ABSTRACT
The concept of experimentation positions curriculum, teaching, and learning as contingent and uncertain, alive and dynamic, continually producing new encounters and forces. In examining the space of an afterschool program for grade 5-6 students designed and led by teacher candidates, this chapter considers how experimentation affords a diffractive way of thinking about the forces and encounters produced in an unexpected moment. In the debriefing of teacher candidates at the end of the first evening of the program, we see what can happen when pre-service teachers engage in collaborative dialogue, question-posing, and imaginative thinking; when they refuse to constrain what is possible by the limitations of assumptions, well-worn excuses, or ready labels; when they take time to consider multiple “what-ifs” and “ands”; and when they are open to opportunities to explore what they do not know and to learn and become something new and different in the process.
