2016 Adult Education Research Conference

1. MICHAEL DILLON, ED.D.
CENTRAL MICHIGAN UNIVERSITY
2016 ADULT EDUCATION RESEARCH CONFERENCE
Learning Happens: Incorporating a
Rhizomatic Perspective into Teaching
and Learning

2. • Traditional conceptions of learning
• Rhizomatic perspective of Adult Learning
• Mapping learning with a Rhizomatic Perspective
Our line of flight today:

3. Traditional conceptions of learning
https://pixabay.com/en/users/geralt-9301/
Transformative
Situated
Experiential
Etc.

4. Traditional conceptions of learning
• Learning as a linear activity.
• Compartmentalization and exclusion of certain features of
opposing theories.
• “Adjective-plus-learning-theory” (Kang, 2007).
• Points towards a certainty and universality in adult learning.

5. Traditional conceptions of learning
Example:
Kolb’s (1984) Learning Cycle
Reflection/
Meaning
Integration/
Conclusions
Guides Future
Decisions
Experience

6. Activity: Sketch a recent learning moment

7. Rhizomatic Perspective of Adult Learning
• A rhizome is both a root and a stem since it
pushes out roots and shoots.
• Sprouts or pops up and makes connections with
whatever is available.
• Has no fixed departure and return points.
• Pursues heterogeneity, anti-hierarchical.
• Starts up again on an old line or elsewhere when
broken apart.

8. Rhizomatic Perspective of Adult Learning
• Post-Modern versus Positivist.
• Ontology of Becoming versus Being.
• Complex Connected Networks versus Relations among
Variables.
• Mapping versus Tracing.
• Lines of Flight versus Lines of Articulation.

9. • “Lines of flight” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) have no beginning or
ending - can help produce a tentative map of learning.
• Tracing LoF is a creative force rather than a reductive one.
• Experimentation with the real.
• Moments of Rupture and Capture.
• Depicting one of the many middles.
Tracing lines of flight

10. • Disclosing potential organizations of reality.
• Malleable, untangling of knots.
• Mapping and tracing again.
Tracing lines of flight

11. Tracing lines of flight
Well, probably some forty years of being out
here. Just experience and being in situations with
so-called leaders, learning from the worst,
learning from the best and somehow taking even
something from the worst and saying, ‘I know I
don’t want to do that.

12. Tracing lines of flight
learning from the worst, learning
from the best
Leadership
Style
Exemplary
behaviors

13. • Our “classrooms”
• Analyzing learning (qualitative)
• Our learning
• Where will your lines of flight lead you today?
Where to next?

14. de Freitas, E. (2012). The classroom as rhizome new strategies for diagramming knotted
interactions. Qualitative Inquiry, 18(7), 557-570.
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, R (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (B. Massumi, Trans.).
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. (Original work published1980).
Dillon, M. (2013). Grassroots community leaders as a community of practice: Utilizing learning and
enduring disruptive change (Order No. 3578627). Available from ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Full
Text; ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. (1501432837). Retrieved from
http://search.proquest.com/docview/1501432837?accountid=34899.
Kang, D. (2007). Rhizoactivity: Toward a postmodern theory of lifelong learning. Adult Education Quarterly,
57(3), 205.
Kolb, D. A. (1984). Experiential learning: Experience as the source of learning and development. Endlewood
Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Martin, A. D., & Kamberelis, G. (2013). Mapping not tracing: qualitative educational research with political
teeth. International journal of qualitative studies in education, 26(6), 668-679.
References