AERA 2018 COPING AS A LINE OF FLIGHT IN A LINGUISTICALLY DIVERSE CLASSROOM: A RHIZOMATIC PERSPECTIVE (original) (raw)
Racial disproportionality in special education is a symptom of larger social justice problems in a racially stratified society. Despite the favorable expectation of the effects of culture-free, universal and objective "evidence-based" interventions in serving students from nondominant groups, overrepresentation of students of color in special education continues to hinder efforts at achieving equity in and through education. In this article, we draw on Deleuze and Guattari's rhizome metaphor and Vygotskian cultural-historical activity theory to analyze the dominant paradigm for intervention research in special education. We illustrate how the naturalized a priori assumptions and practices have contributed to the reinforcement of the racialization of disability. We then offer a rhizomatic research design as an alternative in which teachers, parents, students, administrators, university researchers, and community members engage in collective knowledge production and decision-making activities to develop systemic solutions to racial disproportionality within their local contexts.
Learning and the Rhizome: Reconceptualisation in the Qualitative Research Process
Magis, Revista Internacional de Investigación en Educación, 2018
This article explores the concept of learning as a space of exchange and connection between signs, events and bodies, inspired by Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy of difference. This qualitative methodology is based on the rhizome, with, amongst others, its characteristics or principles of heterogeneity, multiplicity and a-signification. It allows a productive conversation with studies of learning environments and sense productions through images and sounds from cinema media, such as the swimmer and swimming. The focus of this article is on learning, its environment and its role in the relationship between mind and world, pointing to an alternative to the representational perspective.
Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy
Background and purpose: Acknowledging that it is critical that researchers design and implement studies that examine teaching as a complex phenomenon (Strom and Martin [2017]. Becoming-teacher: A Rhizomatic Look at First-year Teaching. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers), the objective of this study was to examine pre-service teachers' (PSTs') experience of teaching a specific content (i.e. Sport Education) in various school contexts (i.e. diverse PSTs, contexts, students, and the SE model). Using the rhizomatic (Deleuze and Guattari [1987]. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press) concept of assemblage, this study was guided by the question, 'How do PSTs negotiate their Sport Education physical education teacher education learning experience during school placement?' Research setting and participants: Grounded in post-qualitative methodology, this study involved twenty-one PSTs undertaking their school placement as part of a three-year physical education teacher education (PETE) programme in Norway. School placement was composed of two three-week periods in upper secondary school in which the PSTs taught SE to the same class each week. The PSTs participated in a university SE-PETE unit prior to school placement. Data collection and analysis: Three focus group interviews were conducted with three PST groups: (i) end of the SE-PETE unit and prior to school placement; (ii) between school placement blocks; and, (iii) end of school placement. Also, PST coursework was collected on completion of the PETE unit (completed in groups) and on completion of school placement (individual coursework). The nonlinear analysis process included data walking, rhizomatic mapping, situational analysis, and memo writing. Findings and discussion: This study highlighted how particular characteristics of various human and non-human elements (that is, the PSTs themselves, their contexts, their students, the features of SE) influenced and shaped PSTs' teaching and learning. Recognizing that it is not possible to be true to the myriad of elements influencing each PST, we provide a detailed consideration of two selected PSTs and show how interactions between human and non-human elements created two different teaching practices and learning experiences. We discuss the concept of assemblage in relation to the findings and introduce the notion of 'translating'. In 'translating', as highlighted by the PSTs in this study, PSTs make sense of ARTICLE HISTORY
Agency as dynamic and rhizomatic: An exploration of learner identities in two secondary classrooms
This thesis is premised on “a politics of becoming” (Gowlett, 2013, p. 149), a Deleuzo-Guattarian notion which speaks to social justice research. Rather than a focus on reductionist reformist politics, I explore moments of possibility as lines of flight that disrupt dominant discourses. As outlined in the New Zealand Curriculum, New Zealand schools are charged with the task of strengthening students’ key competencies (Ministry of Education, 2007a) to lay a foundation for lifelong learning. Learner agency is embedded in a dispositional view of these competencies but there is a paucity of research from a poststructural perspective in this area from New Zealand. Agency is also fundamental to a sociocultural conception of assessment for learning (AfL) where learners initiate, participate and contribute to learning in their classroom communities. Positioned in theoretical landscapes of socioculturalism and feminist poststructuralism, this study investigates agency through a rhizo-textual analysis in two year nine classrooms. The dynamic poststructural view of agency theorised in this thesis is derived from Judith Butler’s (1993) notion of performativity which precludes any prediscursive autonomous subject. Using data from episodes in two year nine classrooms I explore: how students engage as authoritative, active participants, authoring and directing their own actions in social activity within multiple discourses; how students move themselves from one set of culturally and socially structured subjectivities to another; and how agency can look, sound and feel in the discursive space of the classroom. In keeping with a rhizoanalytic approach, I construct plateaus of discourse based on episodes of classroom activity. These three short episodes of classroom discourse serve to illuminate the subjectivities in play. There are two forms of analysis used to construct these plateaus. Firstly, conduct a discourse analysis of identity affordances and discourses to examine the nature of learner positioning. I then use rhizo-textual analysis (Honan & Sellers, 2006) to map the students’ and teachers’ moves in discourse and shifting subjectivities. The findings highlight how agency can appear as a rapid series of rhizomatic discourse moves that take place as students and teachers deterritorialize and reterritorialize discourses as they enact specific identities. They resonate with Davies’ (2000) observation that learners can accept, resist, subvert and change or ignore a range of discourse positions. The study also illustrates that what can appear to be ‘off-task’ behaviour can be also read as highly agentic. The dynamic and rhizomatic theory of agency proposed illustrates that learners can inhabit multiple subject positions across discourses as they respond to the interpellations of their teachers and peers. Rather than a performance where individuals act out roles as pre-discursive identities, students exercise performativity within and across classroom discourses as they are constituted agentically through their lines of flight. The research makes a methodological contribution through combining sociocultural and poststructural theories to explore the discursively constructed social and cultural environments of two classrooms. This is a deterritorializing move away from conventional sociocultural learning theory to incorporate an ecological (Boylan, 2010), rhizomatic view of classroom participation. This research has implications for how educators conceptualise learners’ identities and provide affordances for learners to initiate learning and take up agentic positions in classroom discourse. It also has implications for the ways in which the key competencies can be interpreted and strengthened in classrooms. Rather than ‘having’ agency to transfer competencies from one situation to the next, competencies are produced and enacted as learners shift subjectivities within and across discourses. The findings also offer students, teachers and policy makers insight into the learning dynamics of classrooms which embody the ‘spirit’ of AfL (Marshall & Drummond, 2006) where students can be afforded opportunities for lines of flight to initiate learning. Through being aware of learners’ rhizomatic moves, teachers may be able to notice, recognise and respond to learner initiatives more readily, and assist them to develop their capacity to be agentic learners.
2019
This article was originally published in Innovate (https://edtechbooks.org/-vAR) as: Cormier, D. 2008. Rhizomatic education: Community as curriculum. Innovate 4 (5). http://www.innovateonline.info/index.php?view=article&id=550 (accessed June 2, 2008). The article is reprinted here with permission of the publisher, The Fischler School of Education and Human Services [https://edtechbooks.org/-EbT\] at Nova Southeastern University [http://www.nova.edu/\].
Immanent Transcendence in Educational Research
A Companion to Research in Education, 2013
Marianna Papastephanou has written a thought-provoking article, taking discussions among educational action researchers as her starting point (Carr&Kemmis, 2005 and Elliott, 2005). Should action research base itself on critical theory, on Aristotelian phrónêsis, or on a neo-pragmatic postmodernism rejecting abstract idealism on behalf of “reason” in favour of a radical contextualism related to local standards? The article construes the theoretical opposition sharply in terms of contextualism bound by local habits and customs, versus transcendence, i.e. a transcendence of local traditions that relates to standards somehow more universal (a-priori according to Elliott, 2005). These questions concern not only action researchers, of course. Can anyone criticize “ways -of-doing-things” shaped and determined through local cultures and traditions, without relating to standards transcending the same cultures and traditions? In what direction should we develop our individual and collective practice, towards which standards? Cultures are greatly variegated; how can we choose one before another, by which criteria? How can we choose standards non-arbitrarily, as more than just private or group preferences? Or can’t we choose at all; just accept – rationalize – whatever we’re habituated into, or seduced into liking, or even biologically determined to prefer? But being “against” or “in favour” of something on grounds like these – culture against culture, tradition against tradition, belief against belief, habit against habit, preference against preference, desire against desire – is insufficient. It invites Hobbes’ “natural state” to take the scene: bellum omnium contra omnes, or, at best, a purely rhetorical regime of persuasion and seduction. Isn’t this how both post-modernism and modern complexity theory tell us cultural patterns evolve, however; as different forces push and pull, new patterns emerge similarly whether in interstellar space, in bath-tubs, in ant-hills, or in human societies? Even Wittgenstein (1969, §§ 34, 110, 139) concluded that ultimately, different practices have to speak for themselves as ungrounded ways of acting, simply being as they are.
As two teachers/researchers committed to the values of social justice in the classroom, we are deeply disturbed by the explicit and implicit ways that our education system, operating through neoliberalism, reproduces the inequalities of larger society. To problematize and "deterritorialize" dominant neoliberal notions of schooling, education, teaching and learning in our classrooms, we embarked on a co/autoethnographic selfstudy of our teaching practice. Our methods are underscored and informed by the Deleuzo-Guattarian notion of the rhizome, the multiplistic, non-linear nature of which serves as an "antidote" to the hierarchical, dichotomous, process-product rationality of neoliberal logic. Findings, or "becomings," indicate that the concepts of the rhizome can be practically "put to work" in the classroom to raise consciousness and inform thinking about resisting the neoliberal status quo. Combined with co/autoethnography, rhizomatics and rhizoanalysis offers the potential to connect across teaching practice, understand the political nature of teaching, and open possibilities for transforming teaching.
Journal of the Philosophy of Education Vol III (2018).pdf
JPSE: Journal for the Philosophical Study of Education, 2018
JPSE III--Contents TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction Guillemette Johnston and Allan Johnston Spirit and Grace, Letters and Voice Babette Babich Two Concepts of Educational Freedom Emily Wenneborg Teaching as Entertainment: An Examination of Effects Ross M. Miller and Steven J. Bourgeois Enantiodromia and Integrality: The Rhythm of the Cultural Continuum Robert Mitchell Humanity in the Womb of History Thomas M. Falk Elaborating Environmental Communication within “Posthuman” Theory Maria Kristina Börebäck and Elias Schwieler Epistemologies and the Formation of Modern Democratic Individuality Nathalie Bulle Politics, Education, and Understanding: Anglo-American Readings and Misreadings of Rousseau in the 19th to 21st Centuries Guillemette Johnston Teaching Magical Thinking: Notes towards a Burroughsian Pedagogy Allan Johnston