The document discusses concepts related to education and complexity theory. It introduces the idea that education should be viewed as a complex adaptive system with many interrelated variables rather than a simple system. It also discusses the work of theorists like Deleuze and Guattari who argued against linear thinking and for understanding systems as interrelated networks. The document suggests that viewing education through a complexity lens could help improve decision-making compared to current practices that oversimplify its dynamics.

1. Schizoanalytic Explorations in Education
‘Metamodelling, then, does not presume ‘to promote didactic program,’ but
rather aims to constitute ‘networks and rhizomes in order to escape the systems
of modelling in which we are entangled and which are in the process of
completely polluting us, head and heart’ (GR132/PIP71)” (Watson, 2009, 9)

2. Some background
Guiding ideas
• Education is a complex adaptive system, i.e. there are many interrelated
variables which do not act in simple cause-effect patterns
• The system has been run as a ‘simple’ system leading to poor decision-making
at a system/political level
• Need to engage with the complexity of education to bring improvement
• Contexts are highly variable – they need to be considered and emphasised

3. • Paul Virilio – development of the theory of
‘dromology’
• Social and political acceleration, particularly
related to technology
• A compression of time as a consequence of
geopolitics, technology and the media
• But acceleration and speed can be damaging
• Neoliberalism uses the data and information
explosion to measure and control increasingly
complex systems
• Virilio argues that acceleration allows for
disinformation and confusion

4. Dromology – an educational genealogy
• The advent of ‘deliverology’ under New Labour. Bringing
data centre stage
• Fetish relating to examination outcomes
• Need to show constant increase in outcomes leading to
quest for the ‘magic bullet’
• Coalition, rapid, systemic change
• Untried and untested change
• Since 1997 rapid move towards marketisation/privatisation –
proxy market mechanisms.

5. • Recourse to ever more complex data systems allows rapid generation of targets and
tracking sheets which become regarded as ‘truth’.
• Learning must be ‘measured’ in every lesson, and progress assessed- sometimes not
even every 50 minutes, but every 15!
• The illusion persists that we can ‘know’ the extent of the learning of every child at the
end of every lesson.
• The desired speed for learning and progress has demanded the space of professional
dialogue and reflection.
• Data systems are ‘fast’ processes – they give the illusion of progress, of learning – and
so the acceleration of education has in part gone hand in hand with ever greater
reliance on numeric data, both internal and external (league tables for example).

6. A different view
• Deleuze and Guattari developed a view of the world as interrelated (rhizomatic)
• Are interested in ideas of change and ‘becoming’
• Argue that too much of the way the world is analysed leads to
simplicity and reductive, ‘linear’ thinking and understanding
• Wide interests, including psychoanalysis, philosophy and cultural
studies

7. What the session isn’t:
- an attempt to prove/code a given thesis concerning education
- an attempt to generate agreement
- a process leading to conclusions (although you can if you want)
What the session is:
- a space/time for exploration and points of departure
- a space/time for discussion/insight/ideas
- a process leading to reflection/questions/ dereterritorialization

8. What is learning?
• Think about your classrooms. How do students learn?
• Create a concept map which summarises the elements of learning and how you think
they fit together.
• From this, create a definition of learning no more than two lines long.

9. Knud Illeris
Three-dimensions.
1) a cognitive dimension focusing on knowledge and skills which
together bring meaning and ability,
2) an emotional or psychodynamic dimension which is comprised of
motivations, feelings and mental energy which together are the
basis for mental balance. (e.g. Self-theories, Carol Dweck)
3) The individual is embedded within an external world, making a
social dimension fundamental to understanding learning. ‘builds up
the sociality of the learner.’ (Illeris, 2003, 400).

10. Four levels of learning.
i. Cumulative - or mechanical learning characterised by isolated formation which is not part of anything else. It is learning
where there is no context of meaning and therefore tends to occur in early life or in special situations such as learning a
string of numbers as a PIN code. As a consequence learning is based merely on recall in situations very similar to those in
which the learning took place.
ii. Assimilative – this is learning by addition, where new information is links to a scheme or pattern which is pre-existing. This
is the predominant form of learning within school subjects which is focused on the building and accrual of new information
building out from that which is already known.
iii. Accommodative – learning by transcendence. This occurs where new information does not fit within a pre-existing scheme
which leads to problems in understanding. However, where such dissonance leads to curiosity and interest mental energy
may be given to breaking down elements of the pre-existing schema, thereby transforming it to allow the integration of the
new information or perspective. This is very similar to the work of Mayer and Land (2003) on threshold concepts and
troublesome knowledge.
iv. Transformative – which is learning that might be termed as being based on personality change ‘and is characterised by
simultaneous restructuring in the cognitive, emotional and the social – societal dimensions,..’ (Illeris, 2003, 402). This may
manifest itself as a crisis-like situation caused by major challenges

11. Barriers to learning
Mislearning can result from misunderstandings or miscommunication.
Non-learning. ‘.. Through everyday consciousness we control our own learning and non-learning in a manner that
seldom involves any direct positioning whilst simultaneously involving a massive defence of the already
acquired understandings and, in the final analysis, our very identity.’ (Illeris, 2003, 403).
Resistance occurs where there is a struggle to understand or complete a desired process and may lead to forms
of resistance. However, such resistance may be an essential starting point for transcendent learning, leading
Illeris (2003, 404) to argue;
‘.. Today it should be an essential qualification of teachers to be able to cope with and even inspire mental
resistance, as precisely such personal competencies which are so much in demand - for example, independence,
responsibility and creativity - are likely to be developed in this way.

12. The striated and smooth spaces of learning
Striated spaces
•
•
•
•
Partitioned and pre-determined movement
Prohibits free movement
Determined by data and routines
Movement is linear
Smooth spaces
•
•
•
•
Lack of restriction
Movement is meandering
An affective and creative space
Seen as occurring on the margins, events and spaces of
deterritorialisation and becoming

13. Generate a diagram or image/drawing which captures the idea of learning. Discuss
your ideas as you do this.
Now take your hexagons and try to develop a schematic version of all your ideas.
Include new ones as you do it if want, discard those you don’t feel fit any longer.
Please take a photo or short explanatory video with a phone once you’ve finished

14. Professionalism
QAA Scotland 2007

15. One view of teaching:
•
•
•
•
Good teaching may be emotionally demanding, but is technically simple
Good teaching is a quick study requiring only moderate intellectual ability
Good teaching is hard at first, but with dedication can be mastered readily
Good teaching should be driven by hard performance data about what works and
where best to target one’s efforts
• Good teaching comes down to enthusiasm, hard work, raw talent, and measureable
results
• Good teaching is often replaceable by online instruction
(Hargreaves and Fullan, 2012, 14)
What Hargreaves and Fullan (2012) call a business capital view of teaching

16. A Dialogic Alternative
An alternative view is that of professional capital
Professional Capital = Human Capital + Social Capital + Decisional Capital
(Hargreaves and Fullan, 2012, 88)
• HC – development of knowledge and skills in teaching
• SC – interaction and social relationships – working in groups
• DC – discretionary judgement (a major characteristic of professionals)
This requires space and time

17. ‘teacher voice’
• Absent all too often – particularly since the introduction
of the SEF
• Many schools have become places of Panopticism
• Oftsed provide the gaoler
• Need to find new ways of finding voices within (striated)
and outside/beyond (smooth) the system
• Teachmeets
• Social media

18. Teacher researcher – an act of deterritorialisation
• A core element of the role of teachers?
• Ways of entering smooth spaces (experimentation) through deterritorialisation,
before reterritorialising into new striations
• Leads to new insights and is part of professionalism

19. What makes a bad teacher?

20. Generate a diagram or image/drawing which captures the idea of ‘the teacher’.
Discuss your ideas as you do this.
Now take your hexagons and add/alter/discard ideas to the emerging schematic you
were developing for learning. Include new ones as you do it if want, discard those
you don’t feel fit any longer.
Please take a photo or short explanatory video with a phone once you’ve finished

22. Classroom as assemblage
Consider the number of factors which need to be thought about merely in asking some questions during a
lesson. A non-exhaustive list might include:
· Which questions to ask
· How those questions relate to what has been taught
· How those questions relate to what has been learned (different for each student)
· What the questions are trying to find out
· Who the questions will be aimed at
· What time of day it is, and how that impacts on individual responses
· ……..

23. Complexity and emergent learning
- internal diversity. Systems need to be able to react in a variety of ways by ensuring that
diversity exists, so that innovative solutions to problems can occur.
- internal redundancy. For diversity to be present there needs to be a level of redundancy,
or duplication, within the system such as shared responsibility and interests. Fosters support
and success at the group level.
- neighbour interactions. Here learning is seen as an interaction of the personal and the
social. This leads to the idea that whilst collective interests emerge and are pursued, this
does not preclude individual agency - individual and collective interests are seen as mutually
supportive. Allows for the emergence of new ideas and perspectives.
- distributed control. To allow the development of rich neighbour interactions, it is essential
that the structure and outcomes of a group’s activity (in the case of classrooms, this means
learning) is not controlled from a single point.
- randomness. The system must allow for the exploration of possibilities, giving opportunity
for personal agency and the internal diversity identified above.
- coherence. Whilst randomness is important, complex systems are not chaotic and require
a level of coherence to orientate the activity of the actors within the system.

24. The problem with observation
- Complex adaptive systems
- Illeris
- How can we ‘observe’ all of this happening?
- Observation is only ever partial.
- Need to have other ways of understanding learning

25. The idiocy of Ofsted
• Sees learning as linear
• Sees learning as visible – simplistic views about engagement
• Learning only occurs in the classroom
• Sees learning as that which can be extrapolated from teaching

26. Generate a diagram or image/drawing which captures the idea of ‘the classroom’.
Discuss your ideas as you do this.
Now take your hexagons and add/alter/discard ideas to the emerging schematic you
were developing for learning. Include new ones as you do it if want, discard those
you don’t feel fit any longer.
Please take a photo or short explanatory video with a phone once you’ve finished

27. A pedagogic literacy
Philosophies/
attitudes/values
Understanding
of research
School &
departmental
cultures
Collegiality
Pedagogic
Literacy
CPD
Professional
skills
Reflective
practice

28. We all have pedagogic literacy
By Hornbaker Chelsi, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service [Public
domain], via Wikimedia Commons
By Littlebird Photography (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

29. Pedagogic literacy – an act of becoming
. . .there is no being beyond becoming, nothing beyond multiplicity; neither multiplicity
nor becoming are appearances or illusions. But neither are there multiple or eternal
realities which would be, in turn, like essences beyond appearance. Multiplicity is the
inseparable manifestation, essential transformation and constant symptom of unity.
Multiplicity is the affirmation of unity; becoming is the affirmation of being
(Deleuze, 1983, 23-24)

30. Teachers and the nomadic war machine
• The State is sedentary, and power is hierarchical (arboreal). It exists in striated spaces.
Territorialised.
• The nomad is in a constant movement of deterritorialisation, fluid, rhizomatic, creating
lines of flight.
• It is not possible to conquer the power of the State head on, war must be covert, fluid,
finding and exploiting the cracks
• Teachers cannot win a direct fight with Ofsted or the government – they have the
power. But through constant thought, reflection – building pedagogic literacy, they can
create an alternative, living in the cracks, eroding the power of the State unseen.

31. Devise a timeline of you as a teacher. Include any information you like, but could
be events, promotions, training, moments of transformation (formal and informal)

32. Generate a diagram or image/drawing which captures the idea of ‘pedagogy’.
Discuss your ideas as you do this.
Now take your hexagons and add/alter/discard ideas to the emerging schematic you
were developing for learning. Include new ones as you do it if want, discard those
you don’t feel fit any longer.
Please take a photo or short explanatory video with a phone once you’ve finished

33. On the two A3 sheets:
Sheet 1: questions, insights, ideas (conclusions – if you honestly believe there are any). Please include how you think
Independent Thinking might relate to these issues and begin to question and address them.
Sheet 2: Draw a diagram or other image which captures (at least in part) your thinking