Rhizomatic Inquiry

Developing a Complex Portrait of Content Teaching for Multilingual Learners via Nonlinear Theoretical Understandings

“…Despite the immense complexity of teacher development, dominant research and policy perspectives in this area largely remain reductionist and transactional, positioning the teacher as an autonomous actor/empty vessel who takes her learning from her preservice instruction or a professional development (PD) activity and merely transfers it into classroom practice (Opfer & Pedder, 2011; Strom, 2015). However, an emerging body of literature in teacher education reframes teacher learning and practice as emergent phenomena (Ell et al, 2017; Strom, Martin, & Villegas, 2018) that are jointly constructed from the negotiations of multiple situated elements (Anderson & Stillman, 2010; Gatti, 2016), which include not just the teacher and her students but also other classroom-, school-, district-, and policy-level factors (Strom, 2015; Strom & Martin, 2017). To frame and interpret this review of literature, we draw on insights from rhizomatics (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987; Strom, 2015), a critical theory of complexity that provides important conceptual tools for developing a different ontological perspective of teaching and learning about teaching (and the relationship between the two).…”

“…One of the key concepts of rhizomatics, assemblage , provides an analytic apparatus to examine teaching phenomena from a complex, critical lens (Strom, 2015; Strom & Martin, 2017). An assemblage is a multiplicity, or a constellation of elements that includes people, things, spaces, ideas, sets of circumstances, histories, power relations, and so on.…”

Disrupting course design in online CALL teacher education: An experimentation

“…Although schools may seem open to innovations, so-called successful and innovative teaching practices are often associated with control, behavioural norms, standards, and methodologies. Within these programmes, teachers’ behaviours are observed and analysed through sets of criteria that determine whether those teachers perform as standards assume they should be performing (Strom and Martin, 2017). Consequently, teachers continue ‘to be bound by the Platonic tenets of “image-copy,” or recognition and representation, that defines so much of schoolwork’ (Roy, 2003: 5).…”

“…Consequently, teachers continue ‘to be bound by the Platonic tenets of “image-copy,” or recognition and representation, that defines so much of schoolwork’ (Roy, 2003: 5). Teachers also often feel ill equipped to teach with(in) the disorder, unpredictability, and ambiguity of a classroom, realizing that what they learned in their teacher education programmes cannot be reproduced (Strom, 2015; Strom and Martin, 2017).…”

“…Instead, it emphasizes the ambiguous and messy thought processes and practices (Teal, 2010) in L2 teacher education in CALL and in the associated research and does so to provide teachers with the means to work with(in) the uncertainty, messiness, and creativity of technology teaching in their classrooms. In that regard, Deleuze and Guattari’s ontology aids in the reconsideration of teacher educators and researchers’ thinking and practices, as in CALL (Strom and Martin, 2017; Teal, 2010; Bangou, forthcoming).…”