Abstract
Diana Masny, Cartographies of becoming in education: A Deleuze-Guattari perspective, Sense Publishers: Rotterdam, 2013; 254 pp.: ISBN 978-94-6209-168-9, £26.96 (pbk)
In Cartographies of Becoming in Education: A Deleuze-Guattari Perspective, Diana Masny brings together the work of several international researchers to propose an approach to education that moves beyond closed hierarchical systems of teaching. This collection builds on the research work established through the Multiple Literacies Research Unit at the College of Education, University of Ottawa. Organized into five sections called Entry Points, authors invite education scholars to consider how the theories of Deleuze and Guattari can re-envision educational practice.
The first entry, “Politicizing Education” contains three chapters. Deleuze and Music Education: Machines for Change by David Lines, sees the rhizome as a machine for change in music education and argues this approach works against neoliberal educational policies that restrict teaching and learning to linear methods. Get Out From Behind the Lectern by Jason Wallin, explores transversality as a tool for rethinking the “material organization of the school” (p. 35), creating nonhierarchical relationships by blurring the lines between teacher and student. In Deleuze and the Subversion(s) of the Real: Pragmatics in Education, educational researcher David Cole explores the concept of real in education. Using data from a Sudanese immigrant family living in Australia, Cole offers a multilayered perspective to teaching that takes into account all aspects of the family’s lives. Cole also explains that Deleuze offers a way to think about the ethnography as “unethnographic”—where participants are no longer seen as marginalized “other” or as representational of all refugees. Instead, this approach opens up the life of the participants and engages Multiple Literacies Theory (MLT) as pedagogical implications that move away from white, colonial perspectives to instruction.
Comprising two essays, the second entry point explores affect and education. Affect is intensity located within the body before subjective feelings are conceded. Working against the dualism between mind and body in education, author Inna Semetsky uses the fold to explore the ways the body–mind work together to produce knowledge through that which bodies experience first and later conceptualize cognitively. In Chapter 8, Mia Perry writes about the use of theater performance as an experience that gives way to affective nomadic discovery in the classroom. Perry challenges the dominant perspectives of pedagogy that relies on logic, systems, and individuality (p. 95). In addition, analysis works against the institutional need to homogenously organize bodies by resisting a “culture of consensus” (p. 105). Both of the chapters in this entry point think about the ways bodies are producing and being produced in educational settings, calling for an exploration of difference as a point of departure from typical practices found in schools.
The third entry point explores literacy practices in both traditional and nontraditional settings. Authors Maria de Lourdes Dionisio, Rui Vieiria de Castro, and Ana Sofia Arqueiro examine the social nature of literacy in the workplace. Working against the dualism of literate/illiterate and deficit ideas of literacy, this chapter gives account of two factories in Portugal where workers face conflicting literacies in social and labor relationships. One particularly interesting aspect is the connection the authors make between the discourses of literacy and economic development and how the power of this discourse shapes a national and international understanding of what it means to be literate. Elizabeth Freitas’ chapter in this section pushes against dominant ideas of what it means to “do math” in the classroom. Calling readers to rethink the relationship between math and language as expressive rather than communicative, this analysis allows for mathematical thinking to be seen as a material exercise where tools such as diagrams, teaching-pointers, and bodily movement might have more agency in mathematical understanding than simply sitting, speaking, and writing.
“Teacher-Becomings” serves as the fourth entry point and consists of two essays. In Reading, ICT, Second Language Education and the Self: An Agencement, Francis Bangou uses the concept of agencement/assemblages and MLT to analyze the impact of technology in a preservice teacher course. Bangou focuses on three teachers who learn to integrate Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in the classroom and the multiple transformations these students went through during the experience. The second chapter, written by Taylor Webb, explores teachers in a process of becoming that can be articulated in multiple ways rather than seen as the subject of presumed singular teacher identity. Webb uses several Deleuzoguattarian concepts to unpack this idea, and implicates that using these concepts alongside MLT offers a way for teachers to reinterpret power through the micro level of the teacher body as well as the macro level of government and curriculum policy (p. 176).
In the last entry point, “Deterritorializing Boundaries,” Graham Livesey discusses the ways environments are constructed and organized through the concepts of smooth and striated space. Livesey argues for a “boundryless condition” (p. 188) in institutional spaces so structures might be more fluid than current top-down hierarchical systems that are typically in place. In the 15th chapter, Cameron Duff examines learning as a series of signs, events, and affects within the body that are transformative and rhizomatic. Duff uses illness to illustrate that the ongoing nature of recovery occurs within the affective relationships with everyday life. Masny concludes her book with a postscript to the reader offering insights into the terminology and methodologies used in this book.
One of the most thought-provoking pieces in the text was the artwork of Linda Knight that is interwoven throughout and moves away from traditional print. In a series of knitted images, Knight’s artwork theorizes varies levels of teaching and research and the production of these entities.
Overall, the book challenges current paradigms and power structures by disrupting hierarchies and approaching education as a rhizomatic endeavor rather than a linear exercise. By blurring the boundaries between mind–body, teacher–student, and theory–practice, this book calls for a much more inclusive pedagogy and educational practice and should be well received by educational researchers thinking through the work of Deleuze and Guattari as well as new materialisms.