Minor Pedagogy: A Pedagogy of the Ontological Turn

• In Event: What Pedagogies Produce: Teaching Responsible/Response(able) Qualitative Inquiry

Abstract

Objectives or purposes
In our initial work, we came together to write about everyday pedagogical experiences of our time together as advisor and advisee in what we named a minor pedagogy. In this paper, we re/turn our focus to the concept of a minor pedagogy, as developed from minor inquiry (Author 2, 2017; Author 2 & Author 1, 2020). A minor pedagogy is the struggle to reach the surface at which the assemblages that structure our reality may become differently. It is at this surface of teaching-learning that transformings occur. These ontological transformers present a blurring of the surface at which affective qualities that escape namings are formed, as well as entanglements that produce our own namings individuate. This blurring, or struggle, or becoming, is what we conceive of as a minor pedagogy (Author 2 & Author 1, 2020). Our inquiry here takes on two central questions: what are the ontological stakes of a minor pedagogy, and how might we rethink agency such that we might incite such becomings?

Theoretical perspectives
This paper thinks with a collection of poststructural theorists including Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1975/1986; 1980/1987), Stefano Harney and Fred Moten (2013), Erin Manning (2016; 2017), and Kathleen Stewart (2007) to seek the ontogenetic within a minor pedagogy. In our conception of a minor pedagogy that emerges in-between these authors and these doings, we focus on the ontogenetic, or a minor pedagogy that transforms reality.

Modes and objects of inquiry
This paper utilizes a thinking with theory (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012) approach to inquiry. While this is primarily a theoretical paper, we read theory through artifacts from our experiences in formal pedagogical environments. Pedagogy is an act of transformation neither captured nor capturable by formal educational environments, though we keep to these for narrative clarity. Our formal pedagogical environments are colleges of education in the United States, where pedagogy is a commodity bought and sold by vendors and philanthrocapitalists (Miller & Morphew, 2017; Simon, 2015) and delimited by racist and sexist quality metrics (ASA, 2019). It is a location where many students agitate for social change, and where many administrators purchase the time of consultants to placate these desires (Romeo & Tewksbury, 2020; England & Purcell, 2020). In this formal environment, what tools might a minor pedagogy give for critique and ontological creation (Braidotti, 2012)?

Findings and significance
We narrate the ontological transformation of a minor pedagogy by attending and orienting to pedagogical moments and affects at the surface of ourselves and the world (Manning, 2017; Stewart, 2007). We present singular moments of change as a means to incite a posthuman agential stance. We add to conversations on both the ontological turn in education and pedagogy in higher education in a landscape wherein academic capitalism (Slaughter & Rhodes, 2004) has been put into hyperdrive with shock doctrine COVID responses and outright fascism from local and federal institutions (Klein, 2008). A minor pedagogy provides provocations to resist becoming constituted by academic capitalism, pandemic shocks, and fascism in resisting to become otherwise.

Authors

• Laura Elizabeth Smithers, Old Dominion University

• Lisa A. Mazzei, University of Oregon