Teaching as Rhizomatic Activity: Negotiating Learning and Practice in the First Year of Teaching

• In Event: The Problem of Linear Thinking in Research on Teacher Learning: Can Complexity Theories Help?

Abstract

Problem and objectives
Recent policy reforms aimed at school accountability have tended to take an oversimplified, technical, one-dimensional view of teaching and educational outcomes (Cochran-Smith, 2013). This perspective is reinforced by resurgence of positivism as the “gold standard” of education research (St. Pierre, 2006), a paradigm that fails to capture the dynamic, ever-changing nature of teaching. In contrast, many researchers today generally characterize teaching as complex, contextually situated phenomena (e.g., Borko & Putnam, 1997; Wideen, Mayer-Smith, & Moon, 1998) that “demand modes of inquiry that are specific to them” (Davis & Sumara, 2006 p. 7). Thus, in an attempt to study the enactment of first-year teaching as complex phenomena, I adopted a theory and methodology informed by rhizomatics (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987), a “political version of complexity theory” (Bonta & Protevi, 2004, p. 9) that emphasizes interrelationships among a multitude of interacting variables in a given social situation.

Theoretical framework and related literature
The present study investigates the processes of enacting teaching practice of three first-year, urban secondary science teachers. An in-depth case study was created for each teacher. Data sources included classroom observations, observation debriefs, semi-structured interviews, field notes, and a researcher journal. The study is framed by rhizomatics (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987), which has been expanded into a methodology based on the properties of the rhizome (e.g., Alvermann, 2000; Waterhouse, 2011). This perspective provides for an analysis of the first-year teacher as part of a larger multiplicity, and a study of teaching practice as emergent processes arising from multiple, ongoing interactions between the teacher, her work, and her environment (Strom, 2013).

Findings and contributions
Rhizomatics provides a relational analysis focused on social processes involving multiple interacting material and non-material elements. Using this framework illuminated three interrelated processes implicated in the construction of first-year teaching practice of participants: modifying and enacting elements of preservice learning within a particular context, negotiating with students for cooperation and participation, and developing a related sense of teacher identity. Rhizomatics also allows for a multiplistic conceptualization of teaching practice—not as an action the teacher takes, but as an amalgam of teacher-students-classroom-school and broader policy context elements, all of which interact to shape what occurs in the classroom on a day-to-day basis. This perspective has implications for teacher learning and the “transfer” of practices learned in teacher preparation programs: the teacher’s preservice learning is only one part of the teacher’s system, which in turn is only one part of the larger classroom system. Further complicating the application of teachers’ preservice learning, the relational investigation of the conflux of structural, contextual, and classroom factors demonstrated that the three teachers were attempting to enact their preservice learning within conditions that served as normalizing forces. Despite these rigid conditions, lines of flight, or moments of teaching in more progressive ways, occurred to varying degrees in each participant’s case. Re-constructed over time, these lines of flight, or breaks from customary urban school practices, have the potential to disrupt mechanisms and discourses of schooling that reproduce inequalities.

Author

• Kathryn Jill Strom, WestEd