Becoming Mobius

The complex matter of education

Dr Debra Kidd, Ian Gilbert

• Editore: Independent Thinking Press
• Anno: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781781352267
• Argomento: Education
• Categoria: Education General

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.

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...