This paper uses Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of faciality to analyse the teacher’s face. According to Deleuze and Guattari, the teacher-face is a special type of face because it is an ’overcoded’ face produced in specific landscapes. This paper suggests four limit-faces for teacher faciality that actualise different mixes of signifiance and subjectification in a classroom in which individualisation and massifications are affected. Understanding these limit-faces suggests new ways to conceive the affects actualised in the classroom that are subjected to (...) increasing levels of surveillance from education policy makers. Through this ‘partial mapping’ new possibilities emerge to “escape the face”. (shrink)

This paper aims to question anew the popular and supposedly self-evident affirmation of education, in its modern incarnation as in its historical notion. The “naive” questions suggest that we have recently taken for granted that education ought to be for the masses, that it ought to be upbringing, and that it is better than ignorance. Drawing on the tradition that calls such an understanding of education into question, the author shows that the hidden costs of disregarding such reflection end up, (...) camouflaged and smuggled, taxing the current debates regarding generally accepted education strategies. The characteristic feeling of the currently accepted model of education being in chronic crisis is less a testament to an absence of alternative approaches than to a lack of thorough self-reflection. (shrink)

In times of globalised flows of students, this paper offers an alternative way of conceptualising identity change in the experiences of students on study abroad or student exchange programmes. Despite the ‘identity turn’ of recent years, modernist notions of identity continue to impact on the ways in which study abroad experiences are conceived, resulting in failures both to facilitate productive change and to recognise blocked, or ‘knotted’, attempts at change. The discussion considers data collected in an ethnographic study of a (...) tertiary-level English language programme in an Australian university and suggests that a closer look at the specific experiences of four individual study abroad students, through the lens of the Deleuzian concepts of the molar, the molecular and the line of flight, offers a way looking at identity which may help both educators and learners open more usefully to the possibilities for self-transformation. (shrink)

In the South Korean film, The Parasite, the underling family, in an act of desperation, uses deceptive means to infiltrate the rich family. The term parasite refers nominally to the underling family, and their efforts to befriend and inhabit the class territory and social hierarchy of the rich family. How can this be of use for education? To answer this, we ask: what can we learn from Parasite to inform contemporary philosophy of education? Primarily, this experimental piece written from different (...) philosophical viewpoints, suggests that the images, narrative, and social context of the film cannot be read stereotypically. Using a blend of Deleuze and Stiegler ‘cinema-theory’, we present a heuristic perspective on the Parasite from three viewpoints: (1) South Korean society, and how a pedagogy of the parasite helps to understand the dynamics of contemporary philosophy of education in a global context. South Korea is uniquely placed at the cusp and threshold of deterritorializing Western capitalism, given its position next to the only in-tact communist state system; (2) The film shows how theorizing an exceptional notion of time contributes to the overall pedagogy of the parasite. Here, being a parasite is about waiting to attach oneself to a host, yet this waiting is an anxious, perceptive, adherent time, a reciprocal time, and one internally interconnected to that of the host; (3) The ethics of the parasite. The parasite chooses a host from a certain viewpoint before attaching itself and trying to be absorbed into the host. The pedagogy of the parasite suggests a unique ethical treatment of these assimilative processes and allows us to consider cinema as a parasitic means to shake the passive audience out of its stupor when bearing witness to the violence in the film and its own collusion in the trauma and reality of contemporary capitalism. (shrink)

In our paper we aim at reflecting upon the extent to which educational theory may be used as a framework in the analysis of policy documents. As policy texts are ‘heteroglossic in character’ (Lingard and Ozga, in The Routledge Falmer reader in education policy and politics, Routledge, London and New York, 2007 , p. 2) and create “circumstances in which the range of options available in deciding what to do are narrowed or changed” (Ball in, Education policy and social class: (...) The selected works of Stephen J Ball, Routledge, London and New York, 2006 , p. 46), they need to be theoretically tackled in their underlying assumptions and implications. This proposal draws on an analysis of two sets of documents of the European Union: texts produced between 2000 and 2006, underlying the European Union programmes; and texts produced by a working group focusing on the key competences of Lifelong Learning (2003–2006). Initially, the framework for the analysis of different documents was grounded on the existing research in the field of educational policy. Now we attempt a secondary analysis of the collected data by transposing the borders of this particular and highly prolific field. We argue that what is outside the texts may reshape what is inside the texts. Educational theory allows us to define some conceptual tools in order to question the documents as political apparatus which open and constrain possibilities. Therefore, we will use educational theory as an arena where different matters, perspectives and possibilities may be explored and assembled. We have engaged in a conversation with both the data and some theoretical approaches. Central to this conversation are the concepts of “ignorant schoolmaster” (Rancière, in The ignorant schoolmaster five lessons in intellectual emancipation, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1991 ), “learning contexts” (Edwards, in Rethinking contexts for learning and teaching, Routledge, Oxon and New York, 2009a , b ), and “experience” (Larrosa, in Revista Brasileira de Educação, 19:20–28, 2002 ). (shrink)