#rhizomatic learning

So from September 2015 to August 2016, I had the honor to co-create and coordinate OpenLab (w/ Jim Brady), a student-driven learning course in Design Academy Eindhoven (DAE).

We create this because we believe adaptability is an essential asset for a creative, and this asset can be learnt from a design school where eclectic knowledge is already so abondant amongst students.

We started up 11, we ended up 17 peers. We hired our own mentors, we defined our own goals and assessments, curated 4 exhibitions, initiated collaboration with different schools and institutions, learnt how to deal with smaller and larger creative groups. It has been a social experiment.  It set up a mindset. It is about being fully responsible for our own learning, how to deal with it and incorporate it in daily life, but also creative process.

This was a pioneering step within DAE and we are proud and grateful of what has been done. I personally feel blessed of having put so much energy and time in this project, and having received support. Yes, along the process we received more and more support from school. Though such organic process requires a lot of sensitivity and communication to proceed. This is what is been working on right now for the next years in order to place such mindset in a dedicated course to explore.

This is my first active project in Education and I hope the first of an amazing adventure.

This makes me think of the night sky. We humans look at the panoply of stars, and we select a few with which to structure constellations, pictures and stories. Because from our vantage point the stars seem to shift so slowly — in our lifetimes hardly at all — then we are seduced into thinking that our pictures and stories are eternal. Modern astro-physics has taught us better. The rhizome of the universe is shifting at incredible speeds constantly, and eventually our treasured stories and pictures will no longer map well to reality. The stars will have moved. The challenge of the rhizome is to look afresh at those stars and to create new stories and new pictures. That's what the rhizome does.

Reductionism wants to disentangle the single noodle of my life, stretch it out on an examination tray, name and number the parts, establish the tidy sequences of cause and effect, and finally declare that it understands me. And here's the thing: it will understand a great deal about me that could not have been understood so easily while I was tangled up in the plate of spaghetti. But it will also lose a great deal, if not most, of the contours, the arcs, the twists and turns, the connections and intersections, the forces and counterforces that truly make my life interesting to me, if not to others. Stretched out on the examination table, washed clean of sauce, separated from all the other noodles, and allowed to harden, the noodle of my life will be reduced to the bare facts. Boring. Reductionism reveals nicely what about me is like other spaghetti noodles, but it hardly captures the unique contours that make me interesting, or me.

What is needed is a model of knowledge acquisition that accounts for socially constructed, negotiated knowledge. In such a model, the community is not the path to understanding or accessing the curriculum; rather, the community is the curriculum.

In the rhizomatic model of learning, curriculum is not driven by predefined inputs from experts; it is constructed and negotiated in real time by the contributions of those engaged in the learning process. This community acts as the curriculum, spontaneously shaping, constructing, and reconstructing itself and the subject of its learning in the same way that the rhizome responds to changing environmental conditions.

Community as curriculum is not meant as a simple alternative to the package version of learning. It is, rather, meant to point to the learning that takes place on top of that model and to point to the strategies for continuing learning throughout a career. There is a base amount of knowledge that is required to be able to enter a community, and there are methods for acquiring the specific kinds of literacy needed to learn within a specific community. A learner acquires basic forms of literacy and associates with different peer groups. Networks begin to form and, occasionally, communities develop. Knowledge is created and sometimes discarded as the community interacts. Knowledge does not develop and spread from and through concentric circles. There are no “plastics” to be learned and no canon to consult to ensure that a new skill has been acquired. Knowledge is a rhizome, a snapshot of interconnected ties in constant flux that is evaluated by its success in context.

Just spent an early Saturday morning with Dave Cormier's article Rhizomatic Education : Community as Curriculum. I'm currently writing an article about rhizomatic learning. Dave's article has some interesting points or expressions as "The living curriculum of an active community is a map that is always "detachable, connectible, reversible, modifiable, and has multiple entryways and exits".