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?’     

Mapping discourses in teachers' talk about using digital texts in classrooms

Many accounts explaining teachers' lack of engagement with new technologies in their classrooms engage with discourses that blame their lack of time, expertise, or enthusiasm. In this paper I offer an alternative reading that provides a more agentic explanation. A rhizotextual analysis is undertaken that reveals the connections between teachers' talk and the institutional and societal discourses that ascribe value and worth to particular approaches to using new technologies and their associated digital texts in literacy classrooms. These approaches involve a focus on the technical or operational skills required to use new technologies and the over-emphasis of production work when engaging with digital texts. Taking up these discourses (im)plausibly constitutes teachers as experts and professionals, rather than the more common deficit construction of them as lacking in the skills, knowledge or even creativity required to engage in more meaningful and challenging ways with the literacy resources that young people require in the twenty-first century.     

Manipulating the data: teaching and NAPLAN in the control society

High-stakes testing is changing what it means to be a ‘good teacher’ in the contemporary school. This paper uses Deleuze and Guattari's ideas on the control society and dividuation in the context of National Assessment Program Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) testing in Australia to suggest that the database generates new understandings of the ‘good teacher’. Media reports are used to look at how teachers are responding to the high-stakes database through manipulating the data. This article argues that manipulating the data is a regrettable, but logical, response to manifestations of teaching where only the data counts.     

Cinema Education as an Exercise in ‘Thinking Through Not-Thinking’

In this article we explore the educational potential of cinema. To do this we first analyse how the American critical thinker Henry Giroux tries to give body to an educational theory in relation to cinema. His ‘film pedagogy’ is described as developing a critical response of the learner in relation to the public sphere of film. Giroux’s approach, however, seems to forget rather than explore the potential that is specific to the medium. Secondly, the article analyses Walter Benjamin’s (1936, Illuminations, London, Pimlico) essay ‘The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’, because here we find not a different educational response to cinema, but one of the first studies on cinema that describes its ontological nature and the potential of moving images for thought. Finally, the article discusses the cinema philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, who, in contrast to Giroux, does not construct a Cartesian framework around cinema. Rather, he recognizes and explores cinema’s potential for thoughts like Benjamin did. In this way, Deleuze reverses Giroux’s question of how education should respond to cinema. A pedagogical discussion hereby comes to the fore that does not ask the question of what methodology should be used in education to think critically about cinema, but what the implications are of the nature of cinema for thought and for education.     

Deleuze’s rhizomatic analysis of Foucault: Resources for a new sociology?

This paper analyses and examines Deleuze’s Foucault as a means of investigating intellectual resources for a new sociology – one that, in Foucault’s name, is neither foundationalist nor representationalist but genuinely other than the modernist discourse with which the discipline began and grew up. The paper begins with a brief historiography of sociology in order to broach the relationship between Deleuze and Foucault, and then focuses on Deleuze’s book on Foucault as a means of moving ‘from the archive to the diagram’ and to a topology of ‘thinking otherwise’. Finally, the paper moves to reformulate a new vocabulary no longer anchored in modernist categories to a non-dialectical reconfiguration of explanation and comprehension.     

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.     

文学和生成难以感知——德勒兹文学思想研究

基于他的生成哲学思想,德勒兹认为,文学通过创造感觉聚合物实现对新事物的生成。于诸多生成能力中,文学的生成难以感知之物的能力既体现了文学独特的创造力,形成新的审美维度,同时也暧昧不清,颇受争议。对该问题的讨论始于对难以感知的阐释,进而从文学创造难以感知之物的三个成功途径进行探讨,结论是:优秀的文学作品具有创造难以感知之物的能力,拓宽了人们的认知视域,同时也启发了文学创作的新途径。     

Challenges of ‘thinking differently’ with rhizoanalytic approaches: a reflexive account

Growing numbers of educational researchers are using rhizoanalytic approaches based on the work of Deleuze and Guattari to think differently in their research practices. However, as those engaging in debates about post-qualitative research suggest, thinking differently is not without its challenges. This paper uses three complex challenges encountered in the author's doctoral research – concerned with the early childhood education workforce – to reflexively explore some of the implications of thinking differently with rhizoanalytic approaches. In particular, the author discusses ways of making correctives to: repetition and thinking differently, ways that subjects are produced as-and-in-assemblages, and, immanent ethics. The paper concludes with some possible implications of these challenges and correctives for research practices, and for debates about post-qualitative research.     

Writing to it: creative engagements with writing practice in and with the not yet known in today’s academy

We have developed an approach to collaborative-writing-as-inquiry that we sometimes refer to as ‘between the twos’. Increasingly, we came to understand that the only way to continue in our process was to ‘write to it’; whatever the question, the query or the problem, it was this inducement – ‘write to it’ – that led to new experimentations and the indeterminate rhythms and refrains of the multiple that were often present in the agonistics of our practice. This is how we have been living intra-actively with desire within and against the traditional representations of research and pedagogic practice in higher education in recent years. In offering opportunities for bringing non-totalising modes of sensing to life within Deleuze and Guattari’s experimental and creative originations, and in the multiplicity and the vibrant potentialities of always becoming, we make claims for new, creatively productive writing practices in the university of the future.     

Thinking Machinically,or, the Techno-aesthetic of Jackie Chan: Toward a Deleuze-Guattarian Media Studies

This essay argues the conceptual opacity surrounding technology results from instrumentalism, which posits an a priori distinction between essentialized, binary terms: the human, and the technological, which is both the product and material projection of that essentially human agency. This essay explores a “machinic” alternative to instrumentalism by engaging the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari. After mapping the conceptual terrain suggested by their work as applied to technology, this essay looks to the cinematic performance aesthetic of Hong Kong action-film star Jackie Chan in order to sketch the affective/perceptual/kinetic terrain of the machinic.