TALENTO HUMANO EN LA PLANEACION ESTRATEGICA

Deleuzo-Guattarian thinking and concepts have inspired researchers in a wide range of areas in education, such as educational philosophy, research methodology, teacher education and language education.

For education at large Gregoriou (2004) has seen a potential for Deleuzo- Guattarian thinking to produce a minor philosophy of education, which “picks up ideas from social sciences without anxiety about risking its identity, and connects these ideas in new encounters” (p. 234), while Semetsky (2009) explored Deleuzian concepts to reconceptualise “education as a process of learning from and evaluating experience, inventing concepts in practice, and creating novel meanings” (p. 444). St. Pierre (2004) ‘plugged’ into Deleuzian and Deleuzo-Guattarin concepts to re-think subjectivity as “an individuation that was always starting up again in the middle of a different temporality, in new assemblages, never fully constituted, fluid, a flow meeting other flow” (p. 291).

In a similar vein Mazzei and McCoy (2010) argued in their introduction to the special issue Thinking with Deleuze in qualitative research for de-centering human subjectivity in qualitative research and to “think with Deleuzian concepts in a way that might produce previously unthought questions, practices, and knowledge.” (p. 504).

With regard to teacher education and inclusion Allan (2004) critiqued the “quest for indicators and outcomes within the quality assurance genre” (p. 419) and saw the

rhizome as “an instrument of flight” (p. 424), which helps to see student teachers’

knowledge and understanding as a series of maps that “perform and create new knowledge” (p. 424). Bone and Edwards (2015) explored the concept of rhizome in their narrative account of a study on peer-assisted learning and e-learning in a teacher education programme focused on early childhood learning. The authors found that “learning happens […] by being rhizomic, being prepared to be uprooted so that something new can arise” (p. 71) and saw “new shoots of learning” (p. 72) that surprised them. Unexpected instances of learning included their own critical peer- teaching discussions as a form of peer-learning which encouraged more active student participation.

In language education Masny (2013, 2016) drew on Deleuzo-Guattarian thinking to develop Multiple Literacies Theory (MLT) within her research with multilingual children. MLT is an assemblage which “releases school- based literacy from its privileged rank to engage reading in multiplicitous and heterogeneous rhizomatic connections.” (Masny, 2016, p. 1). Waterhouse (2011, 2012) put to work MLT and Deleuzo-Guattarian concepts of rhizome, assemblage and becoming in her research with adult immigrant language learners, and Bangou (2012) worked with MLT and the concept of assemblage in his investigation of knowledge creation in a second language teacher preparation programme. In his study Bangou found that within the

programme’s collective assemblages research participants transitioned and navigated through multiple becomings, including teacher-becomings, student-becomings and web- page-designer becomings. These and other works helped me develop an initial

understanding of the concepts of rhizome, assemblage and becoming, which I then developed further within the conceptual research framework to come to a different understanding of what it is to do research (see Chapter 4).

Perhaps ironically, the concept of rhizome has been taken up in some parts of education not through multiple readings by different authors, but mainly based on a particular reading of this concept by one author. Cormier (2008) coined the term ‘rhizomatic education’ in an article titled Rhizomatic Education: Community as Curriculum. As the title suggests, the author linked the concept of rhizome to a group of people who jointly define what is being learnt:

“In the rhizomatic model of learning, curriculum is not driven by predefined inputs from experts; it is constructed and negotiated in real time by the contributions of those engaged in the learning process. This community acts as the curriculum, spontaneously shaping, constructing, and reconstructing itself and the subject of its learning in the same way that the rhizome responds to changing environmental conditions.” (Cormier, 2008, n.p.)

From this quote it is apparent that Cormier’s understanding of the concept of

rhizome is linked to the human-centred concept of community, which sits awkwardly with Deleuzo-Guattarian thinking. Cormier later developed his thinking about the concept of rhizome on his blog and ‘applied’ his understanding in two Massive Open

Online Courses (MOOCs), which were enacted on different social media platforms, among them Twitter.

Harris (2016) criticised that Cormier’s understanding of rhizome, “is mentioned in virtually all definitions of rhizomatic education, almost entirely positively” (p. 2). In fact, Cormier’s reading of rhizome was adopted in The Open University’s report

Innovating Pedagogy2012 (Sharples, McAndrew, Weller, Ferguson, FitzGerald, Hirst, Mor, Gaved & Whitelock, 2012) and appears in articles that link the concept of rhizome

to the idea of community (e.g. Bali, Crawford, Jessen, Signorelli, & Zamora, 2015) and to a form of learning, i.e. ‘rhizomatic learning’ (e.g. Mackness & Bell, 2015; Conole, 2016). In my own research I saw the term ‘rhizomatic’ in connection with Cormier’s article on Twitter during the pilot study in tweets with the hashtags #rhizo14 and #rhizo15, leading me to further investigations of this term. From a Deleuzo-Guattarian point of view it could be argued that one reading of the concept of rhizome has led to a territorialisation of the concept of rhizome, thereby stifling attempts to develop other readings that could inform research and lead to different perspectives.

In summary, Deleuzo-Guattarian thinking-doing research offers possibilities for opening up the Twitter-in-education research territory in new and exciting ways. For research into teachers’ Twitter-based PD working with the Deleuzo-Guattarian concepts of rhizome, assemblage and becoming led to the production of research questions that acknowledge the human-non-human entanglement of Twitter-based professional

practices. Research guided by questions that do not privilege humans can overcome the

received view and the contextual view identified in existing research (see Chapter 2.5) and lead to different (in a Deleuzo-Guattarian sense) conceptualisations of (language) teachers’ practices and professional development.