Diana Masny

Rhizoanalytic Pathways in Qualitative Research

This article deploys the concept of rhizoanalysis in order to disrupt, to think, and to do qualitative research differently. Rhizoanalysis is a concept created out of Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) concept of the rhizome. The article explores what rhizoanalysis can do, how it functions, and what it produces in relation to research on literacies, in particular multiple literacies theory (MLT). The article is a rhizome having multiple entries: concept creation, rhizoanalysis the concept, an introduction to MLT followed by a detailed presentation of a rhizoanalytic study on conceptualizing writing systems in multilingual children. The article exits with an intermezzo and a potential becoming of rhizoanalysis as an approach to qualitative inquiry.

Mapping Multiple Literacies: an Introduction to Deleuzian Literacy Studies

Mapping Multiple Literacies brings together the latest theory and research in the fields of literacy study and European philosophy, Multiple Literacies Theory (MLT) and the philosophical work of Gilles Deleuze. It frames the process of becoming literate as a fluid process involving multiple modes of presentation, and explains these processes in terms of making maps of our social lives and ways of doing things together. nFor Deleuze, language acquisition is a social activity of which we are a part, but only one part amongst many others. nMasny and Cole draw on Deleuzes thinking to expand the repertoires of literacy research and understanding. They outline how we can understand literacy as a social activity and map the ways in which becoming literate may take hold and transform communities. The chapters in this book weave together theory, data and practice to open up a creative new area of literacy studies and to provoke vigorous debate about the sociology of literacy.

Weaving Multiple Literacies: Somali Children and Their Teachers in the Context of School Culture.

This ethnographic case study examines the relationship between literacies, school and community cultures by exploring literacy events as they unfold for Somali children in an elementary school. Field notes and interviews involving Somali and school community members are analysed based on the view that literacies are enmeshed in cultural, racial and religious differences. Validating these differences within school culture is important so that children, instead of experiencing marginalisation, can regain voice, power and self-worth. The data provide examples that legitimate childrens personal and communal histories in the classroom. By proposing a pedagogy of difference, educators can chart possibilities for inclusion by weaving multiples literacies in school culture.

Multiple Literacies Theory: Exploring Futures

This article focuses on the contributions of philosophy, art and science to education through the conceptual, theoretical, and methodological usefulness of a Deleuze–Guattarian conceptual framework that informs multiple literacies theory (MLT). Education lends itself to Deleuzes notion of connecting and creating through philosophy, art and science. How do they come together and connect in education and with MLT? Accordingly the first part focuses on some key concepts related to MLT. The second part presents MLT. The third part centres on vignettes from a two-year study involving multilingual children acquiring multiple writing systems simultaneously. The fourth part brings together possible lines of flight as rhizomatic connections in order to consider what MLT offers as a concept for educational future.

Linguistic awareness and writing: Exploring the relationship with language awareness

This paper explores the inter‐relationships between linguistic awareness and language awareness with regard to second‐language teaching and learning. In the second‐language classroom, language awareness, as an interface mechanism, promotes heightened awareness of language forms between the first language (L1) and the target language (TL) and thereby assists language learning. Linguistic awareness refers to the learners’ reflection on and manipulation of the language code. This paper proposes that findings from research studies on linguistic awareness can inform practices in language awareness. One such study is provided here as an example. This particular study examines the relationship between linguistic awareness and writing in two groups of college students. In one group, data were collected in French (L1) and in English (L2). In the second group, data were collected in English (L1). Linguistic awareness was measured by means of two tasks: acceptability judgements and mazed‐reading. The writing task, a...

Education and the politics of becoming

1. Introduction: Education and the politics of becoming David R. Cole and Diana Masny 2. Travelling and sticky affects: Exploring teens and sexualized cyberbullying through a Butlerian-Deleuzian-Guattarian lens Jette Kofoed and Jessica Ringrose 3. Becoming-teacher: Encounters with the Other in teacher education Stephen Marble 4. Latino families becoming-literate in Australia: Deleuze, literacy and the politics of immigration David R. Cole 5. Living, learning, loving: Constructing a new ethics of integration in education Inna Semetsky 6. Its all about relationships: Hesitation, friendship and pedagogical assemblage Sam Seller 7. Uprooting music education pedagogies and curricula: Becoming-musician and the Deleuzian refrain Elizabeth Gould 8. Policy prolepsis in education: Encounters, becomings, and phantasms P. Taylor Webb and Kalervo N. Gulson 9. Grotesque gestures or sensuous signs? Rethinking notions of apprenticeship in early childhood education Linda Knight 10. Multiple Literacies Theory: Discourse, sensation, resonance and becoming Diana Masny 11. We dont believe media anymore: Mapping critical literacies in an adult immigrant language classroom Monica Waterhouse 12. Bon mots for bad thoughts Jason J. Wallin

Problematizing Qualitative Research Reading a Data Assemblage With Rhizoanalysis

This article problematizes the concept of data and experiments with rhizoanalysis to think data in terms of problems, questions, and concept creation. At issue is representation and interpretation, foundational blocks of qualitative research that are incommensurate with rhizoanalysis and post-qualitative research. Deleuze has problematized this issue through questions and experimentation within an asymmetrical world filled with paradoxes that gave rise to concept creation of sense and nonsense. In the Logic of Sense, sense is the event itself. Sense emerges out of nonsense. In this article, representation and interpretation are deterritorialized (virtual becoming) and reterritorialized (actualized) as nonsense–sense and palpation. Palpation is a concept that refers to data experienced indirectly. Rhizoanalysis is deployed because of its non-hierarchical and non-linear approach to data. Multiple Literacies Theory follows a similar path. It releases school-based literacy from its privileged rank to engage reading in multiplicitous and heterogeneous rhizomatic connections. Reading a data assemblage is untimely and not pre-given. It plugs into Multiple Literacies Theory, an analytic approach to reading an assemblage in rhizoanalysis. Reading a data assemblage is explored in a study on how writing systems in multilingual children function and what writing systems produce through affect. A rhizomatic approach is proposed and constituted through a research assemblage whose differential elements enter into a relationality of affect that flows through and transforms the assemblage. It produces a movement that dissolves dualisms in favor of multiplicity, uncertainty, and the untimely. It decenters the cogito human, maps assemblages, and extends experiences of a material world. Posing problems and questions open paths to a future yet to become.

Multiple Literacies Theory: Discourse, Sensation, Resonance and Becoming.

This thematic issue on education and the politics of becoming focuses on how a Multiple Literacies Theory (MLT) plugs into practice in education. MLT does this by creating an assemblage between discourse, text, resonance and sensations. What does this produce? Becoming AND how one might live are the product of an assemblage (May, 2005; Semetsky, 2003). In this paper, MLT is the approach that explores the connection between educational theory and practice through the lens of an empirical study of multilingual children acquiring multiple writing systems simultaneously. The introduction explicates discourse, text, resonance, sensation and becoming. The second section introduces certain Deleuzian concepts that plug into MLT. The third section serves as an introduction to MLT. The fourth section is devoted to the study by way of a rhizoanalysis. Finally, drawing on the concept of the rhizome, this article exits with potential lines of flight opened by MLT. These are becomings which highlight the significance of this work in terms of transforming not only how literacies are conceptualized, especially in minority language contexts, but also how one might live.

Meta‐knowledge, critical literacy and minority language education: The case of Franco‐Ontarian student teachers 1

This paper reflects on the position of Franco‐Ontarians studying to become French‐medium teachers. They are a minority, subordinate to the English‐speaking population, and in many ways subordinate within the francophone community, to an elite that tends to marginalise and devalue certain forms of literacy and proficiency in their own language. These experiences are shared by many Franco‐Ontarians in their own community. Using contrasts between primary (home‐based) and secondary discourses, and between teaching‐as‐apprenticeship and teaching‐as‐learning, the notions of meta‐knowledge and critical literacy are introduced in a postmodern approach to the problem. In the same way that Franco‐Ontarians dropped out of English language secondary schools to avoid forms of ‘literacy’ that were tantamount to cultural assimilation, student teachers take up cultures of silence as a means of resistance to marginalisation and devaluation. A ‘pedagogy of difference’ in minority language education is proposed as a way out...

Capitalism, Immigration, Language and Literacy: Mapping a Politicized Reading of a Policy Assemblage.

Immigration for Australia and Canada is critical to sustain economic growth. Each country’s immigration policy stems from its vision of a nation that includes the role of language and literacy and a program of economic outcomes. While the authors acknowledge that economic integration through employment dominates immigration policies in Canada and Australia, the goal of this article is to critically examine and map how language and literacies in an immigration policy are positioned in relation to economic outcomes in neo-liberal times. Questions flowing from the article’s objective are: what does immigration produce, and what is its effect on how language and literacies are legitimated? The questions explore how capitalism decodes immigration, language and literacy, and in turn how immigration, language and literacies reterritorialize/reconfigure in the context of human and economic capital. These questions are taken up in an assemblage that includes Deleuze and Guattari’s writings on capitalism and deploys multiple literacies theory to read capitalism, immigration, language and literacy in the context of immigration policies prevailing in Australia and Canada. These two countries offer an interesting entry point for rhizomatic analysis since Canada’s government has, in recent years, been actively investigating Australia’s policies and their effectiveness in the successful integration of newcomers. Mapping a politicized reading of the immigration–language–literacy policy assemblage and questioning how this assemblage reconfigures is important as global migration intensifies around the world.