Abstract
This is a sciencepoetical essay combining neurodidactics as an interdisciplinary research field representing an interface between neuroscience, didactics, and educational sciences with the potentials in and with recent post-constructivist and/or post-humanism, compostist, and multiparadigmatic theories of embodiment and matter becomings. It is an attempt to think new about the nature–culture divide and learning. The idea and notion of the rhizome, and thus the idea of the rhizome-embrained body of a child, is followed through. I write along a neutral and panpsychist monist philosophy of mind un/conscious–attention–discovery sensation–thinking–learning continuum, hopefully contributing to research on conceptual change in children and ultimately the Neuron. I write. I thus Pessoa word and I try to Cixous forethink in and with words. They are (my) stimulating electric currents.
Keywords
Donner à l’enfant le désir d‘apprendre et tout méthode sera bonne [Give the child the urge to learn and any method will do].
It is a misunderstanding that someone must be forced to learn something. Consciously and unconsciously, our body and brain learn nonstop, whether we like it or not. Learning is a passion probably located in the sexual center of our brains. Neurons form networks forming larger networks processing information. Networks that, for example, allow us to recognize and code space, develop tools, and navigate thus decide, make matter, and plan ahead. These are processes of orientation in/through space: navigating and thinking about navigating simultaneously. Thinking and planning also without direct sensory impulses, thus having the ability to generate new ideas and ideas about the future. It is a “noisy place” (Reinertsen, 2013): billions of active neural passageways are allowing us to make all kinds of connections and patterns, and through modern functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) and Positron Electron Tomography (PET) scanning possibilities, we can see them light up as dots when we experience pleasure, pain, love, and so on—thinking and understanding both arising out of activity and movement, learning and cognition happening from movement of knowledges, movement of limbs, from dexterity, proficiencies, and skill associations: learning, creative, living, thinking, knowledge is thus movement internalized.
This challenges, the way I see this, hierarchical models of knowledge creation, straight and narrow visions of linear learning processes, and traditional notions of students and children as “autonomous learners.” Such thinking—as anthropo-normativity (Taylor and Blaise, 2014)—is often expressed in/as “child-centered” pedagogies and a normalization of the universal individual child and their “natural” development toward becoming rational beings and exercising autonomous agency. Furthermore, it challenges traditional views of education as that of teachers having to teach something, and the need for rules thus bottom lines teacher-centered instruction and control. Rather, it leads to heterarhic, dynamic, and chaotic (including material) understandings of knowledge and knowledge creation and a move from hermeneutic to immanent views on learning. Or as I prefer, it is a move toward a vibration center of learning and/as “edusemiotic becomings” (Semetsky, 2013). Becoming (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983); as this political practice that insists on human agency despite the loss of a secure center ground.
And now I theorize a bit: edusemiotic is referring to a semiotic intersecting with educational theory and philosophy of education aiming at innovation regarding theoretical foundations for education. It offers an integrative conceptual framework that purports to overcome dualisms both in theory and practice. Its defining characteristics are process-ontology, the logic of the included middle, relational ethics, existential and posthuman dimensions, the role of practical experience, the emphasis on interpretation (and not merely facts or evidence), the conception of language understood broadly in terms of various semiotic structures exceeding analytic philosophy’s direct representation, embodied cognition, and the problematic of self-formation. As a philosophy of education, edusemiotics aim toward ultimately organizing a sense of the “relational self” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edusemiotics). Edusemiotics draws on American pragmatism of, for example, Pierce and Dewey, and Continental philosophy of, for example, Deleuze and Guattari, and also brings the science of coordination dynamics into discourses on education, thus bridging the gap between sciences and humanities ultimately seeing the whole of human experience as an interpretive structure mediated and sustained by signs. Understanding the language of the un/conscious is thus one of the many challenges of edusemiotics.
It is part of what I try here with, for example, my compound words challenging our linguistic and grammatical habits. And even breaking them, our habits, for innovation, because we want to, must, and because it is what we love and can see light up. New information however is always immediately checked by the limbic system—the evaluation system of our brain that supports the learning of things that are new, good, and important for us and rejects information that creates bad feelings (Roth, 2009 in Sabitzer, 2011). My habits are not easily breaking and there are unsolvable issues all over—it thus implies another way of education as that of self-organized learning in/with complexity, or rather learning from paradox through conceptual expansions and change—the brain recognizing and generating patterns and rules itself. Attention through embodiment and matter becomings being key and/for such expanded discovery learning through a mutual inter-/intradepenent contract between generations. Our words our structures our grammars but not. They are (my) stimulating electric currents. Think about it … Lovemachines?
Children know. When Isobel (4 years) says, “Make it myself together with you,” or when Elise and Elaine (14 years) interviewed by the local newspaper about the New Year’s school party say, “The most important thing about the party is finding the perfect dress to wear. It must be absolutely unique. It is vital not to stand out” (Bergersen, 2013), they think, move, discover, make matter, make meaning, learn and act, lines and patterns and dots never forever coinciding. This can be seen as a Rousseauian—through formal negations “perfectibility” learning existence. However and along the way, the brain needs breaks to consolidate, to go on.
I thus combine neurodidactics as an interdisciplinary research field representing an interface between neuroscience, didactics, and educational sciences with the potentials in and with recent post-constructivist and/or post-humanism (Braidotti, 2013), compostist (Haraway, 2014; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1uTVnhIHS8#t=42), and multiparadigmatic theories of embodiment and matter: “The embodiment of the mind and the embrainment of the body” (Marks, 1998 in Braidotti, 2013: 86). I have my brain in my heart and hands. Who can tell where I am? Inside outside besides 3D perspectivized. Your readership is needed. Every genre is different. Create. These are theories, issues, and practices in which meanings and logics are coordinate not subordinate. Similarities and differences, knowing and not knowing, are equally important to investigate further always. This includes affective monist theories in combination with DeleuzeoGuattarian-inspired theoretical analysis moving beyond “regimes of signs” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). A move from individual “race-to-the-top” learning trajectories to recognize our common entanglements already entangled: intra-actions of always already entangled relations (Barad, 2007, 2010). The abstract thus abstractions—consciousness perhaps—as that which ultimately connects us and are common regardless of time, space, grammar, matter, languages and discourses. It makes me dizzy. It must. In order to escape dualisms and through this consider the whole neurophilosophical “eco-mental-physical—mind—system” of learning and education … becoming earth … our body brain … hearts … All done undone.
Such approaches thus make breaks between solid and abstract, organic, and inorganic substances avoiding references to biological determinism and overinflated psychologized individualism ultimately collapsing the nature–culture divide. And again, we are in the esthetic onto-epistemological vibration center of learning as a micropedagogy and politics of the place. For educators and researchers, it implies engaging in constant discovery and/or “researchcreation” (Manning, 2015) as the/a “practicality of research” (Reinertsen, 2015) always resisting, subverting, and through multiple examples to think with creating spaces for multiple and collective voices for learning.
And to elaborate, I write along an affective, passionate, joyous neutral monist Spinozian (1632–1677) philosophy of mind un/conscious–attention–discovery sensation–thinking–learning continuum ultimately engaging in the body–mind, mind gap, or brain-consciousness problem. This view denies that the mental and the physical are two fundamentally different things. Rather, neutral monism claims the universe consists of only one kind of stuff, in the form of neutral elements that are in themselves neither mental nor physical. This implies to accept the existence of a basic substance that is neither physical nor mental: the mental and physical would then both be properties of this neutral substance. Read with me the complexities that I try to love machinic grapple with further down.
Closely related to this is panpsychism, according to which mental experience and properties may be at the foundation of physical experience and properties ultimately turning consciousness into a general material natural phenomena compatible with everything else and anywhere. Subsequently, all divides are collapsed including that of pre-, proto-, and/or unconsciousness and consciousness. The mind gap is dissolved and the human being is put at the same level—anywhere, everywhere, and as any other/anything else thus in continuity with nature. This view is espoused among others by mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947). Consciousness is described (not explained) both philosophically and scientifically. Consciousness does not, however, necessarily lead to thinking that is highly advanced and complex. But what consciousness does is that it breathes life into the equation possibilizing attention, explorations, and thus discovery of sensations—passions—ultimately thinking and learning. This way we are dependent on the brain. We need a brain. The brain produces consciousness. It can be plasticity manipulated. And through this, a view of consciousness possibilizing a self as an essential inconstant, material nucleus—an integrated representational system distributed over changing patterns of synaptic connections—and qualia as these individual instances of subjective, conscious experience …
Creating qualia in reading/writing is an idea for us both. Go on. It is what I give you and try.
The article is crafted as a sciencepoetical or poetry of place essay presenting some basics and principals of neurodidactics and learning, giving an impetus for using these basics and principals in educational contexts. Or put another way, neurosciences are here traversing other disciplines, such as psychology, philosophy, economics, and pedagogy, as well as the institutional practices of education. A poem is a question and a dream. In this case, a critical romantic nature–culture dualist Rousseau (1712–1778) not neurodidactic and neurophilosophical speculation. In poems, words work. The idea and notion of the rhizome (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987), thus the idea of the rhizome-embrained body of a child and me will be followed through. The rhizome as that of continuously reorganizing networks or webs involving connections, heterogeneities, differences, multiplicities, asignifying ruptures, and cartographies ultimately—and again, all our becomings, our vitalist subjectivities, transformative cosmopolite compassions, engagements—attention—electric currents as we will see. Always starting with the person, I am mental for myself, physical for you: my own example: It’s not a stone. It’s my friend. (John, 4 years)
The neurodidactic impetus and the monist philosophy of mind un/conscious–attention–discovery sensation–thinking–learning continuum
I love words. Or rather; I love to word.
Through brain research and constantly improved scanning technologies, we know more and more about the structure, development, and functioning of the human brain. Scientifically speaking, the brain is a physical or material organ, thing, and place made the same way as any other physical, material organ, thing, or place thus comprising electrons, protons, and neutrons. We speak of materiality both theoretically and in principle, the natural sciences describing structures, mechanisms, changes, and neurotransmitters and consciousness seen as signals. Or put another way, connections are traced, and senses, feelings, and thinking are physically described. Plasticity or the ability of the human brain to change its structure and function with experience is an important fact. Furthermore, the brain undergoes dynamic changes from infancy to late adolescence, but also the adult human brain retains a capacity for plasticity.
The first important neurodidactic principal is thus that of our brains being plasticity productive: the brain is a productive organ and space, and an important fact is therefore that knowledge cannot be transferred. It is a view of knowledge thus having to be newly created in the brain of each child/student/teacher/adult. Second, and on the neurological base and function of patterning, the brain recognizes and generates patterns and rules itself. The learner thus needs (to be exposed to) many examples as base for explorations and/or discovery learning. This can, in my view, be seen as a type of noninvasive brain stimulation through expansions and openness through experimentations, speculations, and constant playful impelling questioning and wordmaking. Words to word to think make matter and learn with, words for creating and following lines of desiring productions and forces. Words filled with attention, perhaps an urge to learn. Our main job is thus making it less dangerous to learn something new. It is like speculating oneself out in space not knowing what to find while constantly finding more always: In every school exercise there is a special way of waiting upon truth, setting your hearts upon it, yet not allowing ourselves to go out in search of it. There is a way of giving our attention to the data of a problem in geometry without trying to find the solution or to the words in Latin or Greek text without trying to arrive at the meaning, a way of waiting, when we are writing, for the right word to come of itself at the end of our pen, while we merely reject all inadequate words. (Weil, 2009: 63)
Noninvasive brain stimulation is traditionally linked to experimentations with transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and transcranial direct current simulation (tDCS) involving the use of a magnetic coil positioned over a brain region of interest passing electric current, creating changing magnetic fields, stimulating neuronal functions, and enhancing performance. I allow myself a conceptual neurophilosophical inclusive expansion to possibilize more and other. What other than words are such currents? What other than concepts are passed? They are thus noninvasive movements and activities, movement of knowledges, movements internalized. Ultimately, all these words are multiple examples to learn from, and as brain stimulation—words as electric currents, movements, and, as we shall see below, noise, creating changing magnetic fields stimulating neuronal functions, and enhancing performance. Turning such movements and noise simultaneously into both condition and tool for learning and for investigating how materialist philosophies of matter can help us study the emergence of scientific thought and learning in young children’s activities and scientific concepts as expanding but concrete universals. Historical, social, and material (desiring) forces are all at play. They connect and transverse, thus becoming productive; here—and for me—meta-meta ultimately or hopefully of the concept of the Neuron thus beyond: “You smell good,” she said to me. She is two. We had never met before. Thank you. I put on perfume today.
Did you, mmmm
And off she went. She keeps me grounded about what might matter—mean something for a moment. She made my day that day. I often think of her. I do not know her name. I probably won’t recognize her if I saw her again. She keeps me qualia going; she and me-we. Poetry …
Third is the fact that learning is seen as complex processes possible to influence only through circumstances and/or indirect appropriate settings in, for example, classrooms. Memory processes or the valuation of new situations and information by the limbic system influenced through, for example, offering memory-friendly structures in lessons. This includes enough time for consolidation after input of new information. Memory is dynamic organizing storage and linking of information creating new meanings through constantly restarting memory processes and re-encoding, and therefore new storage again and again—learning involving interplay of declarative and procedural memory systems. In traditional theories about noninvasive brain stimulation, accelerated procedural learning and cognitive enhancement are seen as reflecting reduced “noise” or interference effects in competing brain networks (Brem et al., 2014 in Parasuraman and McKinley, 2014). In my view and again this turns the/a concept in general and here specifically the concept and our notions of noise into both condition and tool for brain productivity paradoxically and simultaneously consolidated, clarified, inhibited sometimes but expanded/expanding again and again. Expanding and concrete again and again. Recursive me my more … We experience a 30% dropout rate from our schools in my country (Reinertsen, 2014b: 267). Doctors report of increasing numbers of fatigue children or as they are called “burned out small adults.” (Halvorsen, 2015: 24–26) We just get a new task or exercise the minute we have finished the old ones. No pauses. (Student, 16 years)
What Rousseau teaches us is that education must work without wanting to work. It must be “intentional, but its intentions must not be direct” (Von Oettingen, 2007: 121).
Numerous learner- or child-centered didactics and proposals for so-called brain-based learning are developed (none mentioned none forgotten). So far, however, the way I see this, not escaping polarizations thus sustaining inappropriate dichotomies or dichotomous thinking between, for example, that of an active student/learner role, on the one hand, and teachers assuming roles of background relational facilitators and helpers, on the other. Students’ behavior and learning thus interpreted as functions of—and reactions to external (read teachers’) interventions—here relations. The active/passive, internal/external continuums, the interdependent and interconnectedness of roles ultimately the intra-relational rhizome connections between students’ and teachers’ learning left unexplored possibly unappreciated creating blind spots. If we think of the first principal above, neither teachers nor students are/can or could be passive.
Furthermore, unproductive divides between conscious and unconscious learning processes are continued through limiting beliefs in cultural rational meaning making, however escaping, or not taking into consideration, natural, physical, or material aspects of our existence thus embodied/embrained mattering processes reaching beneath and beyond the surface of children’s, students’ (and teachers’) experiences, regrettably teaching us that learning is effective only when making sense through giving references to students’ own personal life and environment, thus through possibilizing individual associations only. Part of this is also a focus on usefulness and practically oriented or embedded didactics and pedagogies. Attention is thus only seen as a product of students knowing why they (have to) learn something. Efforts, through dialogue, to detect, visualize, give voice to, or make so-called silent knowledges explicit have been given huge focus. In my view, however, not making breaks between theory and practice, being and doing, real and virtual, knowing and not knowing, and, again, solid and abstract, organic and inorganic substances ultimately collapses the nature–culture divides. And through this providing a teacher and a student becoming “a motif for each other, both embedded in a transcoded passage” (Semetsky, 2013: 229) ultimately going through a “shared deterritorialization” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 293). Rather, we have been brought to a conceptual stop point. We thus need expansions and need to non-invasively go inside our embodied brains and focus on children’s thought processes and/or develop didactics about thinking, ultimately giving concepts back for children to explore and think with. Furthermore, and important for also discussing along the individual/collective continuums and even breaks, we are always connected to the world forming experiential folds, thus “signs-becoming-other signs” enabling “one’s perceptions to vitally increase in power, thereby becoming able to perceive something previously imperceptible” (Semetsky, 2013: 229): unconscious becoming conscious because of the folded—semiotic—relationship between the two. It is what I try: We can the brain we can —and conceptual change
Use all senses, see it, hear it, smell it, taste it, touch it. Examples and experiments might have—and/or might create memory-friendly smells. Words too. There might be colors and smoke … currents: every letter I lay my eyes on, every sound I hear, is sent as electric signals or a current from my eyes and my ears to my brain. And the brain is using its networks of neurons to recognize every sound and every letter creating patterns. And every word I read.
Words (I saw them with my eyes when I was three years old) are our dwarfs, our gnomes, our minuscule workers in the mines of language. … And what words do between themselves—couplings, matings, hybridizations—is genius. An erotic and fertile genius. A law of life presides over their crossbreedings. (Cixous, 2005: 121) Try it. Write it—the words—the concept—three times: take notes, clean up your notes and comprise them. Write with your own words in concepts: Writing ultimately seen in this broad and complex understanding of the concept and as that of “thought happening in writing” (Richardson and StPierre, 2005: 970). Writing thus turned into practical philosophy and how new ontologisations of a concept might create new possibilities for learning and change: Writing forwarding knowledge. Writing the Neuron … and poetics. When organizing teaching: Focus less on own organization of learning activities. Focus more on students’ thinking. Create and manipulate with words. When evaluating learning outcomes: Ask how the child was thinking to reach a conclusion; their reasoning. Look for the child’s own words in concepts. Ask about them. Ask them to compare x with x. A thinkingdidactics? A workingreadingwriting poeticalrealvirtual praxis?
And to elaborate again, neurodidactical facts combined with post-humanist theories, and thus neurophilosophies, offer expansions, always more examples … and/or other words and languages opening up for the productive and constitutive physical/mental nature/culture chaos inside and outside surrounding and embracing our children, our learning, and our inter-/intra-relational connected togetherness—knowing and not knowing—open for and appreciating/anticipating unknown and other: “the perhaps” (Derrida, 1997) perhaps to come. It is a world of atom quantum physics diffractive entanglements—superpositioning phenomena—perhaps: as a pre-/proto-/un-consciousness signal and a material natural cultural phenomenon. Attention is seen as an affective, passionate, joyous, disquiet, and poetic complexity issue in a space of paradox and experimentations. All words and concepts thus vibrating for children to have them for their self-referenced self-regulated innovative thinking wondering patterning learning doing brains: teacher learner student roles didactics pedagogies done undone:
I like playing in this room, but the grownups don’t like it here.
Why don’t they?
Because we run all over the place and play with
It implies entangling in joyous revolts with the transformative capacities of words creating decentered languages and thus every possible example and word to explore and learn with. Words being re-animated are becoming less deterministic, and more inflected with chance and indeterminism, revealing ultimately how concepts are “material articulations of the world” intra-acting with all other matter and meaning. Words and concepts are thus not timeless transcendent abstractions, but part of an unfolding event and learning assemblage. It is a continuous word world-making, of which theory is a productive co-performative element in the service of joy. Being/doing words and words being/doing brain work that is, or words—and again—done undone always.
Act so as to increase the number of choices! (Heinz von Foerster) (http://www.univie.ac.at/constructivism/HvF.htm)
This represents a move toward an ontological and affective turn of didactics and pedagogy, research, and science kicked off by—among others, the deconstructive decentered immanent philosophies of beings and becomings with/in rhizomatic “molar/molecular” vibrating matter assemblages (Deleuze, 1993). The rhizome is seen as a difference comprising “lines of flights” only (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983) but as productive possibilities for more always, thus ultimately turning us all into nomads conducting explorations into nomadism. Molecularity is further related to individual responses to phenomena or types of conduct, where the molecular is related to constant processes of creating, or what might be called inter-/intra-molecular action.
“Molar” is also understood as organs’/organisms’ general conduct patterns. In the book Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) applies the concepts on “political bodies” and through this being able to study matter/materiality as functions of mass, hardness, and of “coherence, cohesion”(Deleuze, 1993: 6). Conley (2012) elaborates, He (Deleuze) projects the distinction onto the body in so far as it can be appreciated in its elasticity and fluidity. Thus with the “molar” the philosopher correlates surfaces with structures, masses with territories, and vibrations or waves with landscapes. (p. 177)
This implies an acceptance of immanent microscopic things and matter in every perception, notion, or inclination, however, simultaneously destabilizing the same perceptions, notions, or inclinations. All perceived objects (words), organic or non-organic, therefore have their own lives and is only felt through tensions in its moral mass and molecular tiny or atomic parts. Working, pulsating, hammering an ethics, a morale, or moral action thus only exist in matter and in the local here and now. Now further comprises masses of elements and/or lines coming together, related to one another in expanded inter-/intra-relational connections: Conley (2012: 177) writes, Deleuze uses molecularity to counter the orthogonal and massive pensive—seemingly heavy and unwieldy—systems of Cartesian philosophy to arrive, by way of Leibniz, at a sensibility touching on the chemical animism of all things, “the action of fire, those of waters and winds on the earth,” in various systems “of complex interactions.” (Deleuze, 1993: 9) Envisaging processes of human beings with/in deauthorized entangled living twenty first century relations, and as decomposable thus a post human and compostist even view of the world. It is a sort of “staying with the trouble compostist approaches” and our need for “the humusities.” (Haraway, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1uTVnhIHS8#t=42)
Following lines of desiring productions—connections and traversals—new ontologizations—to word—to body—bodying reconceptualizing children. My concern is understanding matter, ultimately turning pedagogy into the ultimate social science seeing more and other diffractive expansions always. And to be clearer; this is about more than improved observations. Rather, more like being part of a wild “multiple apparatus of not knowing,” in a place “beyond critique and the imperceptible beingness of engagement” (Reinertsen, 2014a) preoccupied with what is significant right now. I too must word and body. I too am nature–culture un/counciousness nonstop learner oscillating, vibrating rotating. I (must) collapse within me and the most important day and work is every day—recognizing generating patterns and rules and in need of many examples creating memory-friendly structures in lessons. There is chaos, noise, choice no choice.
Tom (5 years): Grownups don’t know Fanny (5 years): It is funny to play behind the house where the grownups don’t see us. —contributing to research on conceptual change in children … and me.
To body to word or our embrained bodies, neurodidactics, and edusemiotic becoming machines
A rhizome ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, and social struggles. A semiotic chain is like a tuber agglomerating diverse acts, not only linguistic, but also perceptive, mimetic, gestural, and cognitive: there is no language in itself, nor are there any linguistic universals, only a throng of dialects, patois, slangs, and specialized languages. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 7)
Below is thus a neuronomadic thus rhizomatic brain-based didactics for learning attempt: to body to word. Representing collaborative possibilities for turning our professional educational efforts/affects and systems into transgressive practices. All suggestions and exercises can be expanded and adapted to the theme being taught and the concepts being focused, to the place you are and the children/students you are with. The important thing is to open up and challenge traditional visions and conceptualizations, to focus on students’ own thinking and evaluation.
The embrained rhizomatic body of the child—take one
You are the mother or father of a child at the age of 4 attending kindergarten. One afternoon when you pick up your child after work, he or she presents you with a drawing which is given to you as a gift. You are of course both pleased and happy about this. You have different response possibilities and you can choose words which might have different effects.
Consider the two options below: Alternative 1: I have made a drawing today. It is for you.
Oh is it for me. Thank you. That is a really fine drawing.
Alternative 2:
I have made a drawing today. It is for you.
Oh is it for me. Thank you. Now you made me happy.
The first alternative directs attention toward the drawing. The language objectifies the product, the child, the parent, and the activity alike. Relations are linear, functional, and singular. The adult judges quality of drawing. The second alternative directs the attention more toward the child and intra/inter-relational processes between parent and child. The language subjectifies the process, the child, the parent, and the actual thinking activity, leaving initiative and judgments with the child. The way I see this, the second alternative has a greater potential for empowering the child and recursive self-regulation thus further discovering both present and future.
And to make sure, these processes go against coding and interpretism. They reappraise resistance and resist domestification always. They are processes of working in/with/through “assemblages” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987), thus constant rearrangements of making, unmaking, and remaking. We put words together and/or plug a word or a chunk of a word back into itself, me/you, and own operations and see what happens and repeatedly: doing words differently and putting them to work. Such dealings with words is therefore about repeating and repealing thus differentiating words constantly, and through me and what I might (not) produce. They are practical process philosophies and our subjective ontologisms of becomings with/in words and our embrained bodies. They are your methods, my methods, and strategies. They are your patterns and rules, your regulations. Your micropedagogies your neurodidactics.
To generate patterns and rules: To forethink: To method: There is something working, pulsating, hammering … What marks off the “self” is method; it has no other source than ourselves: it is when we really employ method that we really begin to exist. As long as one employs method only on symbols one remains within the limits of a sort of game. In action that has method about it, we ourselves act, since it is we ourselves who found the method; we really act because what is unforeseen presents itself to us. (Weil, 1959: 73–74)
1. Put words in plural to see if something happens. For example, what happens with you if you speak of your identities instead of your identity, your subjectivities instead of subjectivity? What happens if you speak of the organizations (early care and education centers (ECECs), schools, universities) you work in, not the organization? What happens if you speak of learnings instead of learning, solutions instead of solution, methods instead of method, formulas instead of formula, calculations instead of calculation? What happens if you speak of qualities instead of quality?
2. Try turning nouns into verbs: we have already seen to word and to body. What about to child, to woman to man? I/you thus doing child, woman man …
3. Use and/or try the gerund more: I am a leader, I lead. I am leading. Womaning? Childing? It might become an exercise to play with the eventfulness of a word/theme/issue. It is an exercise that can be used to provoke. The eventfulness of woman. Woman as event—Quality as event—unpredictable of what comes next. Woman as provocation—leadership—Quality—Child as other as event as more—unpredictable of what comes next—again:
“I cannot inhale more happiness today,” Eduardo (7 years) after x-mass celebrations.
4. Deconstruct dichotomies and words and find examples of the same word being used differently, in different contexts conveying different meanings. In a metaperspective, think here of production, rules, structures, change, presentations just to mention a few. Think, for example, of smells and, since this is Scandinavia, different perspectives of snow. This is an exercise that can be done in a very formal way or one can just use it as a kind of brainstorming:
Active reactive to body to word
5. Consider and discuss what, how, and when a word is inflated and judgmental and why?
Use texts that suit you in your teaching. In my view, this is an important exercise to avoid distrust, indifference, silencing, and even cynicism in organizations. Learning is often prevented because of a lack of words that work other. Therefore,
6. Engage students in rambling plasticity wordmaking and gender mashups: Cixous couplings, matings, hybridizations—create new words, meaningless words, words without content, and word-plays. This is an attempt to possibilize and create hyperbolic spaces and convexity effects, trying to avoid definitions stimulating new thoughts. And again, generating new patterns and rules, your patterns and rules—and those of rhizomatic embrained bodies of children. Karen Barad’s (2007) “thinkingfeeling” is classic. I have made a few new here in this science poem “Thinkfeel with them and go on with it yourself.”
The embrained rhizomatic body of the child—take two
Your daughter has climbed up a high tree: Alternative 1:
Come down. It is dangerous!
Alternative 2:
Oh that is high up! Are you OK? Do you manage or do you want any help?
Alternative one leaves judgment of danger in the situation to you. The second alternative leaves judgment to the child. He or she gets the chance to think, feel, and assess—thinkfeel—the situation herself or himself and also decide what to do next.
7. Consider and discuss what uses of satire, humor, naivety, glamor, horror, ugliness, and examples of bestiary even might do strategically for you as professionals in ECECs, schools, and as researchers?
8. Consider and discuss how paradigmatic text mix, text mess, and mashups might create new. Discuss what would be mind blowing for you and the children you teach?
Research shows that children with low scores on dexterity and physical fitness have low self-esteem (Vedul-Kjelsås:
http://www.adressa.no/sport/sprek/article10265988.ece
). How then to make it less visible that some children do come last, do not hit target, or score goals? Why? To avoid unproductive competition thus enhance efforts, thinking, creativity, practicing, and mastery. Create activities and didactics therefore through which collaboration and supportiveness are enhanced and everybody is seen. By 7–8 years, children compare their own achievements with those of others (Vedul-Kjelsås, http://www.adressa.no/sport/sprek/article10265988.ece). They know what is good and they do not need grownups/teachers to confirm and reinforce differences through the way we organize activities. Rather, count how many laps they manage to run together or how many hits they have together, rather than asking them all to do the same making it obvious who comes last. Think now about the/our limbic systems and evaluation and what it might mean for the child, for you, and me: The students have started to listen to this strange, bearded dude having come down from the mountain to tell them about something he calls quality, that once existed in the world and they know what is. (Pirsig, 1994: 395, own translation)
9. Consider and discuss the importance or not of random notes, memories, hunches, processes, patterns, trial-and-error practices, and stories in/for teaching. From which ontologies and epistemologies do I/you/we draw sustenance? What do I/you/we extract from it? What does political positioning imply?
10. Through forethinking and imagining forward, imagine the collective in the individual. Imagine subjectivities not ideologies.
11. Consider and discuss what it would take—normalizing risky becomings.
This is about aporetic thinking and thus the necessity and the risk of going through the trials of the aporias of “suspension,” “undecidability,” and “urgency” (Derrida, 2002) as a “certain experience and experiment of the possibility of the impossible, the testing of the aporia from which one may invent the only possible invention, the impossible invention” (Derrida, 1992: 41, original emphasis): something else, something different, a trace, something other, otherness, more—not a first or second thing, but a maybe “mad-like” third thing, something to come—always. It is a pedagogy of and for the 21st century.
The embrained rhizomatic body of the child—take three
The student has done an exercise in your class. Three out of five questions are answered correctly: Alternative 1:
Answers three, four and five are correct. One and two are false, take a closer look at them and read chapter x in your book again.
Alternative 2: Answers three, four and five are correct. How did you find the answers? How can you think, and what can you do to find the correct answers to the first two questions also?
In alternative one, judgment is again done by the teacher. The language and wording is constative, singular, objectifying, and product oriented. The teacher knows the criteria, the quality standard, and methods both before and after judgment. The student is left to act accordingly without gaining or at least being encouraged to gain a clearer notion of own activity and of what constitutes quality and/or what it might consist of as a generalized attribute. In alternative two, language is opened up toward the student’s own discoveries, methods, and assessment or evaluation processes in his or her brain leaving him or her with the initiative to learn and how to go about it.
12. Write your own story of wonder didactics. Give an account of yourself; possibilize yourself; the failure encounters that constitutes you.
These are ultimately entangled past present stories about choosing own educative processes. Yours and those of your students’ … and mine: This child and this again and again: “Life understood as potential for creation, variation and production in excess of what we already know to have existence” (Colebrook, 2012: 192).
I like it when teachers speak to me as if they are not better or more than me in a way. (Student, 13 years)
Nodding to Rousseau and Pikettytalk: Pedagogy in the 21st-century becoming earth
Education is valuable only by teaching students to use knowledge. All knowledge must therefore die to resurrect as will, and freedom exists in abstraction only. The only possible teaching goal is thus a personal will born from knowledge. (Stirner, 1842)
I continue to think with Rousseau toward the 21st century. His book Emile is more about principals and abstractions than romantic. He saw culture as nature number two. He questioned authority disrupting discourses of cultural—eventually political structures and control. In his book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty (2014) presents data on increasing structural economic inequalities between countries. His formula
Footnotes
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.