Minor Pedagogy: Ontogenetic Orientations

• In Event: Ontologies of Promise: Cultivating Equity

Abstract

Objectives
1. Present the concept of a minor pedagogy as an extension of Deleuze & Guattari’s concept minor literature.
2. Conceptualize minor pedagogy as ontogenetic.
3. Discuss pedagogy as an orientation/attunement to affect.
4. Examine the stakes of pedagogy as ontological transformation.

Perspective(s) or theoretical framework
Deleuze and Guattari discuss the problem of expression in both A Thousand Plateaus (1987) and Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (1986). In Kafka, they frame the problem thus: “How many people today live in a language that is not their own?...and know poorly the major language they are forced to serve?“ (p. 19). In differentiating a minor literature from a major language, they present three characteristics: “...the deterritorialization of language, the connection of the individual to a political immediacy, and the collective assemblage of enunciation” (p. 18).

A minor inquiry, as developed by Mazzei (2017), brings the concept of a minor literature into the social sciences. For Mazzei (2017), “In a minor inquiry, the minimum real unit is the assemblage. It is always an assemblage that produces utterances.” Building on both Deleuze and Guattari, and Mazzei, we propose what we name a minor pedagogy in a reorienting that considers the following questions: What do pedagogies produce? What does a concept like minor pedagogy add to this discussion? What are the implications for cultivating equity if pedagogy is conceived as an act of ontological transformation?

Methods, techniques, or modes of inquiry
Drawing on previous work, both collective and solo, this paper presents a theoretical engagement with a reorientation to what constitutes pedagogy. It further considers pedagogy not as a doing, but as being. In other words, as an act of everyday ontogeneisis.

Data sources, evidence, objects, or materials
1. Previous teaching/learning together
2. Enactments in our research contexts
3. Attempts at thinking/engaging pedagogy differently

Warrants for arguments/point of view
This paper, along with others in this session, directly take up the challenge offered by the theme for the 2021 Annual Meeting, “Cultivating Equitable Education Systems for the 21st Century.” In this time of myriad challenges, opportunities, and crisis -- what Deleuze describes as “situations which we no longer know how to react to, in spaces which we no longer know how to describe” (Deleuze, 1989, p. xi), the imperative to think with (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012) in ways that unsettle habituated notions are of paramount importance. Prompted by St. Pierre (2021), we go to concepts that help re-orient thinking in order to allow us to “think differently” toward a pedagogy that might be more equitable and just.

Scientific or scholarly significance of the study or work
How many of us have been produced through educational systems where the project of education is to have us inhabit and serve languages that are not our own, no longer our own, not yet our own? Here, we experiment with a pedagogy that unsettles the habitual and recenters acts of creation through an attunement to affect.

Authors

• Laura Elizabeth Smithers, University of Nevada - Reno

• Lisa A. Mazzei, University of Oregon