Playing within the Breaking Points: Schizoanalysis and Social Studies Teaching

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Saturday 1:45 pm - Gold 1
  In Roundtable Session: Posthuman Reimaginings of Teaching and Teacher Education

Abstract

This paper experiments with Deleuze and Guattari’s concept schizoanalysis in social studies teaching. K-12 schools in the US, Canada, and elsewhere are largely characterized by adult-centred hierarchies of authority, the reproduction of hegemonic societal norms, the regulation of teacher-student desire, and a focus on the marked success of individual students. A schizoanalytic approach has the potential to generatively disrupt the normative regulations and territories that constitute life in schools. Forefronting a pedagogical attitude of playful experimentation, this paper uses narrative to represent our enactments of a schizoanalytic approach in a social studies classroom, centring specifically on teacher-student activities that prioritize non-linearity and general rearrangements of classroom subjectivities, relations, norms, and expectations.

Authors

• Peter M Nelson, University of British Columbia

• Jahnek Rai, Lord Tweedsmuir Secondary School