Social Mapping, Lines of Flight, and Late Night W(a/o)ndering

Tonight a provocative statement was posed by Pam Moran (@pammoran) and then responded to by Chad Sansing (@chadsansing) over at Twitter.

Take a look:

So I am thinking about social mapping inside systems and wondering if anyone can point me/us in a direction that might show examples of the thinking that informs the generation of a social map.

I know I have rhizomes on the brain, but I can just about hear Deleuze and Guattari saying something relevant about all this.

Something about maps, tracings, and lines of flight.

Thinking about @chadsansing's tweet. And perhaps it is the presence of lines of flight that signals the collapsed space of hierarchy.  Perhaps these are the sparks.  Could critical mass of a system collapsing be brought about through the generation of idiosyncratic lines of flight?

A line of flight is a rupture in an established system.

Like the various actions that comprise the 'Occupy Movement'.

"A line of flight is a line of becoming that brings the system to yet another level of complexity by virtue
of the new knowledge, new concepts, new meanings," writes Inna Semetsky*.

So could you map lines of flight: lines that signal becoming?
Has someone done this?

Do not these lines represent the non-linearity of a system?







*Not by breadth along: Imagining a self-organised classroom. Complicity, 2005.

Inconsequential Noticings, Ruptures & Lines of Flight

Coming through the Rye (2010, M.A. Reilly)

It is often in the seemingly inconsequential noticings that more profound meaning emerges.  This type of moment may be characterized as line of flight.  Steve Best and Douglas Keller (1991) say a line of flight is "the full fledged deterritorializing movements away from molar identity where cracks becomes ruptures and the subject is shattered in a process of  becoming multiple. This is the plane of creativity and desire, and also of death and destruction" (p. 100).

Hmm. A lot to unpack in that statement.

The other evening my son told me that a friend of ours who is also a middle school teacher (Mr D) is developing 'mad Minecraft skills.' The 'teacher' had recently joined my son's Minecraft server and is playing with others on the server--mostly boys from around the world ages 9 to 15.  Mr D, I am told,  entered clearly in the role of learner.

Son: Mr D is not the teacher on Minecraft.
Me: How so? 
Son: Well he's learning and he's quick, but he isn't a teacher even though, you know, he is one.  He's got mad Minecraft skills, though. 
Me: Not surprising. Mr. D is really bright.
Son: I know, but he's the learner and right now it's like I'm the teacher. He's building just like I did when I started.
Me: How's that?
Son: He's got this airborne farm going and he's got a huge mine. That's what I did at first, too. It's like he's me.

This one-minute exchange with a child as he heads off to bed gets me thinking about the perceptions of teacher and learner from the vantage point of student.  Mr D is in the process of establishing a gaming center at the middle school where he works and had asked if he might join Dev's server as a way to learn a bit more before he and his students begin using Minecraft in a multi-player setting. I recognized at the time that Mr D would be learning a lot as he thought about how this virtual world of multi-players might be enacted inside a school.  What I hadn't considered was Mr D's affect on the boys who are playing on the server, especially my son. 

James Gee and Elizabeth Hayes (2011) in Language Learning in the Digital Age, define characteristics of passionate affinity spaces, such as the multi-player game Dev and Mr D are playing. Gee & Hayes write:

We have claimed that out-of-school learning in passionate affinity spaces is competition for schools as we have traditionally thought of them. Learning in these spaces is organized quite differently than in schools. Often people of different ages are together. Different people teach or mentor at different times. The emphasis is on problem solving centered on a shared theme or endeavor, not on “content” derived from a discipline (p. 73).

Curious in weeks to come to see what develops as to roles inside this Minecraft world. Specifically I am wondering what spaces are created and filled when the more traditional roles of teacher and learner shift and alter? Do nontraditional learning spaces such as a Minecraft community provide different types of occasions for the production of lines of flight than traditional classroom spaces where teacher and student roles are maintained? What happens to roles when Mr D resituates the Minecraft community he is envisioning within a middle school environment? In what ways are identities that are composed inside the Minecraft community lines of flight that become ruptures within the school community as subjects are shattered in a process of  becoming multiple?

Wondering what you think about this.


Works Cited
Best,Steven and Kellner, Douglas (1991). Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations. New York: Guilford Press.

Gee, James Paul and Hayes, Elisabeth R. (2011). Language and Learning in the Digital Age.  T & F Books UK. Kindle Edition.

Reimagining Learning as Lines of Flight

Lines of Flight (M.A. Reilly, 2011)

1. 

Martin Wood and Sally Brown (2009) write: "A line of flight is essentially a movement of creativity, a practical act or a way of living that wards off or inhibits the formation of ‘centres’ and stable powers in favour of continuous variation and free action." from here

2.

Imagine community spaces, such as schools, theaters, dance clubs, town halls, studios, streets, subways, museums, street corners, post offices, gardens, labs, restaurants, book shops, rivers, parks, coffee shops, piers, mountains, tents, playgrounds, fields, creeks, virtual worlds, beaches, avenues, games, rafts, crosswalks, town squares, libraries, paths, bridges, hospitals, courts, vets, diners, third spaces, hiking trails, barber shops, clinics, valleys, music halls, ferries, fire stations, farms, deserts, skyscrapers, barrios, roads, zen gardens, train stations, sidewalks and so on as potential lines of flight that learners traverse and abandon, producing a map of their learning as they move.

3.

"Becoming-" is a process of change, flight, or movement within an assemblage. Rather than conceive of the pieces of an assemblage as an organic whole, within which the specific elements are held in place by the organization of a unity, the process of "becoming-" serves to account for relationships between the "discrete" elements of the assemblage. In "becoming-" one piece of the assemblage is drawn into the territory of another piece, changing its value as an element and bringing about a new unity. "  from Here.

4.

The rhizome is an antigenealogy. It is a short-term memory, or antimemory. The rhizome operates by variation, expansion, conquest, capture, offshoots. Unlike the graphic arts, drawing, or photography, unlike tracings, the rhizome pertains to a map that must be produced, constructed, a map that is always detachable, connectable, reversible, modifiable, and has multiple entryways and exits and its own lines of flight. It is tracings that must be put on the map, not the opposite (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988, p. 21).

5.

be you.

http://labconnections.blogspot.com/2011/10/be-you-house.html

6. 

Nomadic Trajectories

From Maria Tamboukou's Bracketing Identities: Nomadic trajectories in the unfolding self.

"The only way to follow these fragmented, incomplete and often contradictory life stories was to follow their "lines of flight," away from pre-established destinies, be they of gender, "race" or class...What is particularly important for multiplicities is that they are defined by "lines of flight," through which they escape enclosed formations and connect to other multiplicities from the outside. There are indeed narrative "lines of flight" emerging from the young women’s narratives, most often leading to planes of inconsistency. Indeed the only way they can be read is not the triangle from where they speak, but from the outside, the planes, where they are attempting to fly...." Maria Tamboukou

Lines (M.A. Reilly, 2011)

7.

In a book, as in all things, there are lines of articulation or segmentarity, strata and territories; but also lines of flight, movements of deterritorialization and destratification. Comparative rates of flow on these lines produce phenomena of relative slowness and viscosity, or, on the contrary, of acceleration and rupture. All this, lines and measurable speeds, constitutes an assemblage (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988,pp. 3-4).

8.  

From Josh:

“Lines of flight are everywhere. They constitute the available means of escape from the forces of repression and stratification. Even the most intense strata are riddled with lines of flight.” – Miguel Rojas-Sotelo

Lines of flight are creative and liberatory escapes from the standardization, oppression, and stratification of society. Lines of flight, big or small, are available to us at any time and can lead in any direction. They are instances of thinking and acting ‘outside of the box’, with a greater understanding of what the box is, how it works, and how we can break it open and perhaps transform it for the better.

Rhizomatic Learning: Maps as Lived Performance, not as Artifact

Perhaps one of the most important characteristics of the rhizome is that it always has multiple entryways...A map has multiple entryways, as oppose to the tracing, which always comes back 'to the same.' The map has to do with performance, whereas the tracing always involves an alleged 'competence'...What the tracing reproduces of the map or rhizome are only the impasses, blockages, incipient taproots, or points of structuration (Deleuze & Guatarri, A Thousand Plateaus pp. 12-13).

I've been thinking about the Common Core State Standards and the practice of using these standards, or the Common Core Curriculum Maps, or Heinemann's already made reading and writing Units of Study as 'the' maps curriculum writers in Districts trace in the development of local curricula that then gets handed to teachers to enact.  By their very nature, the made map, like a tracing of a map is an epic artifact, not a performance and learning requires performance. The epic world is sealed, untouchable and both learners and their teachers need to live in the middle of the work they compose.  

That's the map as performance which is rhizomatic.

The made map that one then traces cannot carry with it the intentions, contexts, complexities, misunderstandings, and nuances that (in)formed the original. Meaning always exists at points of utterance. This is why curriculum is better situated as complicated conversation (Pinar, 2008). Mikhail Bakhtin (1984) would tell us that "Discourse lives as it were, beyond itself, in a living impulse toward the object; if we detach ourselves completely from this impulse all we have left is the naked corpse of the word" (Location 4116).  Curriculum taken from the Common Core, the Common Core Maps, or the prefab units of study will result in a mere tracing that "has organized, stabilized, neutralized the multiplicities according to the axes of significance and subjectification belonging to it" (Deleuze & Guatarri, p. 13).

The authors of the Common Core Curriculum Maps say:

Educators may view the curriculum maps as “road maps” for the school year, using them to jumpstart the lesson planning process. As common planning tools, these maps also can become the backbone of rich, content-based professional development as teachers collaborate to refine the curricula for their particular schools and classrooms.

Folks, there are no made roads worth traveling at the cost of your freedom.  The entryways and exits have all been preplanned and the attractions delineated. Alongside that made map is a calendar to keep you and your young charges from dreaming, dallying, racing, reversing, erring, collapsing space, making a detour. 

No musing allowed/aloud.  

And there you are motoring about and you get an itch to go left and you just can't do it. The road you are on is an accident.  So what's a body to do? 

Live wide awake lives and let's call that "the content".  Dwell in the imagination and we might consider that akin to process. A little of each of these, along with consistent learner agency and we would find that would be enough.

Beaver Moon (11.10.11, M.A. Reilly)

The finest educators I know do this or try to do this as they labor under the mountain of predetermined 'content' and testing requirements.   I once taught middle school learners who decided early in the school year to remove most of the furniture from the room where we met and to organize the year as a collection of clubs they determined.  Although this was 1996,  one of the clubs a handful of students enacted was a gaming club and I was surely the student my students were teaching. We had a dance club, a reading long novels is great club, a solving community problems club, an editing club (my choice),  and a host of others that came and went as the year progressed. In the room which was carpeted, there was a very large table and a handful of chairs, a couple of easels, some computers and lots and lots of supplies (paints, pastels, brushes, software, cameras, books, magazines, newspapers, and so on).  In December of that year, about a dozen of us took to studying the moon for a month. We hand made art journals, collected and read related resources, interviewed a variety of people who had different expertise about the moon, and took to standing outside at night regardless of the weather for a full moon cycle.  Our journals were filled with our observations and became the texts we studied.  Beneath the club work, I threaded skills, strategies, and dispositions into the work we composed (as did the students) and I hoped it would keep them in good stead. I know that I still am studying the moon and the work 15 years ago continues to inform how I see.

"[T]he rhizome is not the object of reproduction" ( Deleuze & Guattari, p. 21). It is the made work that happens in the company of self and others.  At the time I was 'teaching' this middle school class, I was completing my doctorate at Teachers College/Columbia University.  There I was both teaching and participating in seminars where I was trying out ideas, discussing  and writing about what I understood to be happening with the middle school students.  It was in the middle of  all of this languaging with young teens, graduate students, doctoral advisor,  peers, and family that theories and practices merged, blurred, became a map made from the dialogic threads we composed. Again, Bakhtin (1984) is helpful.  He explains:

The living utterance, having taken meaning and shape at a particular historical moment in a socially specific environment, cannot fail to brush up against thousands of living dialogic threads, woven by socio-ideological consciousness around the given object of an utterance; it cannot fail to become an active participant in social dialogue (p. 276). 

Leaving Dublin (2008, Reilly)

Each year is new. Not repeatable.

A premade curriculum, neither you nor your student have made, will get you lost.

Annie Dillard says it well in The Writing Life:

Process is nothing. Erase your path. The path is not the work. I hope your tracks have grown over; I hope birds ate the crumbs. I hope you will toss it all, and not look back.