AERA 2018 COPING AS A LINE OF FLIGHT IN A LINGUISTICALLY DIVERSE CLASSROOM: A RHIZOMATIC PERSPECTIVE (original) (raw)
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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.
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.
Critical Pedagogy for a Polymodal World
This book explores the complexity of communication and understanding as a possible asset in formal education rather than a problem that needs to be "fixed". The authors examine the question and experience as pedagogical tools, challenging readers to play the critic and ask hard questions, beginning with: Why do the ideas discussed within the book matter? The digital information age with expanding ways of thinking, being, communicating, and learning complicates public education. So, what happens as diverse narratives collide in schools? To answer this question, the authors of this book delve into conflicting assumptions within the framework of complexity sciences and education in an attempt to explore space beyond positivist/anti-positivist debates. This involves examining the role of cultural and aesthetic narratives and cautionary tales as means of acknowledging possibilities in human experiences in education. These possibilities can facilitate praxis, as theory, research, and teaching become reflective practices, and as thinking about education broadens to include diverse methods of understanding and presenting complex phenomena.