Mapping Lines of Possibility in Test-Driven Times: Moments of Destabilization With To Kill a Mockingbird, Lord of the Flies, and Selected Poetry

• In Event: 28.072 - Literary Study as Transformative Practice in a Post-Truth Age

Abstract

Objectives: Educational great, Maxine Greene (1978) once expressed that "students must be enabled, at whatever stages they find themselves to be, to encounter curriculum as possibility." This visual-verbal presentation is an endeavor to map possibility through the use of Deleuze-Guattarian (1987) lines and the rhizomatic assemblage of classroom entanglements. As an intra-active map, this poster will showcase lines of flight as they stray from the stability of rigid patterns of learning and the security of right answers and venture out into the wide-open world of possibility.

Theoretical Perspectives: This project utilizes two theoretical frames: Rosenblatt's (1995) reader-response theory and Deleuze and Guattari's (1987) concepts of literature as rhizomatic assemblage and nomadic thought through the mapping of lines. Through these perspectives, I seek to expose efferent and aesthetic reading experiences by mapping textual encounters where students and teachers stumble out of the routine (stability) and into the realm of possibility (destabilization). These perspectives necessitate the tearing down of subject/object binaries so that everything may be explored as in-relation and intra-active. This analysis, though begun in traditional qualitative methods, aims forward with the shared desire for an acceptance of "research to come as difference instead of repetition" (St. Pierre, 2016).

Modes of Inquiry: This research followed a high school ELA teacher during an entire year in which she taught two semesters of ninth grade English. The study focuses on her classroom's engagement with texts including To Kill a Mockingbird (Lee, 1960), Lord of the Flies (Golding, 1954), and selected poems. Research questions include: What contributes to the presence and absence of "curriculum as possibility," posed as lines of flight? How do students and teachers navigate these moments, and in what ways are they impacted? I also examine ways that these moments reroute classroom assemblages via the transmission of intensities and becomings made possible through the plugging in of literature (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). Post-structural modes of inquiry make "visible relations among individual subjects, discourse, social practice as these are lived out in those everyday practices through which the real world is constituted" (Davies, 2014).

Data Production: The data informing this study include: audio and video recordings of class activities, student artifacts, teacher artifacts, photographs, interviews with students and the teacher, fieldnotes, student quick-writes, and communications communication between researcher and teacher.

Outcomes: Through mapping, I found that aesthetic readings abound when teachers stray from the molar and molecular lines found in routine activities and the security of "right" answers. Curriculum is encountered as possibility when teachers create opportunities for questioning, creativity, and vulnerability. This poster will highlight moments of destabilization and showcase examples of curriculum as possibility.

Scholarly Significance: In today's grade-driven and test-ridden classroom, literature is often reduced to its standard-covering ability. Literature's ability to create avenues for discussion of topics like racism, bullying, and difference-being difficult to both predict and assess-is quelled. This inquiry demonstrates the relationships between creativity, vulnerability, and possibility in the classroom and the importance of aesthetic reading experiences in the becoming of social-justice minded students.

Author

• Anne Murray, University of Alabama