Reconceptualizing Child and Childhood in Education: A Deleuzian Perspective

• In Event: Multiplicities of Multiplicities: Exploring Deleuze and Guattari Across Educational Contexts

Abstract

This paper interrogates how educators and curriculum theorists might begin re-conceptualizing our understanding of child/childhood from a Deleuzian perspective. Today, both schooling and childhood are mutually reinforcing classificatory schemes and social practices. The “child” is a taken-for-granted subject central to the structure of the educational field. While much educational work flows around assumptions about children and their development, what is meant by being a “child” is not debated (Baker,1998). Further, reform efforts continue to express how children should be cared for, neglecting the impact of the discourse which structures the ‘child’ may have on ideas of ‘care,’ ‘reform,’ and ‘development’ in the first place (Baker, 1998).

This paper will explore the new understanding of child from two aspects. First, based on a Deleuzian perspective of time, which is nonlinear and anti-genealogical, childhood is not the period before adulthood; Second, drawing from Deleuze & Guattari’s (1987) concepts of “becoming” and “body without organs” (BwO), the consequence of the becoming of child is not adult; instead, it is the “contemporaneousness” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p.164) of the adult and child.

The major theoretical framework of this paper is post-structuralism, especially Deleuze & Guattari (1987) and Biesta (1998). Deleuze’s notion of the fold offers an escape from the trapped, chained or dead subject. “Education is commonly understood as an interaction between subjects”, as Biesta (1998) points out, “an interaction between the educator, who already is a subject, and the child, who has to become a subject by means of the pedagogical activities of the educator”. However, if we tie Deleuze and Guattari’s(1987) concept of “body without organs(BwO)” to childhood,

The BwO is a childhood block, a becoming, the opposite of a childhood memory.

It is not the child ‘before’ the adult, or the mother ‘before’ the child: it is the strict contemporaneousness of the adult, of the adult and the child, their map of comparative densities and intensities, and all of the variations on that map. (p. 164)

My second set of theoretical frameworks is drawing on Baker’s method of “historical choreography” or “dancing history” (2001) in re-thinking the concept of child from the view of developmental psychology, which has become the expert discipline in institutionally asserting what Deleuze calls “ways of existing” (Peters, 1998, p. 8).

In conclusion, childhood is not the period of the preparation for adulthood; And the growing of child is always in the process of becoming, not in the process of becoming adult, but at the strict contemporaneousness of the adult and child. Using Deleuze & Guattari’s(1987) concept, the child is the “rhizome”: “the rhizome is reducible neither to the One nor the multiple. … it has neither beginning nor end, but always a middle (milieu) from which it grows and which it overspills” (p.21).

Reconceptualizing children’s becoming within educational contexts interrupting taken-for-granted notions of “childhood”, “development”, and “grown up” as developmental theorists of child would have us believe; In addition, the research would contribute to the emerging post-human conversation within early childhood education and childhood studies.

Author

• Shaofei Han, Louisiana State University