CHAPTER 1

EDUCATIONAL THEORY AND TECHNOLOGY

INTRODUCTION

Any theory of education has some connection to the thoughts and/or ideas that constitute it. In other words, education is what it is on the grounds of the reasons that guide the notion of education. In a similar way, educational technology is also underscored by the reasons for its use. Now, much of what is happening in primary education involves socialising students into knowledge of disciplines and subjects, whereas secondary and higher education involve initiating (individuating) students into the disciplines with the aim to provoke their critical thoughts in and about such education. Socialising students involves familiarising them with particular truth claims, whereas initiating them relies on provoking their critical thoughts to analyse and question such particular claims (Rorty, 1999, pp. 117–118). Similarly, educational technology is constituted by reasons such as providing opportunities for students to assimilate and discern (socialisation), reflect upon and question, and to ‘push our understandings of things into previously unimagined regions’ (individuation) (Smeyers & Depaepe, 2007, p. 7). This brings us to a discussion of three prominent educational theories that underscore the understandings of educational technology as espoused in this book.

TOWARDS A DELEUZO-GUATTARIAN NOTION OF EDUCATIONAL TECHNOLOGY

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1987, p. xiv) use the metaphor of a plateau to describe an intensive state of thought that can be reactivated or injected into other activities. And, progressing from one plateau at a particular level to other plateaus at alternate levels is not linear (or in a straight line), but rhizomatic (Morss, 2000, p. 193). For Deleuze and Guattari (1987, p. 16), education that is firmly rooted or anchored in foundational – that is, disciplinary and reasoned – thought is ‘arborescent’ or hierarchical in the sense that education is enacted through a hierarchical superior. For instance, students assimilate predetermined disciplinary content from teachers ‘along preestablished paths’ and students ‘can never get beyond’ what they acquired or are expected to acquire (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 16). In a way, education along the ‘path’ of ‘arborescent’ thought is a form of socialisation that signifies a unidirectional relationship between teachers and students. In other words, educational technology, following ‘arborescent’ thought, encourages interpretations and exchanges between teachers and students that are fixed along a linear and regulated path determined by what is said and heard. 1 Chapter 1

In contrast, rhizomatic education is different from linear, unidirectional thought and, according to Deleuze and Guattari (1987, p. 7) ‘the rhizome itself assumes very diverse forms, from ramified surface extension in all directions to concretion into bulbs and tubers … the rhizome includes the best and the worst: potato and couchgrass, or the weed’. The rhizome, ‘[a subterranean root-like stem] lies upon or slightly under the surface, ready to produce a vertical stem when the opportunity arises’ (Morss, 2000, p. 193). Thus, rhizomatic education involves a form of communication that builds upon a network of interconnections with no central organisation. Understanding education as rhizomatic involves mapping the paths of meanings or lines of flight [new shoots and rootlets] that people take to form linkages (Honan, 2004, p. 269). As Alvermann (2000, p. 118) explains, rhizomatic education is about ‘looking for middles, rather than beginnings and endings, [which] makes it possible to decenter key linkages and find new ones, not by combining old ones in new ways, but by remaining open to the proliferation of ruptures and discontinuities that in turn create other linkages’. Thus, rhizomatic education, through ‘starting anywhere’, looks for middles and disrupts the taken-for-granted understanding of linear education. Students and teachers who are engaging rhizomatically are ‘constantly open to new connections and alternative possibilities’ (Le Grange, 2011, p. 748). They (students and teachers) would map out new possibilities (‘vectors of escape’) as they endeavour to move beyond the confines of linear exchanges of information. In a way, educational technology is a practice that engenders new possibilities for pedagogic encounters of a rhizomatic kind. Whereas disciplined, reasoned and communicative education is linear, hierarchical (‘arborescent’) and ‘striated’ (strictly bounded and confining), rhizomatic education is chaotic and ‘smooth’ (that is, unrestricted, open and dynamic) (Ringrose, 2011, p. 602). Rhizomatic education allows students and teachers to constantly ‘move between deterritorialisation – freeing ourselves from the restrictions and boundaries of controlled striated spaces – and reterritorialisation – repositioning ourselves within new regimes of striated spaces’ (Tamboukou, 2008, p. 360). Territorialisation describes when energy is captured and striated in specific space/time contexts, whereas deterritorialisation is when energy is smooth and momentarily escapes or moves outside normative strata and reterritorialisation describes processes of recuperation of those ruptures (Ringrose, 2011, p. 603). If, for example, one engages in deterritorialised and reterritorialised education, one maps ‘vectors of escape’ (in relation to freeing one’s thoughts from bounded restrictions) and ‘lines of flight’ (such as propelling one’s thoughts about something in multiple and unrestricted directions) that will rupture established and hardened striated thoughts, thus giving rise to ‘assemblages’. For Deleuze and Guattari (1987, p. 145), [t]he assemblage has two poles or vectors: one vector is oriented towards the strata, upon which it distributes territorialities, relative deterritorializations, reterritorializations; the other is oriented toward the plane of consistency or

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