A Meditation in Five Parts

I've Been to Sea Before (M.A. Reilly, 2010)

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.                                           from The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

I.

What is named is most always a fiction.


II.

Rhizomatic tendencies do not come easy even if participation in #Rhizo15 makes the rhizome more commonplace, less happenstance.  I don't recognize myself as becoming for I am too rooted.  A narrative.

Time marches along and I stick to its edges.


III.

Much in the way I live works against rhizomatic tendencies for rhizomes are about horizontal movement and little less. Such mindlessness makes me nervous, triggers an urge to rely on what has been given. Don't tell, but most days I want to know the road is well marked, well walked before trodding. For I am dutiful. A modern girl-version of Prufrock who measures life in coffee spoons--full of beginnings and endings and each time I've glanced away from those seductive middles, I've been rewarded.

Yes, rewarded.  I'm a slave to production.


IV

I've come to understand how ruptures, those sweet lines of flight, are more about trusting what cannot be known than over-relying on what has been coded. And I want to trust. I do. But I live mostly by code. I wish I might be different and of course, sometimes I am--like that day in Dún Laoghaire at the Forty-Foot promontory when the afternoon sun cast shadows shifting three mere mortals to angels and I saw it all as it emerged.

I clicked the camera's shutter to clear space and see.


V.

Some nights I dream myself quiet and wake with the sea at my throat.

The Problem of Over-Coding Knowledge at School

The Bath (M.A. Reilly, 2013)

The point is that a rhizome or multiplicity never allows itself to be overcoded, never has available a supplementary dimension over and above its number of lines, that is, over and above the multiplicity of numbers attached to those lines.

 (Deleuze & Guatarri, 1987, p. 9)

As I read Mikael Holmqvist's (2003) "A Dynamic Model of Intra- and Interorganizational Learning" I was taken by his explanation of exploitation suggesting that as organizations "learn to refine their capabilities; they exploit their existing knowledge; they learn to focus their activities on certain domains; they learn what brings success and failure" (p. 99).  Exploitation is about making use of what has been. It's a means to stability, or at least the suggestion of stability.  Holmqvist tells us, "Exploitation is about creating reliability in experience. It means productivity, refinement, routinization, production, and elaboration of existing experiences (p. 99).

Schools, largely governed by imposed standards and high stakes testing, are most often places of exploitation.

These are spaces where clinging to past success as measured by state tests and avoiding failures as suggested by state testing results lead to an "elaboration of existing experiences."  How might we counteract such hegemony? Holmqvist recommends that organizations  "create variety in their experiences as well, by experimenting, innovating and taking risks" (p. 99). This is the process of exploration.

Schools are striated spaces in need of exploration--of lines of flight.

I think a lot about these potentially clear and striated spaces and the dynamic of lines of flight and over-coding that resituate space as being cleared and/or striated.

Building and collapsing.

Deleuze and Guattari (1987) help to name this potential tension between exploitation and exploration when they write:

It is not a question of this or that place on earth, or of a given moment in history, still less of this or that category of thought. It is a question of a model that is perpetually in construction or collapsing, and of a process that is perpetually prolonging itself, breaking off and starting up again (p. 20).

Breaking off.
Starting up again.

This rhizomatic world, Deleuze and Guattari suggest, is one where exploitation and exploration co-exist and how we shift and move between these spaces, reclassify and clear these spaces are worthy of our notice, our naming, our time.

Cited

Deleuze, Gilles & Felix Guattari. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Mineapolis, MN: Minnesota University Press.
Holmqvist, Mikael. (2003).  A Dynamic Model of Intra- and Interorganizational Learning. Organization Studies 24(1): 95–123. 

Reclaiming Public Learning Spaces: The Long Tail Meets the Rhizome

from Occupy Wall Street (Reilly, 2011)

I.

I reread with much interest an older post by Will Richardson from 2011, "How the Hell Could They Let this Happen?".  In the post, Will quotes a section from an Alfie Kohn post.  Kohn writes:

We are living through what future historians will surely describe as one of the darkest eras in American education — a time when teachers, as well as the very idea of democratic public education, came under attack; when carrots and sticks tied to results on terrible tests were sold to the public as bold “reform”; when politicians who understand nothing about learning relied uncritically on corporate models and metaphors to set education policy; when the goal of schooling was as misconceived as the methods, framed not in terms of what children need but in terms of “global competitiveness” — that is, how U.S. corporations can triumph over their counterparts in other countries. There will come a time when people will look back at this era and ask, “How the hell could they have let this happen?”

Dem-o-cra-tic public education.
Say it slowly.
A mouthful of words.


II.

I think about this often--how public education is so much more than the content taught to children.  It's what helps us to become (other)wise--to try on unfamiliar perspectives. Amidst the standards and accountability movements, we have lost sight of aims of education. 

We have settled for far less. 

So how do we reclaim what does seem to be slipping from our collective hands? How might we do this reclaiming without colonizing one another?  Without forcing our will?

A way to reclaim public education as a public institution is by leveraging the long tail, the rhizome. The traditional view of education situates schooling as a function of transference from teacher to student of expert-determined content--such as the content specified in state and national standards. As such, U.S. public schools tend to rely on hierarchy as the method used to organize and distribute content and pedagogical practices, most often in the form of sanctioned programs. 

Think assembly line.

In contrast, a rhizomatic learning community is a fluid collective where participants dwell in the middle of things and where learning is a blend of explicit and tacit knowledge. As Dave Cormier has written: the community is the curriculum. Cormier writes:

Rhizomatic Learning posits, among other things, that the community is the curriculum. That being able to participate with and among those people who are resident in a particular field is a primary goal of learning. 

Think an endless sea of middles.
Think affinity groups.
Think choice.

III.

There's no single model of learning that represents wholly all that we are becoming. We are so much more and less. As such, the choices for what constitutes becoming in 2014 are fuller than the the single model we rely mostly upon: the school house. In a connected world, the opportunities to learn need not be limited to what we have done before. 

For example, in this brief video that chronicles the work of Charles Raben, a ninth grader, we can see that the locus of learning is not limited to the place we call school. Raben was able to make use of a passion of his, photography, and apply this passion to framing an urban problem. What strikes me most when I listen to Raben is the agency he asserts.  He is not the receiver of content, he is the maker. 

Charles Raben, 9th Grade Student at Quest to Learn from Institute of Play on Vimeo.

Raben's moment of learning that is actualized via his petition offers us a glimpse at the long tail.  And at the heart of the long tail of learning is the understanding that learning can and does happen anywhere, everywhere, all the time.  

We are never not learning. We are always (un)learning. 

This is a shift in thinking that leaders most need to consider--a shift that asks us to disconnect learning from causality.  I don't need to cause you to learn as you are doing so without me.  A teacher may assist you.  A teacher may help you to shape your thoughts. But frankly, you are learning without the teacher too. You may find that you are learning through chats, social media. You are learning via learning walks. You are learning through play. You are learning through dialogue. You are learning via observations. You are learning through trial and error. You are learning through YouTube videos. You are learning through books. You are learning in connection with others. You are learning by doing and making and reflecting on what you have composed and failed to compose. You are joining and breaking with others and learning during these transitions, these disruptions. You are learning via the courses and workshops you take and give. You are learning though work. You are learning at your dining room table, from the front seat of the car, or bus, or subway.  

It feels rather endless, yes? 
It is.

Learning is not limited to the domain of schools and leaders must embrace this reality and open the doors literally and figuratively.  In fact, some of what gets done at schools in the name of content, standards, and high stakes testing may well limit and suppress thought.

Leaders need to be bold.  Let's open our eyes and catalog the many ways learning is happening and then let's leverage social media to share, reinvent, revise those ways. 

Curated Bibliography of Texts about Rhizomatc Learning and Leadership

Rhizomatic Redesign (M.A. Reilly 2012)

A few weeks ago a friend, Renee, from NH emailed me to ask if I would mentor her for her individualized learning portion of her dissertation.  She attends Antioch University and is in the process of earning her PhD in Leadership and Change. I was of course thrilled to be a part of this venture especially as she is thinking about rhizomatic leadership which I am keen to think about and theorize alongside Renee.  We will work together for the next 4 to 6 months. Below is the start to some readings we may well do (we'll see what surfaces).  Thought I would share this curated list.


Articles/Chapters

1. Chan, Kirsten Ho. (2011). Rethinking Children’s Participation in Curriculum Making: A Rhizomatic Movement. International Critical Childhood Policy Studies, 4(1) 107-122.
2. Cormier, Dave. (2008). Rhizomatic education: community as curriculum. Innovate: Journal of Online Education. 4 (5).
3. Gough, Noel. (2010). Chapter 2: Performing Imaginative inquiry: Narrative experiments and rhizosemiotic play (pp. 42-60). In Thomas William Nielsen, Rob Fitzgerald & Mark Fettes (Eds.) Imagination in Educational Theory and Practice: A Many-sided Vision. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
4. Gough, Noel. (2006). Rhizosemiotic play and the generativity of fiction. Complicity: An International Journal of Complexity and Education, 3 (1), 119-124.
5. Gough, Noel. (2006). Shaking the tree, making a rhizome: Towards a nomadic geophilosophy of science education. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 38 (5) 625–645.
6. Gough, Noel. (2004). “RhizomANTically Becoming-Cyborg: Performing posthuman pedagogies”. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 36(3), pp. 253–265. 
7. Gregoriou, Z. (2004). “Commencing the Rhizome: Towards a minor philosophy of education”. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 36(3), pp. 233–251.
8. Honan, Eileen. (2007). Writing a rhizome: An (im)plausible methodology. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 20(5), 531-546.
9. Irwin, Rita L.; Beer, Ruth; Springgay, Stephanie; Grauer, Kit; Xiong, Gu; and Bickel, Barbara. (2006). The Rhizomatic Relations of A/r/ tography.  Publications. Paper 4.
10. Leander, Kevin M. & Deborah Wells Rowe. (2006). Mapping literacy spaces in motion: A Rhizomatic analysis of a classroom literacy performance. Reading Research Quarterly, 41 (4), 428-460.
11. Reardon Micahel, Sanzogni, Louis & Arthur Poropat. (2005/2006). Towards a Rhizomatic Method for Knowledge Management. INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF THE MANAGEMENT, 5(5), 159-168.
12. Reilly, M.A. (2014). To enter stone, Be water: Situating literacy coaching as rhizomatic. Reading & Writing Quarterly:Overcoming Learning Difficulties, 30(3), 293-295.
13. Sanford, K., Merkel, L. & Madill, L. (2011). ’There’s no fixed course’: Rhizomatic learning communities in adolescent videogaming. Loading… The Journal of the Canadian Game Studies Association, 5(8), pp. 50-70.
14. Sasser, Tanya. (2012). Bring Your Own Disruption: Rhizomatic Learning in the Composition Class.  Hybrid Pedagogy, 30.12.2012.
15. St.Pierre, E.A. (2004). Deleuzian Concepts for Education: The subject undone. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 36(3), pp. 283–296.
16. Young, Alex Trimble. (2013).  Settler Sovereignty and The Rhizomatic West, or, The Significance of the Frontier in Postwestern Studies. Western American Literature 48:1 & 2, pp. 115 - 139.

Knowmadic Learner (M.A. Reilly, 2012)

Blog Posts/Web/Prezzi/YouTube, etc.

1. Academic Papers via the Mendeley Group: Rhizomatic Learning
2. Cormier, Dave. (2012).  Embracing Uncertainty – Rhizomatic Learning in Formal Education. Available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJIWyiLyBpQ [Accessed 13.3.2013].
3. Cormier, Dave. (2011). Workers, soldiers or nomads – what does the Gates Foundation want from our education system?
4. Cormier, Dave. (2011). Rhizomatic Learning – Why we teach?
5. Cromier, Dave. & Reilly, M.A. (2011). PlexusCalls - The Rhizome: A New Metaphor for What We Learn and Know. 
6. Crump, Helen. (2014). Rhizomatic learning: metaphors, synergies and semantics #rhizo14
7. Gangi, Jane. (201).  A Brief Introduction to Rhizomatics Via Sheri Leafgren’s Reuben’s Fall
8. Mackness, Jenny. (2014). Principles for Rhizomatic Thinking . 
9. Reilly, M.A. (2013).  The Random and the Intentional: Growing a Business Rhizomatically
10. Reilly, M.A. (2012). Knowmads, Rhizomes, and Minecraft: Exploring the Edges of Learning in a Middle School Classroom (prezi)
11. Reilly, M.A. (2011). Reimagining Learning as Lines of Flight.
12. Reilly, M.A. ( 2011). We Are Pando: Rhizomatic Learning.
13. Steves, Tobey. (2014). Uttering towards otherwise: Students as rhizomatic nomad assemblages.
14. Stewart, Bonnie. (2011). the rhizomatic learning lens & what rhizomes are good for.

Books

1. Cambpell, Neil. (2011). The Rhizomatic West: Representing the American West in a Transnational, Global, Media Age. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska/Bison Books.
2. Cormier, Dave. Making the community the curriculum: Rhizomatic learning in action.
3. Delanda, Manuel. (2002). Intensive science & virtual philosophy. New York: Continuum.
4. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. (1980). A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. (pdf)
5. Deeluze, Gilles, & Parnet, Claire. (1987). Dialogues. New York: Columbia University Press.
6. Guattari, Félix. (2008). Chaosophy, New Edition: Text and Interviews 1972-1977. Sylvère Lotringer (Ed.). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
7. Leafgren, Sherri. (2011). Reuben's Fall: A Rhizomatic Analysis of Disobedience in Kindergarten. Walnut Creek, CA: Leaf Coast Press.
8. Maher, Susan Naramore. (2014). Deep Map Country: Literary Cartography of the Great Plains. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska/Bison Books.
9. Reilly, M.A. (2011).  The familiar falling away: A little book of rhizomes. Blurb.

Dissertations

1. Humphreys, Chloe. (2012). Mapping literacy spaces in motion: A Rhizomatic analysis of a classroom literacy performance. Burnbay, BC: Simon Fraser University. 

The Random and the Intentional: Growing a Business Rhizomatically

  I. Rhizome

Utopia (M.A. Reilly, 2012)

Some days I feel as if I may have awoken in someone else's life--so blessed am I. For the last year I have been composing an educational consulting business (Blueprints for Learning: Designing Educational Futures) built on the foundation of an adult lifetime of work.  It is ongoing effort and I have never been happier or more satisfied.  20 consultants join me and we work in inner city schools alongside principals, teachers, and children. In our organization, everyone teaches and everyone learns. This is the closest we get to a motto. As I have been reflecting on the work at hand, I realize that several of the tenets that (in)form my work as an artist and writer are also tenets that shape this new business.

II. The rhizome forms centers.

I think of my business as a rhizomatic learning community that is fluid (think river flowing).  We act as a collective who dwell in the middle of things and the learning that emerges is informed by explicit and tacit knowledge. I so value the tacit. We resemble a sea of "middles” continuously formed and reformed by alliances determined by needs, interests, whim, playfulness, directions, questions, redirections, assessments, errors, and commitments. 

In contrast to more conservative designs, a rhizomatic business design understands the necessity of joining and rejoining and is inherently unstable by act and desire. Such thinking allows us to embrace error and in doing so allows significant risk making and taking, kindness, and successes.

It is a curious tension that arises when random and intentional acts are allowed, encouraged, designed, and desired.  By frequently embracing this tension, spaces of emptiness arise.  Whereas, I have intentionally selected consultants to work with me--their work is not dictated by me (what a foolish undertaking that would be). I have no program to sell and believe so much in the goodness and brightness of each individual, that I know that it is in the joining and rejoining of consultants alongside principals, teachers and children that creativeness arises.  It is this deep belief in people, in the importance of error making and problem framing, and the role of randomness and play that guides this business design.

III. Practicing Emptiness

As the CEO of Blueprints, there are spaces I design and some that arise by chance where purposeful emptiness is privileged. We know that we are often hired to design with educators ways that enhance and complicate children’s learning and do so with measurable joy. Given the kind and brilliant people I work with (both within the organization and within the schools where we teach and learn), I am confident that everyone will find interesting, unique and artful ways of filling that emptiness by naming, claiming or playing with it.  That in doing so, we will have multiple opportunities to join/rejoin and make sense of the work.

It is this practice of mindful emptiness where lines of flight that (in)form our work are occasioned.  Lines of flight give rise to seemingly inconsequential noticings.  Alongside these, more profound meaning emerges.  I see this occurring in classrooms where we are working at the teacher and student levels. These meanings produced, in turn  produce more lines of flight. An iterative design at that and yet one that will also break.

I appreciate the clarity that Martin Wood and Sally Brown bring to the concept of lines of flight. They write (2009): 

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 )

IV. Having Nothing to Say

I’m learning the value of having nothing to say and the need to talk especially. I think of John Cage who so wisely told us:

This work with others is the rhizome. It is an art.  It leads into and out of powerful learning—that is often exponential as it does not follow along strictly linear lines, but instead occasions lines of flight that join and rejoin that which we could not have seen connected from where we once stood.

Dreaming About Spring (M.A. Reilly, 2012)

This is the process that leads to such intense and meaningful learning--such as the 9-year-old who earlier today used his fellow classmates' learning to explain important tensions Charles Darwin experienced when naming  emerging scientific findings alongside his religious beliefs.  This child wisely told us that it wasn't about one or the other, but rather about what these differences formed together that most mattered.  

Such is the rhizomatic moment when a community of learners recognize the lines of flight that lead to a collective understanding of something we had not named before. 

Exploring Transmediation & Rhizomatic Learning through Art Conversations

Bluebird (Feb. 2012 by M.A. Reilly

(For Saturday @ Western Connecticut State University/ED822)




I. Exploring Transmediation through Art Converasations


What is transmediation? According to Semali, transmediation is:

The process of taking understandings from one sign system and moving them into another in order to make meaning or 'representing' meaning across sign systems. From Semali, L.M. (ed). 2002. Transmediation in the classroom: A semiotics-based media literacy framework. NY: Peter Lang.

Art conversation

View more presentations from Mary Ann Reilly.

Art Conversations (by M.A. Reilly, published in English Journal)

II. Engaging in Art Conversations

Engagement 1:  You have been partnered and have been given a sheet of finger paint paper and paint. Track how meaning emerges and changes as you read/view/hear this Charles Bukowski poem, "Bluebird." Discuss the work, your feelings and thoughts with your partner using the finger paints.   You are not allowed to actually talk, but instead need to converse using the paints.

I.  ENTERING THE POEM

1. Listen to the poem.



from The Last Night of the Earth Poems
 
there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I’m too tough for him,
I say, stay in there, I’m not going
to let anybody see
you.
there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I pour whiskey on him and inhale
cigarette smoke
and the whores and the bartenders
and the grocery clerks
never know that
he’s
in there.
there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I’m too tough for him,
I say,
stay down, do you want to mess
me up?
you want to screw up the
works?
you want to blow my book sales in
Europe?
there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I’m too clever, I only let him out
at night sometimes
when everybody’s asleep.
I say, I know that you’re there,
so don’t be sad.
then I put him back,
but he’s still singing a little
in there, I haven’t quite let him
die
and we sleep together like
that
with our
secret pact
and it’s nice enough to
make a man
weep, but I don’t
weep, do
you?


II. DWELLING IN THE POEM 


2. View Tomas Ralph's short animated film based on the poem


Bluebird from Thomas Ralph on Vimeo.



3. View "Bluebird" a multimodal text based on Bukowski's poem and created by California is a Place.


Bluebird from California is a place on Vimeo.

4. View this is an animation of "Bluebird" created by Monika Umba.




III. LEAVING THE POEM

5. Listen to this a musical Composition by Sympathy 7 based on the Bukowski poem.

In December 2010 a friend recommended a poem by Charles Bukowski called Bluebird. During that time I was working on a musical piece but was unsure of its purpose. Upon reading Bluebird i knew instantly what i should do. I hope you enjoy listening to it as much as i enjoyed composing it.

 6. Watch Damjan Radovanovic film.

Bluebird from Damjan Radovanovic on Vimeo.


7. Watch SinChan's film.


Bluebird from SinChan on Vimeo.


III. Experience as a Moving Force

'Every experience is a moving force. Its value can be judged only on the ground of what it moves toward and into' (John Dewey. 1938/1997. Experience and education, p.38). Transmediation potentially helps to reveal the trajectory of an experience through the presence of multiple symbolic (re)presentations" (Reilly, 2010. "Opening possibilities through transmediation (p. 3).

1. Place your art conversation on the table alongside your peers.
2. As you view the art, consider what understandings you made of the poem, Bluebird.  Did your understanding change as you engaged with the various artworks based on or influenced by the poem.
3. Did meaning emerge or change as you engaged in the art conversation?
4. Gallery Walk: NOw align your work with your peers and take a gallery walk.  Are there any patterns across the artworks that you notice?  Are there points of departure?
5. Think about these, make a few notes (chose whatever form you want) and let's talk about this in about 15 minutes.

IV. Rhizomes, Lines of Flight, and so on...

Rhizomatic Learning

View more PowerPoint from Mary Ann Reilly

Lines of flight

View more PowerPoint from Mary Ann Reilly / Blueprints for Learning, Inc.

Nomad: No Passport/Too Many

So think about what Rosi Braidotti (1994) writes:

The nomad is only passing through; s/he makes those necessarily situated connections that can help her/him to survive, but s/he never takes on fully the limits of one national, fixed identity. The nomad has no passport – or has too many of them (p. 33).

Trying to Find Home (M.A. Reilly, 2011)

This idea of nomadic identity raises some interesting possibilities related to schooling and learning and connects powerfully with work by Deleuze and Guattari (1987) who write that "the life of the nomad is the intermezzo" (p. 381). Deleuze (1995) adds that nomads "transmute and reappear in the lines of flight of some social field" (p. 153).


A couple of questions I am wondering about:

• How might the concept of nomad be applied to education?
• What types of engagements allow for learners who have no passport or too many?
• How might we, in the design of learning, help students unfix their school identity/ies?

Work Cited

Braidotti, Rosi. 1994. Nomadic subjects: Embodiment and sexual difference in contemporary feminist theory. New York: Columbia University Press

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.