Conceptual ecologies for educational research through Deleuze,Guattari and Whitehead

This article will explore the increasing interest in the application of the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari and Alfred North Whitehead to educational research, for example, as a conceptual underpinning for inquiry in the new materialisms, and/or educational posthumanism. The exploration of this paper is complicated by the fact that Deleuze and Guattari changed their philosophical position in their dual publications, with, for example, their last book: What is Philosophy? representing a substantial departure from their rhizomatic work in, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. This article will explain the changes in position with reference to the mapping of conceptual ecologies that Deleuze and Guattari are describing through their philosophy, and not dualism. Concept creation appears in the analysis of Western philosophy in: What is Philosophy? and as the job of philosophy. In contrast, A Thousand Plateaus presents a whole raft of interrelated concepts that help explain the connections between capitalism and schizophrenia, but do not present ‘concept creation’ as a positive task as such, even though one could impute that they are successfully doing it. This article will explain these changes in positioning of Deleuze and Guattari as a mode of sophisticated conceptual ecology, which takes into account the work that they want their concepts to perform. Transcribed to educational research, ‘concept creation’ is an importantly non-methodological task, which is augmented and expanded with reference to the metaphysics of Whitehead’s process philosophy (a non-method), and how it has been taken up, for example, by Isabelle Stengers in terms of research positioning and science.     

Thinking with Deleuze and Guattari: An exploration of writing as assemblage

We need to keep experimenting with writing to meet the challenges of Deleuze and Guattari’s flattened ontology in the humanities. The paper reports on a small, experimental research project at a university in the north-west of England. The findings are written in an experimental mode, inspired by the Deleuze and Guattarian concept, ‘assemblage’. The experiment is theorised and assessed in a non-reductive way that offers future creative possibilities to other researchers. First, the paper presents a context for the subsequent experimental writing. Some current innovative writerly practice and some theoretical and methodological standpoints are reviewed. Next, this paper presents its theorisation of ‘assemblage’ with particular reference to Deleuze and Guattari’s use of the idea, ‘double articulation’. This approach supports and justifies the author’s schematisation of the textual assemblage into four areas: identity, work, territory and dissolving territory. The author explains how these ideas function within an experimental discursive text and illustrates their possible usage in the experimental text itself. Thus, this paper offers a theoretical justification, an explanation of and an assessment of experimental writing, in addition to the experimental text itself, all of which are of potential interest to researchers in the fields of education and philosophy.     

Thriving in-between the cracks: Deleuze and guerilla science teaching in Singapore

The radical philosophies of difference articulated by Deleuze and Guattari are just beginning to impinge the field of education although less so within science education. One common thread among the numerous concepts and neologisms (especially the rhizome) that have been coined is the necessity for thinking and acting in what they call ‘experimental’ modes, which shifts our focus onto the eternal process of becoming rather than merely (re)producing states of being. I reflect upon these seemingly utopian ideas in the light of recent educational changes in Singapore aimed at preparing competent citizen–workers for the knowledge economy and globalization. In particular, this paper shows how one elementary science teacher adopted guerilla tactics while negotiating these sometimes conflicting transitions in policies. I argue that neither mandated, top-down reforms nor drastic experimentation by individuals alone are most productive but rather working in the ephemeral in-between spaces of the rhizome, which Deleuze and Guattari had all long championed.

Creativity,Group Pedagogy and Social Action: A departure from Gough

The following paper continues discussions within this journal about how the work of Delueze and Guattari can inform radical pedagogy. Building primarily on Noel paper, we take up the challenge to move towards a more creative form of ‘becoming cyborg’ in our teaching. In contrast to work that has focused on Deleuzian theories of the rhizome, we deploy Guattari's work on institutional schizoanalysis to explore the role of group creativity in radical pedagogy. The institutional therapies of Felix Guattari's schizoanalytic practice in the 1950s and 1960s and, before him, the Francophone educationalist Celestin Freinet, who founded the Modern School Movement, are explored and used to illuminate examples of some of our own attempts to set the classroom up as a space for collective engagement. We conclude by exploring how this understanding of the class as subject group may be used to mobilise action and de‐stabilise the coordinates of existing academic divisions of labour.     

Affective Teaching for Effective Learning: A Deleuzian pedagogy for the (corporate era and) Chinese context

In this article I explore the pedagogical value of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s philosophical concepts for helping make an ‘event’ of thought, with a view towards fostering deep learning in Chinese students' learning theory and criticism in a second language. Paying attention to the qualitative role of bodies, humour and creativity alongside an expanded trans-personal concept of ‘educational life forms’ that stretches out to include an affective assemblage of inhuman elements (such as art and technology), I explore how Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophical models provide a ethical alternative to corporate, Confucian and Cartesian models otherwise inhibiting students and teachers in the modern Sino-international university context.     

The wicked problem of embedding academic literacies: exploring rhizomatic ways of working through an adaptive leadership approach

Embedding academic literacies in higher education courses has been a major focus of the work of learning advisers. A number of studies present the results of embedding in specific courses without discussing the processes of negotiation or the different people involved. This paper is about embedding academic literacies in the Business faculty as part of an English language proficiency model at an Australian university. After initial slow progress, a team of learning advisers began to evaluate the process by reflecting on practice. This reflection focused on the space between the top-down process as planned and what actually happened in the complex academic environment. There were tensions between the proposed plan and the expectations and understandings of the disciplinary academics. These were used as a starting point to explore the issues in more detail. This paper argues that the task of embedding academic literacies bears all the hallmarks of a ‘wicked problem’ which eludes a linear formulation and is open to multiple framings. The botanical metaphor of the rhizome from the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari and an adaptive leadership approach offer ways of responding to this problem. This paper reinterprets the team’s experiences using these theories and suggests alternative work practices. By moving away from the concept of a model, more opportunities to bring about attitudinal and curriculum change can be created to make academic literacies explicit for students.     

The Logics of Good Teaching in an Audit Culture: A Deleuzian analysis

This article examines the attempted reform of education within an emerging audit culture in Australia that has led to the implementation of a high-stakes testing regime known as NAPLAN. NAPLAN represents a machine of auditing, which creates and accounts for data that are used to measure, amongst other things, good teaching. In particular, we address the logics of a policy intervention that aims to improve the quality of education through returning ‘good teaching’. Using Deleuze’s concepts of series, events, copies and simulacra, we suggest that an attempt to return past commonsense logics of ‘good teaching’ as a result of NAPLAN is not possible. In an audit culture as exemplified by NAPLAN, ‘good teaching’ is being reconceptualized through those practices and becomes unrecognizable. Whilst policy claims to improved equity and quality are admirable, this article suggests that the simulacral change to logics of good teaching may actualize something very different.     

Post-qualitative line of flight and the confabulative conversation: a methodological ethnography

This paper is a methodological ethnography aiming to highlight the difficulties in using conventional methods in connection with an explorative philosophy; Deleuze and Guattari’s. Taking an empirical point of departure in conversations about the future with students in upper secondary school, the struggle to find a scientifically valid label through the focus group interview is outlined. However, combining the particular philosophy with a conventional qualitative method turned out to be an impossible aim since the ideals of the focus group interview departures in the image of stable subject simultaneously as the method is blemished by positivistic language and standards. By turning to post-qualitative research, which encourages new concepts and methods, the confabulative conversation was produced. Within these confabulative conversations, the aim has been to create a methodologically smooth space in order to enable movements beyond manifested knowledge in favor of the virtual and the not-yet-seen, and thus producing possibilities for something new.     

Images of thinking in feminist materialisms: ontological divergences and the production of researcher subjectivities

Qualitative feminist studies are much challenged by the contemporary critique of social constructionist postmodernism, as well as the renewed search for the body and materiality. The result is (at least) two diverging research accounts: a renewed feminist materialism, relying on some foundational ontologies and what has been called a new materialist feminist account that constitutes radical ontological rewritings. The aim of this paper is to investigate what kind of researcher subjectivities these different accounts produce for qualitative inquiry. This investigation will be unfolded using an example from a collaborative research process involving 10 PhD students. The example is woven into Deleuze and Guattari’s discussions on the Image of Thought and the three images of thinking outlined in A Thousand Plateaus. The investigation shows that although the aim of our collaborative process was to resist the assumed Cogito/“I” of philosophy and qualitative inquiry, we still got caught up in taken-for-granted images of thinking and doing analysis. A deterritorializing of habits of thinking and practicing in order for new and other researcher subjectivities to emerge required collaborative efforts that put to work a rhizomatic image of thinking and operated from within an ontology of difference.     

Diffraction and response-able reading of texts: the relational ontologies of Barad and Deleuze

In this paper, we use a diffractive reading developed by feminist philosopher and quantum physicist Karen Barad, as part of a response-able methodology, in order to consider the claim made by Serge Hein in his paper ‘The New Materialism in Qualitative Inquiry: How Compatible Are the Philosophies of Barad and Deleuze?’ (2016) that the philosophies of Barad and Deleuze and Guattari are incommensurable. Our point of departure is from a stance which is quite different from that of Hein’s – we propose that it is indeed productive to put the work of Barad into conversation with that of Deleuze. As an alternative to critique used by Hein to engage with the work of Barad and Deleuze, we consider how a response-able and diffractive reading of notions of critique could provide a more affirmative and productive way of reading academic texts, including those by Barad and Deleuze.     

Latino families becoming-literate in Australia: Deleuze,literacy and the politics of immigration

This article examines qualitative data from a two family case study in New South Wales. Both families are from South America and have recently moved to Australia. This study demonstrates that an understanding of the ways that the families are becoming literate in Australia necessitates moving beyond linguistic analyses of the changes that are occurring. The changes that are addressed constitute a politics of immigration, whereby the internal hopes and desires of the family make up an affective plane that transforms language learning. Such writing exemplifies the use of Deleuzian theory in the analysis of the literacy learning of the families, and shows how this rests on notions of the will to power, affect and the multiple nature of the self. The paper will use Masny's (2006) multiple literacies theory (MLT) to reconcile the politics of becoming involved with the immigration of the families and variant modes of expression.     

词义与概念之间的关系问题研究述评

词义与概念之间的关系问题,是语言学中最重要、最复杂的问题之一,同时也是语言学中争论最多的理论问题之一。半个多世纪以来,国内外学者对词义与概念之间的关系问题展开了热烈的讨论,仍有深入讨论的必要。     

健康与文化并重的高校体育课程理念理论阐释

在探讨健康与文化并重的高校体育课程理念内涵的基础上,从哲学、文化学和课程学等方面对其理论依据进行分析和阐释。研究认为:现象学理论需要高校体育课程理念强调学生生活体验的实践价值;生存美学理论揭示高校体育课程理念要兼顾体育课程文化传承和学生健康水平提高的关系;体育文化传播理论强调运动文化传承在高校体育课程理念发展中的重要地位和作用。     

Becoming-topologies of education: deformations,networks and the database effect

This article uses topological approaches to suggest that education is becoming-topological. Analyses presented in a recent double-issue of Theory, Culture & Society are used to demonstrate the utility of topology for education. In particular, the article explains education's topological character through examining the global convergence of education policy, testing and the discursive ranking of systems, schools and individuals in the promise of reforming education through the proliferation of regimes of testing at local and global levels that constitute a new form of governance through data. In this conceptualisation of global education policy changes in the form and nature of testing combine with it the emergence of global policy network to change the nature of the local (national, regional, school and classroom) forces that operate through the ‘system’. While these forces change, they work through a discursivity that produces disciplinary effects, but in a different way. This new–old disciplinarity, or ‘database effect’, is here represented through a topological approach because of its utility for conceiving education in an increasingly networked world.     

Design Pedagogy for an Unknown Future: A View from the Expanding Field of Design Scholarship and Professional Practice

This article draws on current research investigating the notion of design for an unknown future. It reflects on recent thinking about the role of creativity in design practice and discusses implications for the development and assessment of creativity in the design studio. It begins with a review of literature on the issues and challenges associated with the assessment of creativity in design education. It then discusses and distinguishes three significant assessment models in design and creative arts education and emphasises the importance of opening debate on notions of creativity within the discipline. Following this, the article examines recent developments in the way that creativity is being practised, driven, fostered and implemented in contemporary design practice, and argues that these recent developments must feature in current scholarship about the development and assessment of creativity in design education. The article recommends areas for future research that pay close attention to developments in the rapidly expanding field of design practice.     

语文学习动机的概念与结构分析

学习动机的研究,已经从行为主义的动机观发展到社会文化的动机观。现阶段,有学者开辟了整合研究方向,提出了动机的自我调节论。基于此,我们认为,语文学习动机是激发、维持学生学习行为,并使之朝向一定语文学习目标的一种内在过程或内部心理状态。进而,经过进一步分析可以看到,语文学习动机的基本结构,一般地包括认知内驱力（学习兴趣）、自我提高内驱力（自尊）、附属内驱力（奖励、批评）、自我效能感（成功）、意志（自觉、毅力）和成就归因（成绩）等六个维度。     

Embodiment and becoming in secondary drama classrooms: the effects of neoliberal education cultures on performances of self and of drama texts

This article explores the effects of neoliberalism and performative educational cultures on secondary school drama classrooms. We consider the ways Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanalysis and Butler’s concept of gender performance enable us to chart the embodied, relational, spatial and affective energies that inhabit the often neoliberal and heterosexually striated space of the drama classroom. These post-humanist analyses are useful methodological tools for mapping the complexities of student becomings in the space context of the secondary school. We also show how Foucault’s governmentality and Ball’s theory of competitive performativity are particularly salient in the context of immanent capitalism that shapes the desires of its subjects. These frameworks, when combined, can be useful in critiquing neoliberal educational assemblages and in indicating emerging deterritorializations and lines of flight in teachers and students.     

浅谈徽州古民居的建筑装饰艺术与文化观念

徽州传统民居的建筑、装饰艺术隐含了一定艺术审美、文化思想,它们追求天、地、人统一的宇宙观；宣扬人伦、孝悌、进学的礼制观；企盼福、禄、寿、喜的生存观。     

基于OBE理念的课程目标构建与实践 ——以过程流体机械课程为例

课程目标是对课程学习成果的预期,是评估学生课程学习效果的基础.基于OBE理念,剖析了课程目标与毕业要求、课程目标与课程学习成果评估的关系,论述了课程目标的特点及撰写方法.以过程流体机械课程为例,构建了课堂教学目标与课程目标,为落实课堂教学改革与考核奠定了基础.