Diffractive Practices to Slow Time

Abstract Concerned with developing new ways of reading, writing, and thinking with high school students about texts, the authors of this article—a creative writing teacher and an experimental art teacher, who are also doctoral students—seek to use diffraction, as developed and theorized by Donna Haraway and Karen Barad specifically, to slow down the frenetic pace of the classroom through the entanglement of the radical and subversive possibilities of blackout poetry and computational art represented by coding. The article explores this entanglement of blackout poetry and poetic coding through the interference created and experienced by students and teachers in a classroom as they use the tangible matter of texts to see and re-see what mattered in those texts through the randomness and agency afforded by markers and code. The article suggests that such activities slow down classrooms, allowing students to take time with texts, offering them opportunities to re-imagine and critique existing texts through an engaging classroom activity that blends old and new processes.