I think that rhizomatic stories are everywhere and that we need to make sorties out into them and bring back the intelligence (or lack) we find there. Here is an invitation which has rooted within it a permission to make and remake, to engage and ungage, and to share in ways arboreal and rhizomatic.
All thanks to Helen Crump’s summing up and further reflection along with Jenny’s comment has me thinking in terms of enforced messiness. Not creating the ecosystem or even a space that gives the illusion of being ordered. Rather, as a co-teacher, enforcing messiness, imposing a little disorder, a nudge toward this and that which also includes me in the mix.
If you have never used Vialogues before just go there, create an account, and come back here after you have signed in. Comment away or click on the Vialogue here or above and comment there (a little bit easier to see the video at the Vialogue site, but I love how it is embeddable here too.)
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Hi Terry – Although I like the sounds in your video – it doesn’t ‘speak to me’, i.e. I don’t understand the point – sorry. But you have captured my attention in other ways. For example – when you write:
> I think that rhizomatic stories are everywhere and that we need to make sorties out into them and bring back the intelligence (or lack) we find there.
I’m wondering if the ‘bringing back in’ is an attempt to impose some sort of order on a messy system?
I agree that learners often need to be ‘pushed out of their comfort zone’ to be able to make progress. The problem is that this ‘comfort zone’ is unique to each of us. The balance between the right amount of challenge and chaos to the point of falling off the edge is a difficult thing for teachers to achieve and for learners to keep control of.
Hope this makes sense.
Jenny
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I am glad I caught your attention a little ;-). I have been struggling to get a feel for rhizomatic learning. I saw the water and the sound as one of the smallest stories I could tell, that maybe rhizomatic learning could be about engaging people with looking at and listening to the story of “clarity through messiness”. Personally, I wondered whether viewers might work through the video by sharing images, metaphors, analogies, and stories without exactly saying exactly what I wanted–enforced independence.
I also wanted to play. I think that one of my ways into rhizomatic learning is through play hence this and my use of zeega to try to ‘get it’ in ways that a frontal academic assault has not. I think that if rhizomatic learning does not live in the simplest sorties (watching overflowing water and talking about it with others, for example) then it doesn’t really exist. If the community is the curriculum, then all that the community does, micro to mondo, could be considered rhizomatic.
Is the bringing back of stories a way of imposing order on messiness? I think that stories have always helped us to order chaos. To my mind messiness is not chaos. Messiness is complexity. Even the seemingly simple act of water overflowing is complex, messy. Could messiness be the natural result of rhizomatic life?
I find myself trying to live the life you describe in your final paragraph. It is the over-scaffolding of learning, what James Scott calls, the attempt to create legibility where none need be. My simple, barely scaffolded video may not have worked, but it tried to be rhizomatic as I understand it. It is play on the edge. I am pretty sure it may have messified into chaos for you, but it didn’t for me. I work as a teacher, but I am also a sheep farmer. I am outside every day. If anything is rhizomatic, it is the care and feeding of animals. I am struck by how the simplest of actions has messy ripples baked in. Anything complex is on the edge? This messiness is the natural order of learning, riding the edge between chaos and the ‘legible’.
Thanks for tolerating me, homo ludens.