cartography and tefl

CARTOGRAPHY AND TEFLDAVID R. COLE

WESTERN SYDNEY UNIVERSITY

WHAT IS CARTOGRAPHY?

Maps themselves are like laboratories where experimentations on tracings are set in interaction. Thus, here the map is opposed to the structure: it can open itself in all its dimensions; it can also be ripped apart; it can be adapted to all kinds of assemblies …

4 DIVISIONS OF THE UNCONSCIOUS DIAGRAM

• The four divisions of the unconscious diagram deal with: 1) cut-outs of existential territories; 2) complexions of material and energetic flows; 3) rhizomes of abstract ideas and 4) constellations of aesthetic refrains.

• Perhaps more tangibly, one could say about these 4 zones that they are — i) the ground beneath your feet; ii) the turbulence of social experience; iii) the blue sky of ideas and; iv) the rhythmic insistence of waking dreams.

EXPERIMENTATIONPut the cartography of Deleuze & Guattari to work in your TEFL classroom …Try new techniquesMake a map of your practice, subjective & objectiveWhat makes your teaching ‘take off’?Every lesson is an egg from which a unique body can grow …

COMPLEXITY

• A prominent theme across the current complexity science literatures is that the linear narrative and the Euclidean image are inadequate to depict the emergence and the behaviour of a complex form. Rather, instances of complex emergence call for webbed, multithreaded tales and nested, scale independent geometries to accommodate forms that can become more intricate, more dense, more pregnant with possibilities.

• Davis, Phelps & Wells (2004, p. 4).

RESEARCH

• What are your research questions?

• What is your research method?

• What is your conceptual framework?

• What are your analytical techniques?

• What data are you going to collect?

• Have you thought of the ethical implications of your study?

• Cartography circumvents and bypasses conventional research because it questions simple representation . However, any research technique can be deployed to make a map …

QUALITATIVE RESEARCH

1.Phenomenology

2.Ethnomethodology

3.Grounded Theory

4.Symbolic Interactionist

5.Interpretivist

6.Critical Social Science

7.Feminism

QUANTITATIVE RESEARCH

1.Testing theories can 'improve ' them, but it cannot 'prove' them

2.Quantitative research needs to be open and open to criticism - which should be at the heart of quantitative research

3.Theories that cannot be tested, re-tested and (based on their falsification) be changed should be dismissed

4.Theory - concept - indicator

WHEN DO YOU USE WHICH METHOD?

MIXED METHODS

• Mixed methods research is more specific in that it includes the mixing of qualitative and quantitative data, methods, methodologies, and/or paradigms in a research study or set of related studies. One could argue that mixed methods research is a special case of multimethod research.

WHAT IS A MAP OF PRACTICE?• External: curriculum, syllabus, policy, social expectations, norms, exam results, qualifications, career

success, community.

• Internal: affects, feelings, atmosphere, feedback, agreements, consensus, purpose.

• Cartography attempts to go beyond this divide and suggests an integrated, collective, complex, mobile becoming (in-between) …

• What elements can you include in the map of your TEFL practice?

• How is the progression of English learning linked to your map?

• What techniques can you use in your mapping?

MIND MAPPING?

Make a mind map of your TEFL practice starting with a specific theme (e.g. teaching communicative competence)What do you notice?What do you emphasize?How does your mind map differ from your colleagues?How can you account for these differences?

CARTOGRAPHY AND WRITING

• All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery. Writing a book is a long, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.George Orwell (1947)

… the book is not an image of the world. It forms a rhizome with the world, there is an aparallel evolution of the book and the world …

NORMALISATION AND EDUCATION• The various forms of education or ‘normalization’ imposed upon an

individual consist in making him or her change points of subjectification, always moving towards a higher, nobler one in closer conformity with the supposed ideal. Then from the point of subjectification issues a subject of enunciation, as a function of a mental reality determined by that point. Then from the subject of enunciation issues a subject of the statement, in other words, a subject bound to statements in conformity with a dominant reality.

• (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988, p.129).

CRITICAL AND CREATIVE THINKING

How does your TEFL practice encourage critical and creative thinking?Can you map how this happens?What are the most productive aspects of your teaching and learning practice? How does the production of thinking link to language learning?

RHIZOME AND DEMOCRACY?

• The division between a hierarchal tree-like democracy or organization and that of the rhizomian democracy or organization not only has political implications in the ideas of “leaderless revolution” and networked dissidence, but also educational implications in how to organize curricula... In this situation, teaching cannot be easily seen as a authoritarian activity, but more like “subversive activity” in which teachers, along with their students, compare information from various sources, negotiate their knowledge and experiences together, and interpret the world …

• Suoranta & Vaden, (2007).

WHERE DOES CARTOGRAPHY LEAD TO?

The end of practice and the start of thought?How political is cartography?What is improvement?What is the ‘bigger picture’ in terms our existences as educators in TEFL institutes?Does cartography necessarily imply a subversive act to the status quo? Who reads our maps?

HOW DOES CARTOGRAPHY WORK?What is the point of cartography as a TEFL practice?Where/when/how should cartography be deployed? Who cares about cartography?How does cartography deal with existing power structures? Does cartography solve any problems?

FURTHER READING• Cole, D.R. (2012). Matter in Motion: The Educational Materialism of Gilles Deleuze. Educational Philosophy and

Theory, Vol. 44. (No. S1), 3 — 17.

• Cole, D.R. (2015). Educational non-philosophy. Educational Philosophy and Theory, Volume 47, Number 10, 1009-1023: DOI: 10.1080/00131857.2015.1036827

• Cole, D.R. (2016). Unearthing the Forces of Globalisation in Educational Research Through Guattari’s Cartographic Method. In D.R. Cole & C. Woodrow (Eds.), Super Dimensions in Globalisation and Education (pp. 145-161). Singapore: Springer.

• Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1988). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia II (Trans, B. Massumi ). London: The Athlone Press.

• Guattari, F. (2013). Schizoanalytic Cartographies (Trans, A. Goffey). London: Bloomsbury.

• Suoranta, Juha; Vaden, Tere (2007). From Social to Socialist Media: The Critical Potential of the Wikiworld. In P. McLaren (Ed.) Critical Pedagogy: Where are We Now?. New York: Peter Lang. ISBN 978-0-8204-8147-0.