This essay juxtaposes concepts created by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari with worlds imagined by Ursula Le Guin in a performance of ‘rhizosemiotic play’ that explores some possible ways of generating and sustaining what William Pinar calls ‘complicated conversation’ within the regime of signs that constitutes an increasingly internationalized curriculum field. Deleuze and Guattari analyze thinking as flows or movements across space. They argue, for example, that every mode of intellectual inquiry needs to account for the plane of immanence upon (...) which it operates—the preconceptual field presupposed by the concepts that inquiry creates. Curriculum inquiry currently operates on numerous nationally distinctive planes of immanence. I argue that the internationalization of curriculum studies should not presume a singular transnational plane of immanence but, rather, envisage a process performed by curriculum scholars with the capacities and competencies to change planes—to move between one plane of immanence and another and/or to transform their own planes. My essay is a ‘narrative experiment’ that takes seriously Deleuze’s argument that a work of philosophy should be, in part, a kind of science fiction, and also takes inspiration from Le Guin’s science fictional stories of ‘changing planes’ to generate productive and disruptive transnational agendas in curriculum inquiry. (shrink)

The idea of transformative and troublesome ‘threshold concepts’ has been popular and influential in higher education. This article reports how teachers with different disciplinary affiliations responded to the ‘concept of thresholds’ in the course of a cross-disciplinary research project. It describes how the idea was territorialised and enacted through established materialising discourses in different disciplinary settings and enacted through pedagogical practice, technology and assessment. This has implications for professional development and pedagogical practice and endeavours to create ‘self-organising classrooms’ along Deleuzian (...) lines. (shrink)

In the following essay, I discuss my own uneasy and nonlinear journey from the classroom to Deleuze, describing the concepts and lines of thought that have been productive in thinking differently about teaching and teacher education. I also detail my encounters with the surprising orthodoxies of using Deleuzian/Deleuzoguattarian thought. From these, I suggest that ‘being Deleuzian’ is itself a molar line that serves as an exclusionary mechanism, working to preserve high theory for the use of only a select few. Instead, (...) I argue for the potential of making such nonlinear thinking accessible to mainstream audiences to interrupt the linear, status quo thinking undergirding a global educational neoliberal movement. (shrink)

This paper addresses the unconscious dimension as articulated in Carl Jung's depth psychology and in Gilles Deleuze's philosophy. Jung's theory of the archetypes and Deleuze's pedagogy of the concept are two complementary resources that posit individuation as the goal of human development and self-education in practice. The paper asserts that educational theory should explore the role of the unconscious in learning, especially with regard to adult education in the process of learning from life-experiences. The integration of the unconscious into consciousness (...) becomes a constitutive part of subject-formation and self-knowledge, which in turn serves as a basis for experiential self-education. (shrink)

This essay explores aesthetics, affect, and educational politics through the thought of Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Rancière. It contextualizes and contrasts the theoretical valences of their ethical and democratic projects through their shared critique of Kant. It then puts Rancière's notion of dissensus to work by exploring it in relation to a social movement and hunger strike organized for educational justice in Chicago's Little Village neighborhood. This serves as a context for understanding how educational provisions are linked to the aesthetic (...) distribution of perception within the neoliberal city. It also serves as a powerful example of how these orders of perception are resisted and subverted at the local level by aesthetic and affective means. Through the Little Village hunger strike the essay argues that while Rancière allows us to recognize the aesthetic dimensions of the political, he falls short in addressing tactical and/or affective considerations. The essay concludes by seeking to extend the critical efficacy of Rancière's dissensus through a rendering of tactical affect within Deleuzian metaphysics. (shrink)

There is no more central issue to education than thinking and reasoning. Certainly, such an emphasis chimes with the rationalist and cognitive deep structure of the Western educational tradition. The contemporary tendency reinforced by cognitive science is to treat thinking ahistorically and aculturally as though physiology, brain structure and human evolution are all there is to say about thinking that is worthwhile or educationally significant. The movement of critical thinking also tends to treat thinking ahistorically, focusing on universal processes of (...) logic and reasoning. Against this trend and against the scientific spirit of the age this paper presents a historical and philosophical picture of thinking. By contrast with dominant cognitive and logical models the paper emphasizes kinds of thinking and styles of reasoning. The paper grows out of interests primarily in the work of Nietzsche, Heidegger and Wittgenstein, and in the extension and development of their work in Critical Theory and French poststructuralist philosophy. The paper draws directly on some of this work to argue for the recognition of different kinds of thinking, which are explored by reference to Heidegger, and also the significance of styles of reasoning, which are explored by reference to Wittgenstein and to Ian Hacking. (shrink)

This paper situates moral education in the context of Gilles Deleuze's philosophy and as embedded in lived experience qualified by three dimensions, namely critical, clinical, and creative (‘3C’). The construct of ‘3C’ education will be enriched by reference to the theoretical corpus of Nel Noddings, specifically her 2006 book Critical Lessons: What our schools should teach. The paper argues that only as embodying all three ‘C's in experience can education become genuinely moral and bring the missing element of values into (...) quality teaching (cf. Lovat, 2006a). The novel concept ‘pedagogy of values’ is proposed, analysed and synthesized alongside Deleuze's unorthodox ‘pedagogy of the concept’. (shrink)

This paper addresses the unconscious dimension as articulated in Carl Jung's depth psychology and in Gilles Deleuze's philosophy. Jung's theory of the archetypes and Deleuze's pedagogy of the concept are two complementary resources that posit individuation as the goal of human development and self‐education in practice. The paper asserts that educational theory should explore the role of the unconscious in learning, especially with regard to adult education in the process of learning from life‐experiences. The integration of the unconscious into consciousness (...) becomes a constitutive part of subject‐formation and self‐knowledge, which in turn serves as a basis for experiential self‐education. (shrink)

This paper explores how Deleuze and Guattari's philosophical concepts extend and elaborate discursive and psychoanalytic interpretations of qualitative research findings. Analyzing data from a UK research project exploring young people's engagements with Social Networking Sites (SNSs), Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalytic method is drawn upon to consider complex desire-flows in the social. In particular the notion of ‘affective assemblages’ is developed to explore the relationships between school and online spaces and subjective interfacing with these spaces. The paper suggests online space is (...) heterosexually striated and SNSs create new intensified gendered and sexualized identities and affective relations between young people. Investigating the case study of a teen girl, Louise, who is socially rejected through the affective assemblage of the SNS, then pathologized at school for violently retaliating against being called a ‘fat slag’ online, the paper suggests a Deleuzoguattarian analysis offers new theoretical tools for thinking about discursive subjectification but also for mapping complex desire-flows and micro movements through and against discursive/symbolic norms. (shrink)

Educational philosophy in English-speaking countries tends to be informed mainly by analytic philosophy common to Western thinking. A welcome alternative is provided by pragmatism in the tradition of Peirce, James and Dewey. Still, the habit of the so-called linguistic turn has a firm grip in terms of analytic philosophy based on the logic of non-contradiction as the excluded middle. A body∼mind approach pertains to the edusemiotic turn that this article elucidates. Importantly, semiotics is not illogical but is informed by the (...) paradoxical logic of the included middle. The process of reasoning is however indirect or mediated; it involves active interpretation (in a variety of forms) versus direct representation; it is analogical and connects what are otherwise doomed to remain isolated substances of body versus mind with a separation of knowledge and action. Analysing and synthesising the philosophies of Charles Sanders Peirce and Gilles Deleuze, together with a brief excursion into the cutting-edge science of coordination dynamics, this article will demonstrate how the body∼mind assemblage is created in practice, and what may be the implications of such a stance for educational philosophy and pedagogical practice. (shrink)