MICHAEL DILLON, ED.D. CENTRAL MICHIGAN UNIVERSITY 2016 ADULT EDUCATION RESEARCH CONFERENCE Learning Happens: Incorporating a Rhizomatic Perspective into Teaching and Learning
MICHAEL DILLON, ED.D.CENTRAL MICHIGAN UNIVERSITY
2016 ADULT EDUCATION RESEARCH CONFERENCE
Learning Happens: Incorporating a Rhizomatic Perspective into Teaching and Learning
• Traditional conceptions of learning• Rhizomatic perspective of Adult Learning• Mapping learning with a Rhizomatic Perspective
Our line of flight today:
Traditional conceptions of learning
https://pixabay.com/en/users/geralt-9301/
TransformativeSituatedExperientialEtc.
Traditional conceptions of learning
• Learning as a linear activity.• Compartmentalization and exclusion of certain features
of opposing theories. • “Adjective-plus-learning-theory” (Kang, 2007).• Points towards a certainty and universality in adult
learning.
Traditional conceptions of learning
Example: Kolb’s (1984) Learning Cycle Reflection/ MeaningIntegration/ ConclusionsGuides Future DecisionsExperience
Activity: Sketch a recent learning moment
Rhizomatic Perspective of Adult Learning
• A rhizome is both a root and a stem since it pushes out roots and shoots. • Sprouts or pops up and makes connections
with whatever is available. • Has no fixed departure and return points. • Pursues heterogeneity, anti-hierarchical. • Starts up again on an old line or elsewhere
when broken apart.
Rhizomatic Perspective of Adult Learning
• Post-Modern versus Positivist. • Ontology of Becoming versus Being. • Complex Connected Networks versus Relations among
Variables. • Mapping versus Tracing. • Lines of Flight versus Lines of Articulation.
• “Lines of flight” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) have no beginning or ending - can help produce a tentative map of learning. • Tracing LoF is a creative force rather than a reductive
one. • Experimentation with the real.• Moments of Rupture and Capture.• Depicting one of the many middles.
Tracing lines of flight
• Disclosing potential organizations of reality.• Malleable, untangling of knots.• Mapping and tracing again.
Tracing lines of flight
Tracing lines of flight
Well, probably some forty years of being out here. Just experience and being in
situations with so-called leaders, learning from the worst, learning from the best and somehow taking even something from the worst and saying, ‘I know I don’t want to
do that.
Tracing lines of flight
learning from the worst, learningfrom the best Leadership
StyleExemplarybehaviors
• Our “classrooms”• Analyzing learning (qualitative) • Our learning
• Where will your lines of flight lead you today?
Where to next?
de Freitas, E. (2012). The classroom as rhizome new strategies for diagramming knotted interactions. Qualitative Inquiry, 18(7), 557-570.Deleuze, G., & Guattari, R (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (B. Massumi, Trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. (Original work published1980).Dillon, M. (2013). Grassroots community leaders as a community of practice: Utilizing learning and enduring disruptive change (Order No. 3578627). Available from ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Full Text; ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. (1501432837). Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/1501432837?accountid=34899.Kang, D. (2007). Rhizoactivity: Toward a postmodern theory of lifelong learning. Adult Education Quarterly, 57(3), 205.Kolb, D. A. (1984). Experiential learning: Experience as the source of learning and development. Endlewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.Martin, A. D., & Kamberelis, G. (2013). Mapping not tracing: qualitative educational research with political teeth. International journal of qualitative studies in education, 26(6), 668-679.
References