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- Herausgeber: Independent Thinking Press
- Kategorie: Bildung
- Sprache: Englisch
Becoming Mobius is about living with uncertainty. Uncertainty is a state of being that many people struggle with both in day-to-day life and in education; being uncertain has almost become a sin. If we are truly to have an education system that 'works', we need to accept that learning and life are not simple, and we need to engage with difficult and complex ideas. Focusing on the process of learning and teaching, Dr Debra Kidd posits the possibility that wondering and wandering teachers might impact greatly on a child's ability to live with and thrive among uncertainties. She asks of us, not only as teachers or researchers, but simply as human beings, what are the things that affect us, and how can we remain attuned to all their possibilities while still functioning? Taking cues from neuroscience, physi, anthropology and philosophy, particularly that of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, but also Hannah Arendt, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and others, Dr Kidd explores the nature and purpose of education through a series of different lenses. Details, moments, interactions and relationships are put under the microscope and their effects on teaching and learning examined. Becoming Mobius started life as Debra Kidd's doctoral thesis and draws on her extensive classroom experience, her own observations and research, and a broad base of educational thought; including the work of Gert Biesta, Masny's Multiple Literacies and more. In Becoming Mobius each chapter is presented as a plateau and maps the complexities of teaching and learning. This is a journey through a landscape of education. It is not a straight route. It is not a cop-out. It is a means of living in, with and through complexity and multiplicity. It is an attempt to bring forward a fresh vision of education. This is an honest, challenging and incredibly profound book that makes you stop and think - deeply - about what you do, why you do it and the effect it has. You will never look at teaching in the same light again. For anyone interested in thinking deeply about education.
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Becoming Mobius
The complex matter of education
Dr Debra Kidd
To my boys. For letting me roam and then pulling me home. For always making me feel like I matter. For making me laugh and making me proud. I love you all very much.
CONTENTS
FOR(E)WARDS AND BACKWORDS
A map does not converse in sentences. Its language is a half-heard rumour, fractured, fitful, non-discursive, non-linear … It is many tongued, a chorus reciting centuries of accumulated knowledge in echoed chants … A map provides no answers, it only suggests where to look.
Miles Harvey, The Island of Lost Maps (2000)
This book started its life as a thesis for my professional doctorate which was awarded in December 2013. Without the kind and humorous support of my supervisors, Rachel Jones and Cathie Pearce and Manchester Metropolitan University, it would never have emerged in any form at all. While I worked on my first book in the early months of 2014, Teaching: Notes from the Front Line, my editor, Ian Gilbert, asked me to send him a copy of the thesis. I sent it with a warning. It was not like my blog. It was not like my other book. This was a different, more complex beast altogether. We would not be looking at a bestseller. He wanted to publish it anyway because he’s like that. He likes to think differently.
It’s taken another year to get it to this point. Very little of that time has been spent writing, but it needed incubation. A thesis is never finished; there is just a deadline at which point you hand it over and hope for the best. The same is true of a book. But to move from thesis to book, this text needed to evolve, to take into account the fast changes happening in the world of education, to live a little and to learn more. There are new voices now in this text that never appeared in the original – the most important belongs to Gert Biesta. Both Ian Gilbert and my external examiner, Dr Phil Wood, told me I must read him – that he would enrich my life and my book. And he has.
This is a text about living with uncertainty. This is a state of being that many people struggle with in day-to-day life and in education; being uncertain has almost become a sin. We are told that children are on a trajectory of certain progression from their baseline tests at 4 to leaving school at 18. We are sold a narrative that this course is fixed and certain, and that only poor teaching can knock it off course. And to make sure that this happens, we are policed. And judged. And berated. And punished. It is a lie, and the protection of the lie carries a cost paid not only in the form of a vast amount of funding and energy from politicians, but in the haemorrhaging of teachers from the profession. If we are truly to have an education system that ‘works’, we need to accept that learning and life are not simple, and we need to engage with difficult and complex ideas.
I was not always comfortable with uncertainty myself. I arrived at my first professional doctorate session back in 2007 as a newly appointed initial teacher training (ITT) tutor with a plan. I knew what I knew. I was going to ‘do’ action research. I was going to ‘prove’ that my preferred pedagogy ‘worked’, and it was simply a matter of doing my time until I was able to submit. I had a bike; I knew how to ride it. I had a roadmap; I knew where I was going. As a result, my first assignment was a polemic full of certainty. Over the course of the next six years, that certainty waned until it became my doctoral thesis – a more tentative text.
This point was arrived at via a meandering route of experimentation. By 2009 (I blame post-structuralism) my bike was in pieces on the floor. Instead of going forwards and reaching a destination, I had systematically dismantled all that I thought I knew. Nothing was what I thought it was; I was only certain of not being certain. I had the assemblages of a bike; I could no longer ride it. I had an out-of-date roadmap; I had no idea where to go. Post-structuralism had offered me a way of unravelling assumptions and had been instrumental in shifting my thinking, but I was looking for something more – a way of not so much reconstructing but assimilating and making sense of what I could now see was a complex relationship between the human and non-human; between the certain and the uncertain; between the complex and the simple.
I now know that what I needed to do was to embrace the inherent weakness of education, but I hadn’t at that point read the book that Biesta had not yet written!1 I had been drawn to exploring emotion in the classroom from the start, but now I began to see how our feelings and sensations are impacted not only by power but also by desire, space and time. It has always been my belief that we teach (or should teach) in order to make the world a better place – to see it anew. (Or else what is the point? Do we teach to maintain a status quo? To return to an idealised past?) To this end, the idea of education as a democratic process with a strong moral purpose has always been my goal. This remains – that foundation has not been shaken by uncertainty. But it has been reframed, re-examined, re-evaluated along the way. There are markers of social justice throughout this text and, above all, these stories have the notion of justice at heart. But they are framed in philosophical lenses through which we explore the nature and purpose of education.
During those six years, I stumbled off roads altogether. Wandering here and there, relaying between left, right, forwards, backwards, in-between. Getting lost, finding new ways, foraging and gathering – in my wandering I had become wonderer. A nomad. This book posits the possibility that wondering and wandering teachers might impact greatly on a child’s ability to live with and thrive among uncertainties. It suggests that while things might be complex, they don’t have to be complicated. It asks of us, not only as teachers or researchers, but simply as human beings, what are the things that affect us, and how can we remain attuned to all their possibilities while still functioning?
On this little wander, I found a sturdy pair of shoes: science and philosophy. I found science to be working with the same sorts of ideas that I found in the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari. Long before neuroscientists started thinking of the brain as an emergent system, Deleuze was moving towards this possibility by describing the brain in rhizomatic rather than arboreal terms. I was also drawn to science and by science – the pioneering, experimental, uncertain science at the edges, and not what Furedi calls the empirical ‘scientism’ of certainty.2
Both Deleuze and Guattari altered my thinking, giving me both a language and navigational tools. Their conceptual frameworks – that life is lived at the edges, that it is complexly and rhizomatically connected, that it is constantly shifting shape and form, that it is brim-full of possible becomings – really resonated with my experience of the classroom. I found that both these scientific and Deleuzian concepts allowed me to better understand why it was impossible to fully understand a learning process and why it was so important to keep on trying.
This book is my attempt to present and map that journey. It is where we step off the road. There is no transport. I’m afraid you have to walk, and it is not a stroll in the park. A former adviser to Michael Gove once told me that he refused to read Deleuze because he was ‘wilfully obtuse’. But just because something is difficult does not mean that it’s not worth the effort of engagement. The content is difficult, but there are, hopefully, enough signs to ensure that you don’t get too lost. The opening chapter is long and theoretical – bear with me – but it’s important to frame the discussion and explore the ideas underpinning the rest of the text. I hope it provokes new thinking.
This is a journey through a landscape of education. You will see children on plains surrounded by beautiful and terrible distractions; shepherds and lost lambs; dams and roadblocks, streams and passageways. The data consists of stories, and these tales have been drawn from a number of contexts. Primary, secondary and higher education – I have taught in all of them. Some of these narrative landmarks were collected as part of my consultancy work in schools. It has all been selected because of its pull on memory. It is not what was sought, but what was most powerfully present either in the moment or at a point of recollection in the future. This is not, I grant you, the usual means of collecting data, but it’s an honest one and one that seeks not to tell truths but to open doors to further questions.
By 2010, I had returned to work in school – in a secondary setting, employed as an advanced skills teacher (AST). Some of this book explores the difficulty of the return from higher education to a full-time teaching role and my frustrations in that role. And how, eventually, those frustrations spilled over into a resignation. I stand here now, outside of school, but wholeheartedly inside the education system. A nomad, still figuring out where to go next. But the focus in this book is not on the here and now of my context. It is on the process of learning and teaching; the attempts to find the middle and to stay in the middle, resisting linearity. The middle way is not the easy route. It is not a straight route. It is not a cop-out. It is a means of living in, with and through complexity and multiplicity. It is an attempt to bring forward something new – to find ways of making education anew. I have no final solution, no silver bullet, but I have a map of an emerging world, and it keeps on growing.
Notes
1. G. Biesta, The Beautiful Risk of Education (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2013).
2. F. Furedi, Authority: A Sociological History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
Chapter 1
A MATTER OF THE MIDDLE: INTRA-DUCTION
Intra-duction
In.tra – prefix within; inside
In.tro – prefix in, into or inward
Oxford English Dictionary
But Mousie, thou art no thy lane,
In proving foresight may be vain;
The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men
Gang aft a-gley,
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain
For promis’d joy!
Robert Burns, ‘To a Mouse’ (1785)
Little of what follows is what I thought it would be. There were times when I sat with head in hands, bemoaning the plans that ‘gang aft a-gley’. Times when, like St Pierre, I found myself ‘stopped, stuck – dead in the water’,1 not noticing at first the nibbling nudges at the edges of consciousness attempting to tell me that all was not lost, that the outcomes were simply ‘other’. It was in the process of learning to allow those nudges/gut feelings to find their ways into thoughts, or to lie fallow until another experience pinged them into a resonant life, that this thinking would really begin to take form. I had intended to write about children’s experiences of learning, and then I became lost in methodology, and gradually the two fused in a complex intra-relay between theory, practice, self and other.2 All experience mattered. All experience became matter. It has been a messy, sticky process. It is still messy, still sticky, still half-formed and half-emerging. What follows is not a completed act, but a point in time – an intra-duction.
An intra is, of course, a ‘middle’ and not a beginning, and in many ways this book is a series of mid-points or conjunctions, inspired mostly by the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. They conceptualise experience as rhizomatic – think of a strawberry plant or grass. The rhizome is always in the middle, in places where affects, ideas, assemblages converge and become other: ‘The middle is by no means an average: on the contrary, it is where things pick up speed … a stream without beginning or end that undermines its banks and picks up speed in the middle.’3 Both men challenge the traditional modes of thought that life and ideas are arboreal (tree-like), that thoughts and experiences follow a linear progression from root to fruit. Instead, they argue that human life is not tree-like, but a much more messy tangle of rhizomatic root structures, complexly and unpredictably connected. They conceptualise time as similarly complex – not linear at all, but a mishmash of pasts, presents and imagined or possible futures pressing in on moments and decisions and actions.
Deleuze separates out the functions of time into two types – aion and chronos (more on these later). Inspired by this, my work is nothing less, or more significant, than a selection of story-streams, which oscillate in aion time in which pasts press upon and fragment the present in arcs towards potential futures.4 The fracturing nature of time, as explored by Deleuze, has created a fractal element to the work, and therefore there are leaps and lines of flight which are deliberately enmeshed and which may confuse or tax the reader. They are connected by resonance, by theory and by concepts that have emerged from my lived experiences of working with children. The writing leaps about, connecting ideas in a way that is not entirely linear, although, of course, you are more than likely to read this in a linear way. But thoughts and resonances have been left largely where they occurred and, to that end, this is a piece of writing that, instead of a road, is more of a plateau. Dahlberg and Moss describe working in plateau as:
a continuous, self-vibrating region of intensities whose development reactivated or between which a number of connecting routes could exist. This avoids any idea of moving towards a culminating point or external end – the antithesis of the dominant discourses in today’s … education with their fixation on predetermined and sequential outcomes. Instead we are always inbetween, with many possibilities open to us.5
The plateau is a useful geographical term here. It represents both a physical flattening and a flattening of time – a place which has been formed by geophysical pressure, but one from which there is a flattened view. From a distance it looks like a uniform and simple structure; close up, there are folds and layers of complexity.
We can stand in/on a plateau and follow the markings and lines that have formed this place – an assemblage. Each plateau (or chapter) in the text represents a ‘line of flight’ with none dependent on or entirely detached from the others.6 There is no ‘finale’ in this text, no chronology. It is my attempt to write as an assemblage, and one that deliberately disrupts. There is, nevertheless, content (education) and there are participants (teachers, researchers, an AST and children) and, inevitably, issues relating to power and justice emerge throughout. By working in this way, I hope to add to and develop ways of working with and through multiplicity in educational settings, but always with a sense of social justice in mind and heart.
As teachers, we often bemoan the role of ideology in education. But we all have an ideology. Our values and beliefs as practitioners are always enacted in classrooms. Often this is done subconsciously – we re-enact the education we value, which is often that which worked for us. It is far more helpful, however, to step back and consider who you want to be and what you want to stand for. This can involve reading. It certainly involves reflecting on what you see, feel and experience. It demands that you find resonance, connections; that you try to make sense. For me, that resonance came through Deleuze. But what matters is that you seek to understand why it is you do what you do. And that you keep on looking – because first conclusions are rarely the only ones you might draw. Life thrives in multiplicity. And there is always another possibility – or, indeed, many possibilities.
In attempting to let go of the structure of this text, I attempted to reflect the complex nature of teaching, learning, researching and, indeed, of living. I found that Deleuzian frames allowed me to explore complexity anew. Part way through my doctoral study, I returned to classroom teaching from higher education, and then I left it again. In many ways, this work charts a series of returns as I attempt to explore how the past sits within our present; how returns and differences can help us to make anew; how, ultimately, complexity can be navigated (and embraced) without becoming overwhelmingly complicated. It is my contention that while many teachers recognise the complex nature of teaching, the desire to conform, perform and survive, and to push forward binaries, leads some to reject the complex and reach for the simple.7 Instead, I argue that by engaging with complexity in a playful manner, we can finds modes of resistance which allow us to ‘become-Mobius’ – to exist in the between spaces of one AND another in order not only to survive but also to thrive.
As I move among my stories – not in forward motion, but in loops and returns – I explore and play with surfaces, rhizomes and middles instead of beginnings, endings and roots. In line with the philosophies of Deleuze and Guattari, this book is predominantly preoccupied with notions of immanence taken from the Latin intra (to remain within) and becoming (moving outwards). Deleuze and Guattari describe the plane of immanence as ‘a single wave that rolls [concepts] up and then unrolls them’,8 and it is here, in this rolling and unrolling, that I have found myself working.
For Deleuze and Guattari, there is no attempt to signify: ‘writing has nothing to do with signifying. It has to do with surveying, mapping, even realms that are yet to come.’9 And so this is an attempt to map – to write into being – an educational landscape without attempting to consciously shape or conclude. Yet, inevitably, shapes will be perceived and conclusions drawn. This tension between resisting certainty and stating beliefs is simply something that has to be lived with. It is not a contradiction but an intra-action, and the work will be unsettling to anyone seeking to know ‘what works’. In both teaching and research settings, I attempted to survive in a linear culture while subverting the notion of linearity and developing a tolerance for uncertainty. There is no ‘one time’ underpinning the trajectory of this book or uniting the stories that form its data.
Stories of matter
The ‘matter’ of the title is both material and emotional – the entanglement of matter in the process of becoming and mattering. ‘We are all matter, and we all matter.’10 The ambiguity of these words has very much preoccupied my thinking process and those of others, such as Karen Barad, who points out the resonances between what we think of as material matter at a scientific level and emotional matter at a human level.11 These notions of both organic and inorganic material becomings form a significant part of Deleuze’s thinking on the non-human dimensions of his work on bodies without organs,12 ‘that thrives in the multitude of its modalities’.13 The idea of ‘becoming’ is very much central to Deleuze’s work – the means by which we become other. And there are connections here also to the work of Biesta, who argues that education is (or should be), in part, a process of ‘subjectification’14 – in itself a form of becoming. Similarly, the philosophy connects to the world of theoretical physics.
Karen Barad, herself a theoretical physicist, challenges notions of intentionality from both within the human perspective and the more non-organic material perspective at the level of particle physics. Just as ‘there is no determinate fact of the matter’ in human intentionality,15 she argues, the same is true of all matter. For the physicist, the acceptance that the conceptual and the real are both material is a given. Niels Bohr argued that his work was not ‘ideational’ but related to ‘specific physical arrangements’.16 The intra-actions between the physical world and the educational experience are explored throughout – environment and bodies messily enmeshed in learning processes and memories. And underpinning them all is the notion that it is possible, always possible, to become ‘other’. That life is not predetermined; that possibility always exists.
I have found myself indebted to Barad’s explanation of mattering which resonates with these ideas:
Individuals do not pre-exist their interactions; rather, individuals emerge through and as part of their entangled inter-relating … matter and meaning, come into existence, are iteratively reconfigured through each intra-action, thereby making it impossible to differentiate in any absolute sense between creation and renewal, beginning and returning, continuity and discontinuity, here and there, past and future.17
For Barad, these impossibilities suggest a process of becoming which is better understood through the metaphor of diffraction than reflection. She points out that the use of reflective practices makes assumptions about the nature of reality – a ‘right back at you’ approach – whereas diffraction focuses on differences, small and minute differences, in order to better understand things and processes. She uses the images of waves in diffractive patterns to show how diffractive methodology might work in visual terms. It is at the points of intra-action where we should focus our attention.
In short, it is at the point where there are differences, outliers, disturbances that the really interesting stuff happens. In education, we too often look for the trend, the pattern, the average. But it is not here that challenge is born. It is in the nuance, the not yet, the difficulty. If we focus on the trend, we’ll always miss the possibilities sitting just out of sight, at the edges of our experiences.
Diffraction in water
There are clearly resonances here – in Barad’s images of diffraction, where waves of physics and philosophy converge – with the developing understanding of the workings of the mind through neuroscience. Susan Greenfield touches upon the overlaps of the two science disciplines in her writing as she explores the ‘assemblies’ of consciousness and accepts the limitations of her science:
The big and indeed unanswerable question now … is what phenomenology can be matched up with this very physiological phenomenon of a neuronal assembly? … The great question is still the causal, water-into-wine relationship of the physical brain and body with subjective mental events.18
Greenfield argues for closer working between biological neuroscientists and quantum physicists, but she also acknowledges the role of philosophy and anthropology. This blurring of the lines between disciplines and ideas is fractal – the point at which one thing converges on/with/through another. Her view of the brain–mind relationship brings modern-day neuroscience much closer to that explored by Deleuze and Guattari. Indeed, the lines between philosophy and science are blurred in the field of physics too, particularly at quantum level where the notion of lines and outlines is also problematic. As Feynman says in explaining the structure of the atom, ‘what is the Outline? … It is not, believe it or not that every object has a line around it! There is no such line!’19 Similarly, time and place are differently understood at the subatomic level, drawing scientists into an acceptance of unpredictability: ‘it is not possible to predict what will happen in any circumstance’.20 Neuroscientists use these uncertainties and complexities to warn against reductionist views of the brain,21 a position that Deleuze and Guattari posited while brain science was relatively new:
The brain is not a rooted or ramified matter … the discontinuity between cells … make the brain a multiplicity immersed in its place of consistency or neuralgia, a whole uncertain, probabilistic system.22
As I am drawn to the connections between Deleuzian concepts and scientific metaphor, I find myself visualising another natural form – the rhizome. Look at the images below of the plant and of the brain cell:
Rhizome plant structure
Dendrites and brain cells
And the networks they produce:
Rhizome root network
Synaptic link network
Synaptic links, like rhizomes, appear in the ‘middles’ and are complex assemblages of proteins and hormones; of cells and particles interacting in ways that are unpredictable, and which together create emergent systems which are more than the sum of their parts – or immanent. These developing understandings of the brain bring science closer to Deleuze and Guattari’s declaration that the brain is ‘grass’, that is complexly and rhizomatically interconnected.23 The fusing of these two worlds through the interdisciplinary reading of images and texts creates new understandings.
Many aspects of my attempts to explain and outline my rationale for the role of exploratory research in my work wrestle with the ideas of ‘difference’ and ‘repetition’. Derrida and Deleuze have used these words in contrasting ways. Barad brings those contrasts closer by conceptualising the Derridian concept of ‘difference’ through diffractions.24 Diffractive analysis requires a series of returns – a key element of Deleuze’s work on difference. Although these theorists contemplate what seem to be similar concepts, for example repetition, the difference between their positions is marked. It is described by Bearn as, ‘simple and deep: it is the difference between No and Yes’.25 I am drawn to the potential of these and other complexities. For Derrida, the deconstruction of the ‘norm’ performed strategic reversals, forcing the reader to worm into the roots of discourse and of social constructs to better understand how our identities, values and cultural selves are created and maintained. I am also drawn to his rejection of empiricism.26
Deleuze extends the notion of ‘difference’ in The Logic of Sense. Both he and Guattari offer a new way of conceptualising difference, moving from root to rhizome and from language to a broader plane of immanence and affect.27 For Derrida, the digging into discourse creates ‘depth’, but for Deleuze it is not depth but width that yields the most interest. Much of the work for this book has been spent ‘digging’ for roots, but finding along the way that the network is complex and unpredictable, and is spread along or near to the surface. Instead of roots I have found rhizomes. Instead of digging down I have learned to rake across, and this is an important skill for a teacher working in a culture that desires single answers. If we dig down too deeply into one line of enquiry, we are in danger of blinding ourselves to the multiplicity of the width.
In education, this has become evident in the way in which politicians have pursued synthetic phonics as an ‘answer’ to the complexity of reading, forcing a hard stare at a single solution. Meanwhile, at the edges of our vision, boys in particular are losing a love of reading which impacts on their future success at school and in life.28 Viewing an issue thinly – looking at the edges for unintended influences and consequences – takes vigilance and patience. It requires returns. It is not shallow to work in the shallows.
These impossible differentiations between time, discipline and creation – the images of intra-related connections which fold in on themselves and become both inner AND outer – have come to dominate my view of matter and mattering. These entanglements have drawn me to notions of complexity and to the points at which philosophy and science become entangled. Ricca explores how complexity theory has developed within a scientific framework,29 and offers useful parallels for viewing educational experiences in the classroom as complex adaptive systems, characterised by ‘growth, mutual influence and non linear connectedness’.30 Similar connections between complexity, science and social/educational research have also been developed by Barad, Walby, Allan and Turner, among others, and both Protevi and Plotnitsky have written about the connections between the Deleuze–Guattari project and theories of chaos and complexity.31 This complexity leads Biesta to encourage us to celebrate education as a ‘beautiful risk’ in which uncertainty and complexity are not to be feared but to be embraced and worked with as tools of hope and possibility.32 There are striking resonances between the metaphors used by scientists to explore complexity and Deleuzian notions of immanence, folds and rhizomes. As a result, I have become interested in thinking within science about complexity and Deleuzian philosophy as lenses through which classroom interactions might be viewed. I stress here that my interest in, and references to, science do not stem from a positivist frame; instead, I draw from the difference between science and scientism – the former being the pioneering work at the edge of certainty and the latter rooted in a deadening desire for certainty.33 It is within the former definition that I have found scientists playing with ideas and language in a field of complexity and uncertainty.
The inter- and intra-relationship between ideas and experiences requires a mode of eclecticism in terms of exploring educational ideas driven not by categorisation and linearity but by resonance through emerging connections. There is a flattening of logic, of discourse and of materials in which it is the material at the edges that is most interesting. What is emerging? Where is the potential growth? Where are the intra-actions? How do the seemingly unconnected connect and become more than the sum of their parts, creating emergent systems? As Anderson says:
The ability to reduce everything to simple fundamental laws does not imply the ability to start from those laws and reconstruct the universe … At each level of complexity entirely new properties appear. Psychology is not applied biology, nor is biology applied chemistry. We can now see that the whole becomes not merely more, but very different from the sum of its parts.34
Telling tales
This work demands a different way of looking – sideways glances AND full-on stares, soft AND hard focus, zooming in AND zooming out. There is an avoidance of planning, per se, and more focus on setting up a method that leaves the process open to serendipity and chance. As such, rather than bemoaning the disruption of ‘best-laid plans’, I have learned to accept and embrace the disruptions, and even to seek to disrupt in order to better understand or explore a position. This desire to remain open to exploration, or play, has led to viewing the development of my thinking as a Gedankenexperiment. This is an idea borrowed from the world of physics in which a concept is explored outside of laboratory settings. These experiments are described by Barad as ‘pedagogical devices – tools for isolating and bringing into focus key conceptual issues … there is no expectation that a Gedankenexperiment will be realized as a laboratory experiment’.35 This book takes place outside of a literal lab, of course, but it also takes place outside of the constructs of a methodological ‘lab’ – a place of agreed experimental structures. There is no formal methodology, no planned collection of data and the analysis sits within a conceptual realm and not an empirical setting. To this end, I attempted to ‘follow’ the data – to work with what emerged rather than simply codifying it. This process, as Deleuze and Guattari observe, is ‘not the same as reproducing’ which is simply a mode of watching a ‘flow’. Following requires an examination of the ‘singularities of a matter’,36 and I have attempted to do this not by fixing the data in a single interpretation, but by following a number of possible lines of flight from it.
This is a deliberate attempt to disrupt the dominance of the question, ‘What works?’, because that question demands ‘certain’ answers. And certain answers force a reduction in terms of framing the question and validating the evidence. In education, then, in asking the question, ‘What works?’, we necessarily reduce our focus to test results. What works in terms of securing test results? Even this is not foolproof – there will always be the children who fail, the outliers. But they don’t interest the hunters focused on averages. If we can get the vast majority through the tests we can claim to have an education system that ‘works’. But only if the purpose of education is to pass tests. Many, Biesta and Egan among them, are demanding that we broaden our question out.37 Instead of ‘What works?’, perhaps we need to be thinking about what we want education to achieve in terms of both human and non-human futures. Such questions demand autopoietic thinking which is characterised by growth, emergence and complexity.38 This is, in itself, a risk as teachers are not encouraged to be emergent; instead, they are told that theirs is a technical role, one by which the adherence to certain sets of habits and practices will make them ‘teach like a champion’.
This resistance to technical modes of thought also impacted on my writing process. By allowing both writing and teaching to ‘emerge’ through diffractive thinking, rather than being forced or structured – by attempting, as Richardson and St Pierre suggest, to ‘travel in the thinking that writing produces’39 – I could play with the idea of allowing the writing to lead, and for both the data and the writing to take on a performative element. This creates a sense of writing as a means of creating smooth nomadic spaces in which the writer sits on the camel of the keyboard and allows the work to emerge. In resisting traditional modes of writing, of research, of teaching, we put ourselves out on a ledge – a precipice from which there is danger of failure and ridicule. But there is also a unique view and a heightened awareness of what is possible. It is a risk worth taking.
There are clearly connections here to post-structuralism in which ‘language does not reflect social reality, but rather produces meaning and creates social reality’40 – that is, language acting as a diffractive process. I hope to explore how language, both spoken and unspoken, impacts on learning. But I am not attempting to expose or codify ‘social reality’, rather to gently uncover possibilities so that we see difference, not necessarily truth. While post-structuralism initially focused on the ways in which language is used to create power dynamics, meta-narratives and discourses, it has, more recently, been used as a tool to defend and even celebrate the blurring of boundaries between genre and notions of truth, and to invite us to ‘reflect on our method and find new ways of knowing’.41 In this later work, what Denzin and Lincoln describe as the ‘methodologically contested present’ of ‘the seventh movement’,42 arguments are formed for the validation of more radical approaches to conducting and interpreting ‘research’, arguing for the recognition of these alternative forms of knowing. One of these, and the one with which my work is most concerned, sits in the affective dimension, and requires a wider notion of literacy than that which exists within language. This is one reason that Diana Masny’s work resonates for me:
Literacies are a construct; a combination of social, physical, economical assemblages … literacies consist of words, gestures, attitudes and ways of listening, speaking, writing, human and non human, ways of becoming in the world … literacies are actualised according to a particular context of time and space … and involve constant movement in the process of becoming other.43
This view of the literate human as one who is open to ‘reading’ intra-actions as ‘texts’, and viewing them in a non-linear way, requires an openness to serendipity, to chance, to the fleeting moments of affect which vibrate across time and space. It also requires a rejection of norms, a refusal to comply with the expectations of others, while acknowledging a responsibility to at least attempt to explain. Sometimes that which one hopes to explain is so fleeting and momentary that it is hard to justify as ‘data’. Yet it is in these moments that strong pivots take place – moments which, while fleeting, are so powerful that they shift a person or a group into a new trajectory of being. It is in these moments that what I would describe as a ‘gutterance’ occurs – a communication without words, which is nonetheless fully felt and understood. This interests me, for it is in these moments, sometimes less than a second long, that the outcome of a lesson can be decided and which can ignite resentment or joy or hope or anger. I have been drawn, therefore, to exploring concepts of time. These gutterances are calls to ‘action’, and so other plateaus explore what actions might be and examine different notions of actions, deeds and events.
This exploratory text is both a reaction against and a product of a ‘now’ time in which it seems, more than ever, that we, as a species, are living with the demand for certainty while the world itself seems more uncertain.44 Austerity is driving a relentless focus on reliable outcomes, on what works, what is deliverable, and this is mirrored in a demand for research to answer questions about that most complex and unpredictable of human beings – the child. Governments across the world have called for educational researchers to use the same methodologies employed by the medical profession,45 and in promoting the Education Endowment Foundation’s toolkit46 – a synthesis of Hattie’s work47 – have encouraged the acceptance of large-scale statistical randomised controlled trials, meta-analyses and effect sizes. But as Furedi points out, children are not illnesses and education is not a cure.48 The move towards this form of research approach is worryingly reductive and ignores the complexity of both human and non-human inter- and intra-action. It exposes what Biesta calls a ‘misguided impatience’ in which ‘children are being made fit for the education system rather than ask where the causes of this misfit lie, and who, therefore, needs treatment most: the child or society’.49
Dylan Wiliam puts across well the danger of overly simplistic thinking in this yeast analogy:
A: When you don’t add yeast, bread doesn’t rise.
B: When you do add yeast, bread rises.
C: Therefore, yeast makes bread rise.50
Of course, yeast only makes bread rise in the presence of moisture, heat and so on. He points out that while looking for patterns and trends is a useful thing to do, we must always bear in mind that where there are seemingly simple correlations ‘it’s usually a bit more complicated than that’. We cannot be as certain as we would like to be.
A map
There are many leaps and lines in this text – it is unsettling and refuses to sit still – so it might be helpful to view the structure of the book as topographical rather than linear. Less of a road and more of a landscape. The features of the landscape are connected and form a whole – there is a map but no directions. Kitchin et al. offer a view of maps as ‘unfolding potential: as conduits of possibilities; as the sites of imagination and action in the world’,51 and this is how I hope the text will be read. The creation of each plateau has been intra-dependent – working outwards and returning back in folds and waves. In many sections of this book for example, data which pre-exist the thesis emerge alongside ‘new’ data, just as long gone glaciers leave valleys on our maps but remain present in a new form. Each plateau is a topographical feature, some connected to methodology, some to experience, some merging both. They are significant not in terms of their separateness but in how they come together to create an intra-active whole. As such, I present a series of cartographies in which lines of thought are depicted in the hope that they add to the emerging literature relating to Deleuze and education.
This plateau, the first of our landmarks, sets out my position – perhaps it is a welcome sign on the border. Like a landscape, we can view each topographical feature separately, but it is not until we step back and take in the whole that we get a full sense of ‘where we are’. So, in our landscape, we encounter material conceptual features:
• A matter of amorphodology. An exploration of the notion of method and the search for forms and processes that resist linearity and embrace complexity. It aims to open up questions about how complexity might be playfully navigated. How does data appear? How might we embrace serendipity? What can be learned from others experimenting in the field?
• A matter of space. Here we encounter gaps and folds, smooth and striated spaces, freedoms and constraints. This plateau aims to explore how spaces can be opportunistic places which offer the potential for change, becoming other. It examines the folded spaces where elements hide – ‘pleats of matter’ waiting for recurrence and reterritorialisation which make us notice a ‘something’. It argues that we, as teachers, can find spaces for play, for investigation, for possibility.
• A matter of action. This plateau examines deeds and events, affect and effect from two perspectives – that of Deleuze and Arendt – and asks what new understandings can be gained from examining the two theories not comparatively, but conjunctively. It brings in Biesta’s critique of Arendt’s assertion that politics and education should be entirely separate, and asks what constitutes action in the classroom, examining the nuances and complexities of the formation of events and actions.
• A matter of time. This plateau charts a return to classroom practice framed though the concept of time and travel. It aims to unravel a developing sense of myself as an artisanal nomad and how that position throws up challenges for me working in a school context. It frames this journey as an experience of time, conceptualised through chronos and aion, and examines the impact of our conceptualisation of past, present and future on children’s learning experiences.
• A matter of making sense and taking responsibility. I examine the multiple meanings of sense by straddling the roles of teacher and researcher. This plateau aims to explore the different ideas of sense – sensations, making sense and being sensible (responsible) – within a Deleuzian model of ethics, one which rejects a notion of morality and yet is rooted in notions of justice.
• A matter of (r)evolution. This large plateau explores myriad ways in which systems of linearity might be subverted at macro, micro and nano levels. It examines current educational rhetoric and places this within the notional framework of control societies. It explores what might be done at a micro level in terms of curriculum and pedagogy and, finally, it posits the idea that neither macro nor micro revolutions can be effective without taking into account the nano – the significance of minute and important small classroom interactions. Taking both Deleuzian concepts outlined in other plateaus and Biesta’s work on weaknesses and risks, it asks how the teacher might ‘become Mobius’ in meeting demands from competing pressures. It asks what might be done, what might ‘work’, subverting the current notion of work being equated purely with achievement in examinations or inspections. It argues not for revolution, but rather for the idea that teachers form collective and conscious modes of evolutionary practice which could revolutionise education.
• A matter of hoping. Finally, I consider the theory and process that have been instrumental in creating what has emerged. This plateau asks what this exploration is in terms of being something of matter, and explores what it can become in terms of making an ongoing contribution to the field of teaching and learning. It returns to other plateaus in this book in order to explore how they, and the process of writing itself, have combined to create, and continue to combine to create, new lines of flight. It also explores the responsibility that writing and remembrance bring.
In attempting to present a meandering process rather than a linear journey, data and themes flit focus – in school/out of school, me/us/them, then/now/future. Some have been informed by looking back; others have emerged seemingly from nowhere. But, of course, this is not true – they have pre-existed in some form or other. The data has acted therefore more as a schizo disruption, as described by O’Sullivan in his exploration of Guattari’s work:
First it might come after the accessing of any signifying nuclei. This would be a retroactive recognition, as it were, an ‘Ah! So that’s what it was!’, or even an ‘Ah! So that’s me!’ It might also, however, operate prior to the asignifying nuclei as a kind of platform or catalyst. Here signifying material is predictive, even prophetic.52
While I reject linearity, there is no doubt that lines of flight have emerged from my thinking. These lines are presented within the text as interruptions in the form of the data. They chart, or map, as rhizomatically as possible, my battle to be artisan rather than architect in my teaching.53They expose the weaknesses – the many failures – as well as the pressures to comply and hopefully also small triumphs, which offer some scope for improvement and movement while recognising complexity.
Disruptive stories
Just as science grapples with notions of consciousness, so research grapples with trying to pin down that which is hard to prove. Traditional linear notions of research demand a degree of predictability and certainty, which is usually produced in linear and logical form – from what Deleuze refers to as ‘denotating intuition’ (hypothesis) to oversimplified conclusions of signification.54 It is difficult to resist the temptation to draw denotative conclusions in outcome even if the process is more fluid. To stand outside of, or to defy, this ‘established way of thinking’ in which ‘a prevailing system of representation is naturalised and seen as the only truthful and correct way’ is daunting.55 Doing so is an act of resistance.
It is this refusal to engage with the simplicity of origins that has made the process of writing this book so complicated. Conformity lives in the margins – described by Norris as ‘the powerful normative consensus’.56 This consensus has haunted me as I have written, as I have attempted to write myself out of norms within a normative form, to unsettle the ‘unsettling forces’. This has formed a jostling between the data and the narrative – the latter being the central text and the former an attempt to trouble the centre. The data itself exists not simply as something to be analysed but as an interruption, a disruption, and there has been a great temptation to refuse analysis – to allow it to sit. Yet as a species we are driven to make sense. It is hard to resist the impulse to draw single conclusions; so instead I attempt to suggest possibilities. The ‘data’ has appeared at the margins of consciousness, as headers and footnotes, and sometimes as images in my emerging thinking. Not so much sought, as niggling their way into the main ‘text’ and appearing, seemingly innocently, as stories.
These stories concern affects and effects. They have come to me loaded with emotion and have arrived rather than been chosen by virtue of their impact – the impact that tells the mind that ‘this matters’ even if at that moment it is not clear why or how. They are the ordinary moments, easily missed, that carry the potential – when they connect to others at some future or past point – to become extraordinarily or consciously meaningful. We all experience these pivotal moments throughout our lives, but we tend not to consider them in terms of the impact they have on classroom experience and practice. Anthropologist Kathleen Stewart offers a useful definition of the notion of ordinary affects:
Ordinary affects are the varied, surging, capacities to affect and be affected that give everyday life the quality of a continual motion of relations, scenes, contingencies and emergencies. They’re things that happen. They happen in impulses, sensations, expectations, daydreams, encounters and habits of relating, in strategies and their failures, in form of persuasion, contagion, and compulsion, in modes of attention, attachment, and agency and in public and social worlds of all kinds that catch people up in something that feels like something.57
Ordinary affects, as defined by Stewart, are distinguishable from Deleuzian ‘affect’ in that they are wholly concerned with the human experience. (Deleuzian affects exist outside of the lived realm and form part of a number of assemblages.) Ordinary affects are, nevertheless, within the Deleuzian affective realm – they are sensations, not easily defined or identified, and they are problematic for both research and for education. They cannot be planned for and, therefore, the concept of a methodology becomes difficult. They might be conceptualised as a ‘non-conscious experience of intensity’ that leads to forms of action.58
