foster new ways of understanding teacher agency for inclusion.