Night: Real & Imagined

I'm fascinated by night, real and imagined. In this video I attempt to display a range of feelings about the night based on art work I have created during the last three years.

 - Mary Ann

Art 2011

An animoto film featuring art I made this year (2011).

Rhizomatic Learning

Sylvano Bussotti, Rhizome (1959). Found here.

For several years now, I have been considering how the rhizome might function as a metaphor for learning and a model for education.  I tend to agree with Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (2002) who in writing about the tree as the long standing metaphor for knowledge and learning said, “We’re tired of trees. We should stop believing in trees, roots, and radicles. They’ve made us suffer too much" (p. 15).

In their stead, Deleuze and Guattari offer the rhizome. Rhizome? Yes. You know rhizomes: think ginger. A rhizome is the horizontal stem of a plant, usually found underground. From the plant's nodes, it sends out roots and shoots.  The rhizome is all about middles. The tree is a symbol of hierarchy.

A month ago, my friend Jane, a professor at a Connecticut University posted this definition of rhizome:

The rhizome is a tangle of tubers with no apparent beginning or end. It constantly changes shape, and every point in it appears to be connected with every other point. (Driscoll, 2004. Psychology of Learning and Instruction, p. 389)

So today as Scott Klepesch, Deb Gottsleben and I were visiting English teachers, Cathy Stutzman and Meg Donhauser and librarians Heather Hersey and Marci Zane from Hunterdon Central Regional High School (HCRHS) in NJ, I began to see what the rhizomatic classroom might resemble.  Cathy and Heather partner, as do Meg and Marci,  in the design and teaching of a student-centered English class. I became intrigued a few weeks ago, when I had read a post Cathy had written describing the learning happening in Meg's British literature class. Cathy wrote:

Meg’s class is run like a choose-your-own British literature adventure! Students move through literary eras together, but they choose their own texts and areas of focus. Students track their learning by basically writing their own learning plans. They identify standards they work toward, they write their own questions, and they identify their own understandings. Meg conferences with them, monitors their progress, and teaches them to question and reflect. I love this whole concept. It makes learning collaboratively differentiated and amazing!

I contacted Cathy and she was kind enough to extend an invitation for us to visit her American literature class and Meg's British literature class today.  Each class met for 80 minutes and was populated with junior and senior students.  There was so much to comment about given all the progressive learning I observed, but for this post I am limiting my comments to describing how each class was inherently rhizomatic.

In defining the rhizome, Deleuze and Guattari (2002) write that it:

has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo. The tree is filiation, but the rhizome is alliance, uniquely alliance. The tree imposes the verb 'to be,' but the fabric of the rhizome is conjunction, 'and . . . and . . . and' (pp.24-25)

Today while observing, I noticed how the classroom dynamics in each room were rhizomatic. The learners (students, teachers, and librarians) resembled a sea of "middles" in that they formed and reformed alliances based on need, interest, direction, redirection, assessment, and commitment.  Unlike the design of many teacher-directed classrooms, the rhizomatic classroom is based on joining and rejoining as opposed to a hierarchical structure where the teacher determines the content and the method to "dispense" knowledge or perhaps even to occasion learning through experiential design. 

The rhizomatic classroom requires a shift in teacher talk from telling to inquiring alongside students; from talking a lot and often to listening and conversing.  Such shifts reveal the uncertainty present in dynamic learning. As Meg explained planning happens in conjunction with and response to what is happening in the classroom. There's no Sunday planning for the week in the traditional sense. What happens on Monday will inform Tuesday and so on. As Meg said, it's all about conversation.

Image found here.

Perhaps what was most significant is how the rhizomatic classroom reveals the fallacy of content-driven teaching as the method that better ensures there are no wholes in students' knowledge.  Often I hear educators explain that they like the idea of student-centered classrooms, but worry that students won't learn as much as they will not be determining all of the content and sharing their insights and knowledge with the class.  They worry that although they might teach students A and B concepts x and y,  neither will learn concept z as only student C will have occasion to learn that.

So it was interesting when I asked the teachers if they missed teaching whole class texts and Cathy said at times she did.  She referenced how much she loved teaching The Great Gatsby and yet she was quick to explain that in teacher directed lessons, just a few students might understand the points (concepts x, y, and z) she would be highlighting and stressing. I thought about how her description so matched my memory of my own teaching and realized that there are always wholes in what we know.  Cathy added that now her students are learning more as they are all learning all the time, instead of the occasional connection to what she was directly teaching. The students determine which concepts and skills connected to standards they will learn, how they will learn, which texts they will read/view/hear based in part on teacher-recommended author lists and informed by their interests and how they will represent their learning.

In the rhizomatic classroom, thinking resembles the tangle of roots and shoots, both broken and whole.  Problem framing and decision-making rest with all learners: teachers and students.  Right before we were to leave, Heather told a story about a student who was studying modernism and postmodernism and struggling with how to represent his learning.  After some discussion with the boy in which Heather learned that he was passionate about motorbikes, she asked him if he thought he could represent what he had learned using motorbikes.  Do you think you could find some connections that would show what you learned? The student found the idea challenging and interesting and began thinking.

Throughout the visit as I observed and interacted with the teachers, my colleagues, and the students--it became obvious that Marcy Driscoll's description of learning as rhizomatic was recognizable. She wrote:

Break the rhizome anywhere and the only effect is that new connections will be grown. The rhizome models the unlimited potential for knowledge construction, because it has no fixed points…and no particular organization (p. 389). 

The learning we watched today had not been predetermined or orchestrated via a single point (teacher). Instead, as students worked solo, in pairs, small groups, with the teachers, or us--new alliances were formed and broken leading to the potential of new connections being learned/unlearned/relearned.




Work Cited:
Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix. (2002). A Thousand Plateaus Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London: Continuum. 
Driscoll, Marcy P. 2004. Psychology of Learning and Instruction, 3rd Edition. Allyn & Bacon.

Getting Off the Math Acceleration Train

My husband and I have come to a decision: we're getting our son off the math acceleration train that speeds through middle school (in order to get ready for high school) and takes with it any and all interest in things mathematical.  This is the child who lined up condiments from the refrigerator at 18 months, taking time to balance the bottles so that they were somewhat symmetrical from taller bottles on each side to smaller, more squat bottles.   We are watching his imagination and curiosity lessen, his anxiety about grades increase, and his belief that he can't "do mathematics" take on new life.

When we discussed the matter with our son and asked him if he wanted to continue in the accelerated track, he answered, No! with great quickness.

In a perfect world, mathematics, especially during the middle school years, would be understood as an art, no more or less a symbolic language than music, photography, painting, and so on. But this is not a perfect world and mathematics is not understood as an art. I can't help but think if this were the case, my 12-year old might not say, I hate math, with such regularity. 

1st "Still Life", age 7: Sense of symmetry, line, and balance were intuitive.

In "A Mathematician's Lament," Paul Lockhart writes: "Math is not about following directions, it’s about making new directions."

The opposite of this idea was so easily observed a few nights ago when we helped our son solve two-step algebraic equations--corrections he had to make on a test. Although he could follow the steps when shown, he didn't have any understanding. Finally my husband asked him if he understood what the equal sign represented. He said no. That led to describing scenarios that involved balancing sides (seesaw, weight distribution on an airplane by aisle, playing with coins, and so on). We later found out that the "curriculum" was finished for the year and the teacher decided to get a jump on next year by assigning and then testing via a 20 item test, students' capacity to solve equations (1/5t - 57 = 18).

All this getting ready for...is just plain dumb.

We need less rushing through to answer math exercises and more dwelling in human problems where the elegance and uncertainty of mathematics are given center stage.

Lockhart describes meaningful problems this way:

But a problem, a genuine honest-to-goodness natural human question— that’s another thing. How long is the diagonal of a cube? Do prime numbers keep going on forever? Is infinity a number? How many ways can I symmetrically tile a surface? The history of mathematics is the history of mankind’s engagement with questions like these, not the mindless regurgitation of formulas and algorithms (together with contrived exercises designed to make use of them).

Maybe it's too much to hope for, but somewhere I hope there's a math teacher in my son's future who also wants to slow down and dwell in meaningful problems and perhaps is even courageous enough to do so often, if not regularly, in these dark days of pacing and testing.


There's a lot to be said for joy and curiosity, wonder and fun.  It's time to get off the fast train. I hope other parents might do so as well. 

Evaluating Student Learning: Down the Rabbit Hole

I have often wondered why some teachers (perhaps even the majority?) evaluate students not on the progress made or even the learning attained across time, but rather measure at specific points in time and then let that measurement represent the totality of learning.  Seems epic to me--a past sealed off immutable to the present.  Allow me to be a bit more specific.

Image by Centralasian on Flickr.  Found Here.

Student A takes a math test during a Monday in April. Student A's work is evaluated and rendered a grade.  Let's say that grade is 42 (and it is not the answer to the universe). Student A corrects the mistakes s/he made (as required by the teacher), has the test signed by a parent, and returns both to the teacher.  A month later, Student A aces a math test and interestingly, the skills originally assessed on the April test are embedded into the May test. Something like: In order to solve X you needed to know Y.

At the end of the marking period, both tests along with other "evaluations" are added to the list of "count-ables" and form Student A's marking period grade.  What has been measured?  How valid is this system of add them all up and divide?  What does Student A learn about learning? Measurement? Evaluation?

Now in another classroom, perhaps across the hallway, Teacher B also evaluates student work using the same process with a slight difference: S/he "allows" learners to hand in the corrections (with full work showing) and then averages the two grades (1st attempt and corrections) to figure the final grade (the one that goes into the grade book).  In this scenario, what is the student learning about revision? correction? work? I have asked lots of Teacher Bs why the first grade isn't dropped from the grade book as the student has now demonstrated the learning?  The responses usually provided include: fairness (there are students who got all correct the first time and that should count more); standard-based evaluation (still not sure what that phase means); Puritan ethic (Makes students want to work harder to get everything "correct" the 1st time); practicing for high stakes test (you don't get a do over).

Wondering what you think about this. Is there some value to establishing points in time where a single test regardless of later performance represents what the learner knew/knows?  I can't help but think students must experience these situations like Alice in Wonderland:

Alice says, "If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is because everything would be what it isn't. And contrary-wise; what it is it wouldn't be, and what it wouldn't be, it would. You see?"

You see?

Published! F-Stop Magazine

Two images I made are part of the group show and published in F-Stop Magazine's June/July 2011 issue.

The first image, Dreaming of David Hockney, is also being show for the next 5 weeks at Trillium Gallery in  Glenford, NY.  An Artist's reception will be held on Saturday, June 4, 2011 (beginning at 2 p.m.).

Dreaming of David Hockney (Mountainville, NY, November 2010)

The second image, Watching, was made a bit north of Newburgh, NY. I shot the image in 2009, but f did not process it until earlier this year (2011).  Sometimes I need to live with an image for awhile before I begin to see it.  Squaring the image made a difference.

Watching (2011)

TwitterArt Collaboration w/ @AndersonGL

On Wednesday night Gary Anderson tweeted a haiku that just captivated me. He wrote:

The smell of lilacs
through the kitchen window now
long after nightfall

With the poem as inspiration, I made the following image, embedding Gary's words.

Visual Haiku (M.A. Reilly, 2011)