Rhizocurrere: a Deleuzo-Guattarian approach to curriculum autobiography

This paper introduces rhizocurrere, a curriculum autobiographical concept I created to chart my efforts to develop place-responsive outdoor environmental education. Rhizocurrere brings together rhizome, a Deleuze and Guattari concept, with currere, Pinar’s autobiographical method for curriculum inquiry. Responding to invitations from Deleuze, Guattari and Pinar, to experiment, I have adapted their ideas to create a philosophical~methodological concept that draws attention to relationships between my pedagogical and curriculum research and the contexts that have shaped my life~work. This paper outlines rhizocurrere, its parent concepts and how I have enacted my attempts to think differently about curricula and pedagogy. The central question is not ‘what is rhizocurrere?’ but rather ‘how does/could rhizocurrere work?’ and ‘what does/might rhizocurrere allow me to do?’     

How to Desire Differently: Home Education as a Heterotopia

This article explores the co‐existence of, and relationship between, alternative education in the form of home education and mainstream schooling. Home education is conceptually subordinate to schooling, relying on schooling for its status as alternative, but also being tied to schooling through the dominant discourse that forms our understandings of education. Practitioners and other defenders frequently justify home education by running an implicit or explicit comparison with school; a comparison which expresses the desire to do ‘better’ than school whilst simultaneously encompassing the desire to do things differently. These twin aims, however, are not easy to reconcile, meaning that the challenge to schooling and the submission to norms and beliefs that underlie schooling are frequently inseparable. This article explores the trajectories of ‘better than’ and ‘different from’ school as representing ideas of utopia and heterotopia respectively. In particular I consider Foucault's notion of the heterotopia as a means of approaching the relationship between school and other forms of education. Whilst it will be argued that, according to Derrida's ideas of discursive deconstruction, alternative education has to be expressed through (and is therefore limited by) the dominant educational discourse, it will also be suggested that employing the idea of the heterotopia is a strategy which can help us explore the alternative in education.     

Deleuze’s children

Children, the image of the child, and the gendered figures of the girl and the boy are thematics that run through the work of Deleuze and feature prominently in his joint writing with Guattari. However, there are many different children in Deleuze’s writings. Various child figures do distinct things in Deleuze’s work. In this article, I argue that his work on children can be utilized to rethink popular, teleological notions of childhood and ‘growing up’.     

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.     

Deleuze,action research and rhizomatic growth

Deleuze and his colleagues, particularly Guattari, have had a profound impact on a number of fields of study. The authors argue that their work offers a range of images to help think about and write action research, a way that acknowledges and celebrates the complexities of the sites of action. The article has a divided structure, coherent with the style of Deleuze & Guattari. The authors present some Deleuzian ideas, particularly the concept of rhizomatic growth, and show how they might profitably be used to analyse and write accounts of action research, reflecting the multiplicities of practice, in this case within education. They have shown the potentialities of the ‘rhizome’ as a way to rethink the field of action research, imagining a new epistemology (in which the concepts work, rather than represent) and how the rhizome demands experimental forms of writing ourselves in action research. They show a cartography (of smooth and striated space) that is required to think rhizomatically about action research.     

Nomadic inquiry in the smooth spaces of the field: A preface

Framing this essay as a preface to a return to the field in order to collect more data for her study of the older, white southern women of her hometown, this researcher uses Laurel Richardson's (1994) concept of ''writing as a method of inquiry'' in order to revisit some of the places in which she has already done field work. By employing Deleuze and Guattari's (1980 1987) image of the nomad deterritorializing space, she revisits some of those spaces- mental space, the space of the text, and the space of theory- in order to work out of the failure of her received understanding of fieldwork and to think differently about the spaces and places in which her research takes place.     

The Concept of Educational Disadvantage and Some Implications for the Classroom Teacher

I should like to talk to you about a matter which was a great concern to Ruth Wong, as it is to me – the question of what ‘education’, in the brod sense, can or should do to alleviate the plight of the many millions of the world's children, who, for one reason or another, are unlikely to live full, healthy, productive and happy lives as their more fortunate fellows. ‘Disadvantage’ has been interpreted in many ways. Indeed, each of us has his or her own concept of what constitutes the term, just as each of us has personal ideas about ways of eliminating or minimizing its effects. What I have to say represents my own feelings and opinions. I hope you will forgive me if I begin with some general ideas, one or two of which may seem a little academic, but I think it is important to be clear as a great deal of damage has been done because of confusion of thinking.     

Attitude and passion: becoming a teacher in early childhood education and care

By focusing on a collective aesthetics based on sensation and affect, researchers, especially in Stockholm, Sweden, are exploring a pedagogy that opens up space for assemblages of desire, acknowledging the expressions of children who transform themselves and their milieus into a weave of bodies, spaces, signs and media. By analysing this pedagogy, against the background of the theories of Henri Wallon and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, I wish to investigate the concept of a ‘thinner skin mentality’. This willingness to transgress one’s own stabilising attitude, to move towards a greater sensitivity to relational and situational affectivity when accompanying the learning of children, may provide a point of reference for a preschool teacher qualification.     

Looking at lived experiences of self‐advocacy through gendered eyes: becoming femme fatale with/out ‘learning difficulties’

In this article, we attempt to intersect the interdisciplinary characters of disability studies and gender studies, in order to make sense of the activism and lived knowledge of/with two women with the label of ‘learning difficulties’. Inspired by Deleuze and Guattari’s anti‐essentialist notion of devenirs‐particules, we find our multiple selves involved in cross‐cutting relational storytelling, as such destabilising essentialist, biological determinism towards women with/out the label of ‘learning difficulties’. Thus in becoming femme(s) fatale(s), we make the most of a science capable of grasping the continual interplay between agency, structure and context, creating a ‘becoming space’ where we, as activists with our academic allies, can think and act with one another.     

Cute,creepy and sublime unnamed childhood monstrosities

ABSTRACT

Strangers, Gods, and monsters are all names for the experience of alterity and otherness within and amongst us. We need monsters in our lives. In this paper we use philosophy as a method to explore language, developmental and cultural instabilities, and terrifying (and discursive) monstrosity located within children's literature and childhood contexts. Philosophy as a method serves as an engagement, an ethical relationship with monstrous thoughts, and as an opening to the philosophical thinking of everyday practices of childhood play (i.e., through objects, practices, language, text, and images). Alongside and through cute, creepy and sublime notions of monsters in children's literature children become monsters–monsters become children. We draw from Derrida's notions of hospitality and hostility and Deleuze and Guattari's deterritorialization of minor literature as well as from literature on monsters, monstrosities, and ugliness. We argue that different representations of childhood monstrosity can help educators and other adults to see the ‘productive’ in childhood otherness, to consider the always present ‘childhood undecidable’ (simultaneous presence of cute and creepy) and the generative in infinitely unknown and unrecognizable childhood objects and discourses.     

“I think it fits in”: using process drama to promote agentic writing with primary school children

Set against the backdrop of children being ‘alienated’ from their writing, this paper is taken from a United Kingdom Literacy Association sponsored project where primary school teachers were trained to use process drama in order to give children more agency in their writing across the curriculum. Here, we use discourse analysis to think about the children's historical creative writing in relation to the drama lessons which are differently framed by the teachers. Building upon a theoretical model of process drama as involving ‘embodied experience’ and writing as problem‐solving, a case is made that process drama can lead to what we term ‘agentic writing’. Agentic writing, we demonstrate, involves children actively translating their embodied experience of process drama into writing by making a range of intertextual borrowings. These borrowings serve both to capture and transform their embodied experience as the children gain agency by standing outside language to achieve ‘double voicedness’ and in doing so write sophisticated texts. Seeing the relationship between process drama and writing in this light, we argue, provides a means of reconnecting children to the act of writing.     

Waiting on text: interpretation in educational research

Against the widespread insistence that educational research should be ‘scientific’, I attempt to change the terms of the debate. Instead of asking whether research is robust and rigorous, and whether it ‘works’—all terms derived from the ‘scientific’ view—I argue that we should ask whether we can have confidence in research. This way of putting it enables us to place the idea of interpretation back at the centre of our understanding of education, and to see that when we have confidence in interpretation, it is because good interpretation has quite different qualities from scientific knowledge. At the centre of interpretation lies the idea of text and of responsiveness to text. Good interpretation requires good listening or ‘attentiveness’. It does not pretend to represent the world accurately and conclusively, as ‘scientific’ research does: it opens up space for conversation, and brings a world into being.     

Towards a Deleuzo-feminist ethics of empowerment and freedom from logics of judgement

This paper brings together themes from the varied texts of Gilles Deleuze in outlining a Deleuzo-feminist ethics that speaks to contemporary debates in education. Drawing on Deleuze's (1988) engagement with Spinozan ethics, Foucault's (1987) ‘practice of freedom’, the Nietzschean ‘doctrine of judgment’ and ‘system of cruelty’ (Deleuze 2001), and Bergsonian ‘fabulatory processes’ (Deleuze 1995), we explore the poststructuralist distinction between ethics and morality and its implications for feminist responses to neoliberal educational practices, identities and cultures. Following Gannon (2012a, 2012b) and others (e.g. Braidotti 1996, 2000; Colebrook 2000; Grosz 2000, 2002; Wyatt and Davies 2011), we mobilise Deleuzian accounts of subjectivity, corporeality and difference in reconfiguring the existential dimension of teaching as an ethico-aesthetic relationality. A Deleuzo-feminist ethics of empowerment promises: escape from systems of cruelty that mark, shame and blame; the politicisation of such systems; productive experimental alliances and an alternative mode of existence to that prescribed for the teaching and student body by neoliberal rationalisation and bureaucratic proceduralism.     

Desiring machines and nomad spaces: neoliberalism,performativity and becoming in senior secondary drama classrooms

This paper explores Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalysis in relation to student and teacher becomings and the way these are actualised within the neoliberal and heterosexually striated spaces of the secondary school assemblage. Deleuze and Guattari considered a narrow approach to education problematic and called for creativity as a site of ‘resistance’. Drama is one subject rich with potentiality for students to strengthen their creativity and ‘speak back’ against the neoliberal project. What our research revealed is how the drama classroom is an open, dynamic space where students can embody different identities at a critical time in their adolescent development. What is delimiting about this potentiality is the proclivity of teachers and students, as desiring machines, to conform to the dominant neoliberal culture of competitive performativity. The paper proposes that schizoanalysis offers new insights for mapping complex desire-flows and embodied identities through and against the dominant performative and heterosexist culture.     

A Genealogical Analysis of the Concept of ‘Good’ Teaching: A Polemic

In this essay I intentionally employ Nietzsche's genealogical method as a means to critique the complex concept of ‘good’ teaching, and at the same time reconstitute ‘good’ teaching in a form that is radically different from contemporary accounts. In order to do this, I start out by undertaking a genealogical analysis to both reveal the complicated historical development of ‘good’ teaching and also disentangle the intertwining threads that remain hidden from us so we are aware of the core threads that hold it together. Two major threads are identified in my analysis, which I refer to as: Genealogy I: Teaching as applied science or practice; and, Genealogy II: Teaching as a vocational calling or neutral profession. With this in mind, I take the two value systems (Genealogy I and II) presented in my critique of ‘good’ teaching, and rather than return to old, or create new values, I argue that the true task of any educational endeavour is to make human beings human. Therefore, in the spirit of Nietzsche, I revive and extend Nietzsche's account of Bildung as a dynamic way of living timeless educational aims, such as learning to see, think, speak, write and feel in becoming true human beings.     

MacIntyre's Revolutionary Aristotelian Philosophy and his Idea of an Educated Public Revisited

In this article I revisit MacIntyre's lecture on the idea of an educated public. I argue that the full significance of MacIntyre's views on the underlying purposes of universities only become clear when his lecture on the educated public is situated in the context of his wider ‘revolutionary Aristotelian’ philosophical project. I claim that for MacIntyre educational institutions should both support students to learn how to think for themselves and act for the common good. After considering criticisms from Putnam, Wain and Harris I conclude that MacIntyre's later work points towards an idea of educated ‘community’ that is more outward looking and open to difference than his earlier articulated idea of an educated ‘public’.     

Comparing children's and student teachers’ ideas about science concepts

Children and teachers may not think in the same way about particular science concepts. Such parallel lines of thought can compound children's confusion and misunderstanding as they learn science at primary school. The situation could be more acute when student teachers are teaching science, because of their limited experience of considering children's ideas. This paper investigates children's and student teachers’ ideas about certain science concepts: ‘animal’, ‘flower’, ‘living’, ‘force’ and ‘energy’. The ideas and understandings of 96 children and 168 student teachers were explored. Results showed that the student teachers and children had similar ideas about ‘flower’ and ‘animal’, whereas they evidenced very different responses to ‘living’, ‘energy’ and ‘force’. Implications for classroom practice are considered.     

Exhausted philosophy and islands-to-come

Abstract

Drawing on an array of sources, from Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy (schizoanalysis) through to non-philosophy (cinema, literature), this paper concerns itself with the manifestation of the concepts of hope and despair in utopian thought and continental philosophy and the experience of hopelessness, despair and exhaustion in the contemporary moment. I aim to demonstrate such pressing concerns through a comparison of Japanese philosopher Kojin Karatani and Japanese fiction writer Ryū Murakami with the American science fiction-thriller film directed by Michael Bay, The Island. What is explored in these works is the dialectic of exhaustion and possibility. The focus of the paper is on the fecund moment inhering in the incapacity of thought to think the possibility of utopia. In terms of the philosophy of education, this hones in on the perceived lack of vision of such a possibility among youth and the failure of the university qua institution to proffer an alternative world to its cohort. To demonstrate this, the paper contrasts both ‘affirmative, transcendent, and authoritarian utopias’ (‘ignoble’ utopias as philosopher Gilles Deleuze calls them) and the possibility of ‘immanent, revolutionary, libertarian utopias’—which we shall consider in terms of ‘absolute reterritorialization’.     

Free the sheep: improvised song and performance in and around a minecraft community

Recent work around the use of virtual world video games in educational contexts has conceptualised literacies as communal processes, whilst considering complex notions of collaboration through participants' multiplicity of presence in hybrid virtual / physical locations. However, further research is necessary in order to help us understand how the complex interactions afforded by such spaces influence ‐ and are influenced by ‐ children's social relationships. This article draws upon data from a year‐long ethnographic study, investigating a group of ten and eleven year old children's engagement with the video game ‘Minecraft’ as they collaborate to build a ‘virtual community’. With a particular focus on the children's improvised singing and use of song during the club, I examine how their creative practices ‐ drawing on a wide range of self‐selected resources, played out both in and out of the virtual world ‐ help to fundamentally shape the nature of the space around them. Furthermore, through examination of one particular performance, I demonstrate the importance of ensuring that such details are not written out of accounts of children interactions around technology, if we are to understand the true potential of such environments.     

Don't Fence Me In: the Liberation of Undomesticated Critique

In response to Helmut Heid's critique of domesticated philosophical critique, I focus on the metaphor of domestication, which is central to his article. Drawing on the work of Jacques Derrida, I offer a deconstructive critique of the opposition between domesticated and undomesticated critique, arguing that a clear conceptual demarcation between the two is impossible, and that ‘domesticated’ and ‘undomesticated’ critique always carry each other's traces. I explore connections between the undomesticated and das Unheimliche (Freud's ‘Uncanny’), as well as differences between Helmut Heid's and Paulo Freire's interpretation and use of the concepts of ‘domestication’ and ‘liberation’. Lastly, I examine how educators might go about a pedagogy of critique. I argue that critique can and should be understood and taught as a tradition, but one that is heterogeneous rather than monolithic. A careful reception of this translated and metonymic tradition of critique will enable students to see the spaces in which new critique—and critique of critique— is possible.