This study aimed to elucidate how school employees caring for students with intellectual disabilities managed emergencies caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. It attended to decision-making by school managers as well as the engagement of local teachers in the outcome resolution process. A total of 10 teachers employed in different positions were purposefully selected from a school for students with intellectual disabilities in Osaka, Japan, and interviews were conducted with them via Zoom. The thematic analysis identified six significant premises: sensemaking, emergency responsive organization, high morale, planning through prioritization, risk management, and recovery from adverse incidents. The findings suggest distributed leadership functions to successfully sustain security in educational practices. Additionally, the empirical study consisting of interviews with staff in multiple positions reveals that all of the staff’s proactive participation in decision-making and the communication process enabled the school to cope with the pandemic crisis as a united organization.
Kusumi, Y. (2022). Actualizing concept without language: a diffractive analysis of educational practice for children with disabilities with handmade manipulative materials in Japan. doi.org/10.1080/09518398.2022.2127016
This study reconsidered educational materials by analyzing educators’ opinions regarding handmade manipulative materials (HMMs) for children with profound intellectual and multiple disabilities in Japan. Instead of concurring with the view that educational materials are static and inert products, the author adopted an agential realist perspective and considered them as agencies working and becoming with teachers and children. The author interviewed two retired teachers who had spent more than 30 years in HMM production and analyzed the obtained data using a diffractive methodology. Findings showed that making and remaking HMMs allowed teachers and children to engage with actualizing concepts without language and demonstrated the open-ended nature of learning for teachers and children with HMMs.
Providing solutions to increasing global concerns, by analyzing the world form an outside perspective is difficult, because we ourselves are a part of those ongoing issues. Hence, post-qualitative resaerch, which emerges from qualitative research, mainly postulates the theory of Deleuzian philosophy, new materialism, and post-humanism, and borrows ideas from anti-representationism, symmetry between materials and humans, and decentering of humans. Futhermore, the methodology and writing style of post-qualitative research, which is often from the ethico-onto-epistem-ological perspective, are seemingly entirely different from those of traditional studies. In this approach, researchers and various data intra-act in a deterritorialized and destratificated plane of immanence. Thus, their assemblages create novel knowledge. By closely examining the neologisms and tropes of post-qualitative researchers, overviewing the criticisms of their theory, and grasping the important characteristics of post-qualitative research, the current study hopes to open the boundaries of qualitative research that may lead to post-qualitative research.
