Cartographies of Becoming in Education

Book excerpt: Cartographies of becoming in education: A Deleuze-Guattari Perspective proposes a non-hierarchical approach that maps teaching and learning with the power of affect and what a body can do/become in different educational contexts. Teaching and learning is an encounter with the unknown and happen as specific responses to particular problems encountered with/in life. In this edited volume, international scholars map out potential ruptures in teaching and learning in order to conceptualize education differently. One way is through the multidisciplinary lens of MLT (Multiple Literacies Theory) in which reading is intensive and immanent. The authors deploy different aspects of MLT while creating and experimenting with ethology, teaching, learning, curriculum, teacher education and technology in relation to visual arts, music, mathematics, theatre, workplace literacy, second language education, and architecture. With the forces of globalization, digital media and economic re-structuring reconfiguring the social, political and economic landscape, societies require innovative ways of thinking about education. Cartographies of becoming in education: A Deleuze-Guattari Perspective is a response to problems posed by such forces. The problematic surrounding Deleuze-Guattari and education continues to grow. Diana Masny’s scholarship in this area is well known and appreciated through her many essays and books that develop MLT (Multiple Literacies Theory). Cartographies of Becoming in Education: A Deleuze-Guattari Perspective continues her effort to broaden the notion of education and show its intersections with MLT. The series of essays do this by forming a number of ‘entries,’ five to be precise: politicizing education, affect and education, literacies and becoming, teacher-becomings, and deterritorializing boundaries. Each ‘entry’ explores the way an MLT inflected orientation enables us to further grasp the creative inventiveness of the Deleuze-Guattarian tool kit that can be applied to areas of music education, ethnography, art, drama, literacy, mathematics, landscape ecology, ethology and teacher education. It is a vivid illustration of the cartography that maps the rhizomatic movements that are taking place by international scholars who are deterritorializing education as a discipline of modernity. I highly recommend this collection of essays to those of us who are continually asking how might education be rethought through the unthought. It opens up new territories. – Jan Jagodzinski, University of Alberta, Author of Psychoanalyzing Cinema.