Some 20x20 thinking about the metaphor of the rhizome in learning and its implications for curriculum theory,

policy and change.

Christina Cantrill, May 2012 @seecantrill
Friday, May 11, 12

Curriculum Theory, Policy and Change Related rhizomes about rhizomes collection: http://pinterest.com/seecantrill/rhizome/

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Friday, May 11, 12

Rhizomic learning theory caught my attention this past fall when Dave Cormier, a blogger and educator from Canada, started a robust dialogue about the metaphor of the rhizome and its implications for learning during a massively open online course he helps to organize called #change11.1 Daves been thinking about rhizomic learning theory for years.2
1 Course facilitators. November 10, 2011. Rhizomatic Learning - why we teach. change.mooc.ca. from http:// change.mooc.ca/week09.htm. 2 Cormier, Dave. November 5, 2011. Rhizomatic Learning Why we teach? Daves Educational Blog: Education, post-structuralism and the rise of the machines. from http://davecormier.com/edblog/2011/11/05/rhizomaticlearning-why-learn/. image source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/gforsythe/6318918248/

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In 2008 he wrote an article titled Community as Curriculum in the journal Innovate. He states: "In the rhizomatic model of learning, curriculum is not driven by predefined inputs from experts; it is constructed and negotiated in real time by the contributions of those engaged in the learning process." 3
3 Cormier, Dave. June 3, 2008. Rhizomatic Education: Community as Curriculum. Daves Educational Blog: Education, post-structuralism and the rise of the machines. from http://davecormier.com/edblog/2008/06/03/ rhizomatic-education-community-as-curriculum/. image: personal collection (Preparations for Heart of the Beast May Day Parade, Minneapolis, 2009)

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This past fall, after presenting this idea during #change11 he was challenged by another educator to take up Einsteins advice and explain it to a 6 year old. He ended up writing a letter to his own 5 year old, Oscar, which is posted on his blog -- a letter that started me, rhizomically, on this exploration today. 4
4 Cormier, Dave. November 18, 2011. Explaining Rhizomatic Learning to my Five Year Old. Daves Educational Blog: Education, post-structuralism and the rise of the machines. from http://davecormier.com/edblog/2011/11/18/ explaining-rhizomatic-learning-to-my-five-year-old/. image source: http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/show/19421

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Other educators have been thinking about the rhizome in learning too ... Mary Ann Reilly, New Jersey-based blogger and educator, notices her sons learning while playing Minecraft and connecting with Tom, from London, another 13-year old player. She writes They hail from across the globe and horizontally connect with one another in this passionate affinity space where they learn deeply. 5
5 Reilly, Mary Ann. September 27, 2011. We are Pando: Rhizomatic Learning*. Between the By-Road and the Main Road. from http://maryannreilly.blogspot.com/2011/09/we-are-pando-rhizomatic-learning.html. image source: http://maryannreilly.blogspot.com/2011/09/we-are-pando-rhizomatic-learning.html

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In an article she wrote in the Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, Mary Ann suggests that we should think about professional learning as rhizomatic and locally determined instead of pd programs which undermine teachers agency and obscure ... capacity to recognize anomalous situations ... diminishing thinking and learning overall. 6
6 Reilly, Mary Ann. 2009. Dressing the Corpse: Professional Development and the Play of Singularities. Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy. Volume 6, Issue 1, 2009. pgs. 79-99. also online: http://www.scribd.com/doc/ 73021538/Dressing-the-Corpse-Professional-Development-and-the-Play-of-Singularities image: http://maryannreilly.blogspot.com/2011/11/reimagining-learning-as-lines-of-ight.html

(Image: rhizome tubers)

Friday, May 11, 12

Rhizomic learning theory is based on the metaphor of rhizomes found in the writing of French philosophers Deleuze and Guattari, from the 1980 book A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Bulbs and tubers are rhizomes ... they write, [and] unlike trees or their roots, the rhizome connects any point to any other point, and its traits are not necessarily ... of the same nature ... 7
7 Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Introduction: Rhizome. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987 tr. Brian Massumi, pg. 4 online: http://danm.ucsc.edu/~dustin/library/ deleuzeguattarirhizome.pdf image: http://maryannreilly.blogspot.com/2011/06/rhizomatic-learning.html

(Image: birds; n-1)

n-1
Friday, May 11, 12

... the rhizome operates by variation, expansion, conquest, capture, offshoots ... In contrast to centered ... systems with hierarchical modes of communication and preestablished paths, the rhizome is an acentered, nonhierarchical, nonsignifying ... ... Subtract the unique from the multiplicity; A system of this kind could be called a rhizome. ..." 8
8 Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Introduction: Rhizome. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987 tr. Brian Massumi, pgs. 19 and 4. online: http://danm.ucsc.edu/~dustin/library/ deleuzeguattarirhizome.pdf image: http://spaceandpolitics.blogspot.com/2011/03/speed-of-revolutionary-resonance.html

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A core idea of learning which emerges from this rhizomic philosophy is that there is no fixed knowledge only new knowledge that emerges from acts of creation. Biologist Stuart Kauffman writes that it is a far richer story of the creation than expressed by Darwin as he shares about the ceaseless creativity of the universe that he finds in biological evolution 9
9 Kauffman, Stuart. April 2, 2012. Beyond Darwin: Niche Creation and Creative Evolution. NPR: 3.17 Cosmos and Culture from http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2012/04/02/149851678/npr-beyond-darwin-niche-creation-andcreative-evolution. image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/margaperez/2976037593/

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He describes the ever new adjacent possible empty niches ... that become filled by newly evolved species that create, without selection, yet more new empty adjacent possible niches, filled by yet more new species. This niche creation he says, means that life keeps making more room for itself! 10
10 Kauffman, Stuart. April 2, 2012. Beyond Darwin: Niche Creation and Creative Evolution. NPR: 3.17 Cosmos and Culture from http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2012/04/02/149851678/npr-beyond-darwin-niche-creation-andcreative-evolution. image: http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2012/04/02/149851678/npr-beyond-darwin-niche-creation-and-creativeevolution

(image: quote from Dewey)

Friday, May 11, 12

These descriptions of life suggest to those thinking about learning that the possibilities are highly creative and that knowledge is itself an act of constant creation. In education too, these ideas have their own connections ... Inna Semesky takes them back to Dewey in her book Deleuze, Education and Becoming. 11
11 Semetsky, Inna. 2006. Deleuze, Education and Becoming. Educational Futures: Rethinking Theory and Practice. Sense Publishers. Also online: www.sensepublishers.com/catalog/files/90-8790-017-1.pdf image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/54144832@N06/5872707687/in/photostream

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And in the emerging field of digital media and learning, Douglas Thomas and John Seely Browns New Culture of Learning doesnt use the metaphor of the rhizome but instead says that the 21st century ... belongs to the tacit and that tacit knowledge plays a key role in shaping the process of inquiry. 12
12 Thomas, Douglas and John Seely Brown. 2011. A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change. CreateSpace. http://www.newcultureoflearning.com/. image: http://digitalis.nwp.org/site-blog/crowdsourcing-harnessing-power-crowd-our/3734

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This new culture, they describe, is one that brings together core dimensions of learning that connect the tacit with the known, namely play and making. 13 David Gaunlett picks up on the connection between making and learning in his book Making is Connecting, where he describes making and doing as acts of creativity that connect materials and ideas as well as communities and society. 14
13 Thomas, Douglas and John Seely Brown. 2011. A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change. CreateSpace. pg. ? http://www.newcultureoflearning.com/ 14 Gauntlett, David. 2011. Making is Connecting: The Social Meaning of Creativity, from DIY and knitting to YouTube and Web 2.0. Polity, UK. http://www.makingisconnecting.org/ image: personal collection (Nam June Paik installation, The Art of the Video Game, American Museum of Art, DC, 2012)

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Dewey writes that in the end what is unseen decides what happens in the seen. He then goes on to describe this as the thickening of life. 15 For Deleuze, this is about becoming. 16
15 Dewey, John. 1938. Experience and Education. Kappa Delta Pi, MacMillian, NY. pgs. 74. 16 Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Introduction: Rhizome. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987 tr. Brian Massumi, pg. 10. online: http://danm.ucsc.edu/~dustin/library/ deleuzeguattarirhizome.pdf image: personal collection (Sunflower at Beths House, 2009)

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When Glenn Gould speeds up the performance of a piece, Deleuze and Guattari write, he is not just displaying virtuosity, ... he is making the whole piece proliferate. The Pink Panther imitates nothing, they say, it reproduces nothing, it paints the world its color, pink on pink; this is its becoming-world ... its own line of flight ... 17
17 Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Introduction: Rhizome. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987 tr. Brian Massumi, pgs. 6 and 11. online: http://danm.ucsc.edu/~dustin/library/ deleuzeguattarirhizome.pdf image: http://simchafisher.wordpress.com/2010/06/20/espressivo/

Friday, May 11, 12

When Glenn Gould speeds up the performance of a piece, Deleuze and Guattari write, he is not just displaying virtuosity, ... he is making the whole piece proliferate. The Pink Panther imitates nothing, they say, it reproduces nothing, it paints the world its color, pink on pink; this is its becoming-world ... its own line of flight ... 17
17 Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Introduction: Rhizome. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987 tr. Brian Massumi, pgs. 6 and 11. online: http://danm.ucsc.edu/~dustin/library/ deleuzeguattarirhizome.pdf image: http://simchafisher.wordpress.com/2010/06/20/espressivo/

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Inna Semesky asks how can this theorizing help us in an educational setting? She then quotes Deleuze who wrote that all one should ever do when teaching is explore ... [a question], play around with the terms, add something, relate it to something else. Our only teachers, he continues, are those who tell us to do with me ...rather than ... to reproduce ... 18
18 Semetsky, Inna. 2006. Deleuze, Education and Becoming. Educational Futures: Rethinking Theory and Practice. Sense Publishers. pg. 52 (Deleuze 1995, p 139) Also online: www.sensepublishers.com/catalog/files/ 90-8790-017-1.pdf image: http://digitalis.nwp.org/resource/1807

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In the context of an inquiry-driven community of educators, writing project director Ralph Cordova speaks of the adjacent possible when working with his colleagues from The CoLab. The CoLab is a thinking and doing space, he says, where we learn to make visible and transferable the seeming invisible and intangible aspects of our teaching practices. 19
19 Cordova, Ralph. December 4, 2011. You are the Theory & The Technology in Action NWP Digital Is from http://digitalis.nwp.org/resource/3327. image: http://artmuseumteaching.com/2012/02/20/reading-murals-telling-stories/

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Beth Kolko, an engineering professor, studies the role that makers and hackers play in innovation and discovery. 20 She established a space called Hackademia where you don't have to be an expert to be an innovator and writes that a lack of expertise can in fact drive people to create the kind of disruptive technologies that really are gamechangers. 21
20 Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Jan 24, 2012. Beth Kolko on Hackademia: Leveraging the Conflict Between Expertise and Innovation to Create Disruptive Technologies. http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/interactive/ events/luncheon/2012/01/kolko. 21 http://www.hackademia.com/ image: http://sternlab.org/category/blog/page/2/

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Via a screencast about youthvoices.net, writing project teacher Paul Allison documents his own process of learning with social media, where he shows how he is building his own curriculum with other people, some he barely knows, online ... He describes this learning as being about [the] emotional, the intellectual, and the academic. How can I bring this kind of learning into the classroom? he asks. 22
22 Allison, Paul. July 21, 2011. Why we want students to work on Youth Voices. Published at http:// youthvoices.net/about and http://youtu.be/uaNoD9RlQg0 image: http://youthvoices.net

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At the Innovation Lab in the Thompson School District in Colorado a process has been developed that supports each individuals curricular path by organizing around key steps of Notice, Dream, Connect, Do. Monika Hardy calls it a safe place to perfect this natural learning process. 23
23 MacArthur Foundation. Connected Learning: Case Study. The InnovationLab: Exploring the Possibility of SelfDirected Learning. http://connectedlearning.tv/case-studies/innovationlab-exploring-possibility-self-directedlearning. image: http://www.slideshare.net/monk51295/be-you-book-draft

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Gaunlett also imagines a future education system that recognizes the natural characteristics of powerful learners ... curiosity, courage, desire, imagination, social and reflective. 24 More passions, not fewer, is the answer says Dewey. 25 Can the rhizome help us in finding the ways?
24 Gauntlett, David. 2011. Making is Connecting: The Social Meaning of Creativity, from DIY and knitting to YouTube and Web 2.0. Polity, UK. http://www.makingisconnecting.org/ 25 Semetsky, Inna. 2006. Deleuze, Education and Becoming. Educational Futures: Rethinking Theory and Practice. Sense Publishers. pg. 25 (Dewey quoted in Holder 1995, p. 184) Also online: www.sensepublishers.com/catalog/files/90-8790-017-1.pdf