Desire Lines and Rhizomatic Learning: Speculating Curriculum in Response to Preservice Teachers’ Digital Agency

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Abstract

Desire Lines and Rhizomatic Learning: Speculating Curriculum in Response to Preservice Teachers’ Digital Agency
In the postdigital era, teachers are increasingly expected to be both competent and inventive in their use of digital technologies. Yet in South Africa, the promises of technology-enhanced learning remain largely unmet, despite policy intentions. This paper draws on a 10-month multimodal, multisited ethnography that explored the digital pedagogical agency of preservice teachers (PSTs) in a Bachelor of Education program. Two questions motivated the inquiry: How do PSTs actually learn to teach with technology? And how does this shape their decision to integrate or not integrate digital tools into their teaching practice?
One of the key findings is that PSTs learn to teach with technology not only through formal coursework, but also through informal, situated, and sometimes subversive practices. Digital agency is assembled in the margins with daring teacher educators, along patchy off-roads with peers, and in the cracks of school placement where mentor teachers permit experimentation. These learning trajectories resemble “desire lines” (Malone, 2019; Myhill, 2004), a concept borrowed from urban geography for educational applications, which refer to the unofficial paths learners create when institutional routes fall short. These lines of flight reveal the limitations of rigid curricular structures and raise questions about what counts as legitimate learning in teacher education.
Responding to this, I adopt a speculative, empirically grounded approach to reimagining curriculum. What might happen if we accounted for PSTs’ desire lines and designed curriculum in ways that remember, rather than forget, their nonlinear pathways, strategies, and practices for learning to teach with technology? Thinking with assemblage theory (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987; DeLanda, 2006) and sociomaterial approaches, and in conversation with Cormier’s (2008) work on rhizomatic learning and Barnett’s (2007) call for pedagogies attuned to supercomplexity, I argue that teacher education must embrace more open, relational, and adaptive forms of curriculum design.
Using diffractive analysis (Mazzei, 2014; Barad, 2007), I engage with data produced through multimodal journals, walking interviews, home visits, and participant observation with 15 PSTs in their final year of study. The analysis shows how their digital learning is nomadic, shifting across platforms, spaces, and relationships, rather than following the linear logic of course syllabi or professional standards. These findings challenge deficit narratives around PSTs’ digital competence and highlight the situated, inventive ways they make sense of educational technology.
This paper contributes to conversations on rethinking teacher education amid technological and social flux. I propose rhizomatic curriculum development as one response to the dynamic terrain PSTs must navigate and shape. Such an approach affirms their emerging digital agency and offers a way to counter institutional misrecognition, fostering pedagogical courage in uncertain times.

Author

• Delecia Davids, Stellenbosch University