Notes on Murris K (2017) Reading two rhizomatic pedagogies effectively through one another: a Reggio inspired philosophy with children for the post developmental child. Pedagogy, Culture and Society [online] . DOI: 10.1080/14681366.2017.1286681 Dave Harris  [I've skimmed the introductory bit. It's about the construction of child subjectivity and how it has been constructed by patriarchal hierarchy. How education positions children and childhood as something lesser. Psychology is still the dominant discipline and that provides principles like the need to move from concrete to abstract, simple to complex and sees this is a representational view of the world, 'not immersion' (2). It implies dualism between language and reality, culture and passive objects. The material has no agency itself. There is a need to show 'how matters of ontology and epistemology have implications for ethical relationships in educational institutions' and that these are as important as efficacy and standards. Critical post-humanism has offered new possibilities. Language is seen as a tool involving power — Deleuze and Guattari say that we have a habit of saying I where the self is set apart from other things. Barad argues that this excludes other Is, other humans. This is an anthropocentric focus on language and the discursive. It limits educational encounters. Critical post-humanism wants to move beyond language as the hub of knowledge production and humans as the only producers of knowledge. Deleuze and Guattari refer to bees and communication from experience. It would be wrong to equate our own second-order language with knowledge. Deleuze and Guattari propose bold experimentation instead [for adults]. We can go on to re-evaluate the child, to welcome them as knowers. Intra-action for her breaks with individualised existence and emphasises mutual relationality. Intra-action, unlike interaction, does not think that there is a pure separation between nature and culture. Instead they are 'always in relation'. (3). All human and other bodies are quantum entanglements 'constituted by concepts and material forces'. They should not be seen as separate unities but as entangled, with agentic force. She shows how it all works with brittle starfish, which reveal that 'knowing, being and doing are inseparable' [and this chimes nicely with child-centred views of education of course]. We need to ask how the child's 'material – discursive beginnings' are operationalised in education what the role of teachers might be.]  This article attempts a diffractive reading of to pedagogies. Diffractive readings are becoming popular, but we can't prescribe the method 'because the person doing the research is always already part of the apparatus that measures'. Barad's article is a guidance. It is 'affirmative, creative, intuitive and nonrepresentational', avoiding interpretations that involve reflection on the past. It is a 'post qualitative methodology'. Some implications have been explored by [a list of people including herself]. She wants to read diffractively, 'through one another, human and more than human bodies', the deleuzian concept, the concept as in Philosophy with Children, and the concept in Reggio Emilia on concept formation. We read texts and theories about concepts diffractively, in a nonrepresentational way, focusing on the entanglements of bodies and texts [and everything else] she herself is part of the entanglement. This is not a unity. However it 'queers binaries such as object/subject, cognition/emotion, world/researcher' (4). This is not 'rational argumentation' there is no argument combining certain aspects of different practices, because that involves a representational form of research where the researcher uses their mind to relate things. This is a rhizomatic analysis instead, 'ceaseless variations leading in indeterminate directions, including unpredictable causal factors, and opening up a space for human and more – than – human bodies to also produce affect and intensities' (5) [we shall see]. We will pursue a process that is both material and discursive. We will include the more than human. We aim at a new interference pattern, constructive knowledge that queers binaries of humanism [she means by queers 'an undoing of identity']. Diffraction is not reflection. It involves breaking apart in different directions, the interference or overlap between waves that changes the waves themselves and create a '"superposition"' [quoting Barad — superposition is typical hyperbole. In quantum physics, according to Penrose anyway, it means the superimposition of positions so that particles in theory can be in two places at once — partly because we can't measure particles smaller than photons without disturbing them, so we cannot know where they are]. We don't want to reject or critique one text or theory. We don't want to just look for the known or what is similar. Instead we need to affirm each philosophy 'by paying attention to the differences that matter — the power producing binaries that include or exclude'. As we read these philosophies through one another we will be performing Barad's cutting together–apart as a single move. Ideas remain intertwined, 'nothing is "left behind", because the difference does not exist within "itself", but is exterior' [confusing — if everything is related to everything else how can anything be external — presumably she means artificially imposed by human beings?]. Barad urges us to put practices in conversation with each other, pay attention to fine details and exclusions by investigating how definitions and differences matter. She does not intend to compare approaches or identify themes, but rather to develop 'new pedagogical ideas of working with concepts' this will deterritorialize conceptual knowledge and enable the inclusion of the child as 'knowledge cocreator'. The pedagogies will not be reduced to each other. Nor will a lack in them be identified. The superposition identified is not critical. Instead it adds force to both [so diffraction here does not include the possibility that waves will cancel each other out, as in physical diffraction?]. She is not assuming that either practice is a unity, nor that a new unity emerges from the interference pattern. She does not wish to 'theorise the diffraction pattern, but to put into practice in this article'. What we do is start with 'carefully chosen [but how exactly] citations that do the work of making the reader feel and think differently about pedagogical practice'[so the test is entirely based on reader response?]. This will make theory and practice related as a diffraction. The two educational philosophies will be introduced 'with a deliberate focus on the material – discursive force of the embedded and embodied life experiences of the originators… And the salient implications for a particular concept of child' this will then produce an 'e/mergence'. Other geopolitical events will also be diffractive, including the impact of war. Then we will focus on conceptual knowledge construction, naturally as a 'diffractive reading'. [Reggio Emilia (RG) is described.] It is not a method but rather 'socially and culturally embedded educational approach and philosophy'. It started after the war, and its founder claimed that just seeing abandoned tanks or trucks generated the school — they sold them and then built the school. They turned the disadvantages of poor kids speaking local dialect into a positive opportunity by assuming that children only learn from children. As a response to Italian fascism, it stressed 'democratic conversation, critical and creative thinking and caring relationships' (6). It is now a 'living organism' shaped by various theories brought to the practice. It cannot simply be replicated or imitated. It was an attempt to avoid 'hegemonic theories of child and childhood' and this produced engagement with educational theories, and collaborative dialogue with significant others. Conventional educational theorists are not excluded exactly, but rather 'theories and practices are constantly evolving, shifting and changing like a rhizome', unlike arborescent systems. The rhizomatic curriculum is 'echoed' in the running and management of the school. The core is the child as 'rich, resilient and resourceful', an active participant, an 'organism [sic] "disposed to interaction and active self construction"' (7) [citing the founder]. They are immediately in a world of communication and exchange, they are an 'ecological child', a figuration, and this is not grasped by humanism and its binaries. We need to look afresh at how knowledge is produced. Philosophy with children (P4C) was also a response to the Second World War and its effects, because its originator had been a soldier. He thought it essential to teach philosophy in childhood as necessary 'for a well functioning truly democratic society' [presumably as in Dewey?]. School had to 'tap into children's original curiosity, sense of wonder and enthusiasm for intellectual enquiry, and strengthen their philosophical thinking'. Both Dewey and Vygotsky were an influence. There philosophies apparently focused on 'thinking about thinking'. There was opposition to Piaget as well [the real target for American liberals]. The early books 'are littered with arguments and dialogues with children that exemplify that children's thinking is similar to that of well-known adults philosophers', but there are still disagreements about whether the child belongs in the rational world of adults, and whether adult philosophy should be the norm. Instead, children's encounters can challenge adults and offer 'a different form of reason and knowledge, resulting in different philosophies that children may bring to academic philosophy itself'. Freire as well as Dewey led to the concept of the 'community of enquiry pedagogy'. We should not offer a definition though, because that would be 'representationalist' instead we can put it at the centre of our practice in diffractive reading, 'foreground how concepts are constructed and reconstructed and who and what is included and excluded' (8) So we provide 'carefully selected quotes sometimes followed by comments or questions interspersed with practical information informed by theory' (8) and this is what Barad means by an agential cut. These are 'specific intra-actions: they are about matter and meaning at the very same time'. They are an apparatus, 'a doing not a thing', 'boundary making practices which include and exclude because boundaries become determinate through the agential cuts' this involves an ethical responsibility which should be part of knowledge production. There are still separations and differentiations 'but they are always within relationships'. This is a post-human methodology to revitalise pedagogy and disrupt humanist binaries, 'in particular [her favourites] the child/adult, learner/teacher binary'. We have an assemblage that answers some of the key questions – how people can respond to initial curiosity and sense of wonder, and how pedagogical practices can be developed to position children as 'knowledge producers and co-creators, not as knowledge consumers' [are they never to consume anyone else's knowledge?]. Let's focus on concept formation in communities of enquiry. Look at the writings of Barad Deleuze and Guattari and others. Look afresh at pedagogy. We don't have to start at the beginning, since Deleuze and Guattari explain that rhizomes are always in the middle. We want to 'provide an imaginary of what a philosophical education could look like'. It would not have units, plans and curricula or individualised age-appropriate practice. It would be deterritorialized through 'transdisciplinary philosophical exploration of concepts that "meets the universe halfway"'. This will be a playful activity full of energy and dynamism, aimed at strategies not implementing the programme. [In what follows] quotations and surrounding text 'diffract with each other' sometimes highlighting what's new, and other times offering a questions and answer format. This will be an assemblage, an apparatus to affect the reader. It will produce [sic] 'an ethical and political commitment to particular pedagogical strategies, such as provocation, dwelling, questioning, rhizomatic concept building and communal thought creating'. these are 'material discursive practices'. They are designed to '"render each other capable"' [citing Haraway] and 'bring into existence a figuration of child as rich, resilient and resourceful' (9). We are not after the essence of quotes in this assemblage, we are not going to paraphrase or introduce citations but put them in a particular sequence and use 'different fonts and font size' to reveal the 'vitality, intensity and aesthetic force of the philosopher's own words' [and the translators?] This will be 'carefully staged unpredictable work' [both?]. Choices are involved to acknowledge 'the authors entanglement with the research apparatus'. There can be no epistemological distance or metacognitive reflection. [And onto techno Buddhism] 'knowledge creation is part of the world's infinite becoming: ontology and epistemology e/merge' for Barad, and this is at the heart of the approach in Reggio — 'a flexible approach in which initial hypotheses are made about classroom work: but are subject to modifications and changes of direction as the actual work progresses' [quotation marks are a bit confused here, but a Reggio guru is being quoted]. This will contrast with the program with predefined curricula and stages. We can consider various strategies which can be endlessly varied: 1. Provocation of a project as in Reggio — a picture book is read which has been selected to 'open up, questions and puzzlement about philosophical concepts that interest them' [them is emphasised and refers to the clients — what is really happening is choices being made about what the educator thinks is interesting to them?]. There may be unusual characters, even aliens or cyborgs, extreme concepts like immortality, obscure thought experiments, 'creatures that mediate between binary opposites: e.g. a gorilla who has a cat as a pet… A monster with human feet'. These play with binaries and produce 'provocations for philosophical wondering questioning… Involving the imagination, emotions, lust [sic] and desire'. The material and the discursive are 'intraconnected'. [Then a series of quotes from various people, with supportive remarks about philosophy not just belonging to adults, and encouraging wonder, in different type. Most seem to be Reggio people. Whitehead is then cited on wonder] 2. Children are allowed to dwell on ideas. This 'requires openness to indeterminacy' just as in Barad 2012. More quotes follow on openness and silence — in Irigaray, Heidegger, and some Reggio people. Kids write words down or draw or use other materials. They need to be reassured 'that spelling does not matter and to give instructions that move away from representationalism (e.g. copying the pictures in the picture book)' (10). The creative potential is unleashed 'without prioritising reading and writing' [more supportive quotations follow — Reggio folk again]. We encourage verbal outpourings and a free reign of thought without the need to read or write. We might formulate new theories and hypotheses out of oral exchanges, 'real or imagined' which can then lead to drawing which will reveal gaps in knowledge and require readjustment of theories 'thereby continuously building on and refining earlier thinking' the 100 different languages available to the child [says Reggio person in a little poem about how nasty schools take out all the creativity and joy and multiple eg emotional understandings] 'diffract with one another and create new conceptual understandings in the process' (12). The imagination can express what is not there 'simultaneously creating a kind of ecosystem, and in the process, creating deep empathetic understanding for the relational dimension of one's being in the world', for example by drawing a pet and then focusing in detail on the network of relationships the animal is a part of [this is the bit that looks like the Victorian object lesson?] So that we can get to see the world as a web, one that communicates even if not explicitly. 3. Children are invited to develop questions in small groups. One is then 'selected democratically to move the project forward' two goals then -- which one?] . The educator listens to children and supports their work, as in the example of the pet [a quote reminds us that it is important to listen rather than imposing conceptions that will lead to a loss of wonder and gaiety]. We have to be'response-able', as in Barad for any observations or interpretations and explanations, we should see them as inevitably ambiguous, selective, partial. 'A willingness to be open to surprises and the unexpected is key' (13). [The project is documented by the teachers] — this is 'material discursive expression of children's learning and their intra-action with more than human things, thought, affect, concepts and environment'. The documentation just energises the project. Philosophical questions arise but not from individuals — 'they e/merge through the relationality between the human and more than human'[not sure if the more than human means the document here or perhaps the objects the kids are still working with]. The documentation is then shared with children colleagues and parents. We should see the document as an apparatus not producing identities with boundaries especially not between teacher and learner. The document is not about their abilities or capacities, but is rather designed to make visible learning emerging from relationality. This is quite a different notion of academic performance and ability, and this will 'offer transformative opportunities to reconfigure notions of child and childhood' [massive talk up throughout, beginning, I suspect with teacher documenting]. 4. Children choose philosophical questions which are divergent and generate many other questions. This is educationally important and shows the role of the community of inquiry in generating conceptual knowledge. [More quotes follow, this time from the superbly named Splitter and Sharp — they see configurations interaction, open-ended enquiry, and corrigability]. We are not going to define a community of enquiry pedagogy because it varies, or as S and S claim it 'is at once immanent and transcendent: it provides a framework which pervades the everyday life of its participants and it serves as an ideal to strive for"' (14). We need a community of enquiry because we are interested in creating concepts that are always new [citing Deleuze and Guattari here!]. D&G tell us  that concepts have many parts and are continuously becoming, balanced between chaos and stasis, liable to be reabsorbed into dominant or traditional ways of thinking [the phrases of a certain Adkins, I don't know if he is supposed to be quoting D and G]. Traditional thinking re-establishes bounded classifications and puts them into hierarchies, but for Deleuze concepts are a tool box, a pragmatics, not to be pinned down by tracing roots or fixing definitions [this is classic homonymy — the specialist concepts of the D&G are the same as the partial generalisations kids arrive at in project work]. Communities of enquiry are particularly fruitful here [so real departure from Deleuze] because the menial concepts is problematised — rhizomatic curriculum development  ensues, that should be transdisciplinary and meet the universe halfway [for example 'by examining the concept "pet" through different disciplinary lenses', or using the child's 'hundred languages' — different perspectives: biological, anthropological, historical, ethico-aesthetic, political, legal, media studies or literary implications might be developed]. This community 'deterritorialize's concepts' liberates them from '"ideological locked down networks"'. It is transdisciplinary. It includes children 'as players in this political project'. [Then a quote from Haynes on P4C and how it's playful, based on relationships with the universe with other people, how it assumes '"equal ability of all human beings to philosophise but also brings ability itself into question"' (15) [that bit heavily emphasised]. P4C just has enabled children to progress through dialogue. In a school curriculum there are concepts linked into systems of beliefs but these are already constructed culturally and historically. We teach kids as if distinctions between types of animals [domestic, wild, pet etc] say are unproblematic. They are really contestable as we can see from philosophical enquiry — no objective criteria for differences can be established. Curricula split concepts into specific disciplines, and we need to explore them rhizomatically and connect them with experience in order to produce new relations and bring them to life. Understanding the concept of pet through binary logic means it is never abstract enough [but unlike Deleuze, we are not heading to the virtual?]. We have to remember the abstractions are embodied thought. When we perform with our pets we see that objective definitions no longer apply. We need to address the relationality of the concept. The concept pet 'is too complex to capture through binary logic. It needs to be understood through a "pragmatics", that is directly embodied in action, creatively and imaginatively' [but that confuses the orientations provided by theory on the one hand and the good old pragmatic stance of practice on the other. And whose pragnatics -- farmers'?] As well as moving away from prioritise in reading and writing, Reggio involves attending to emotions, each other, the teacher, 'smells, sounds and even silences' (16). There is questioning and responsible listening, to disrupt the usual power relations between adults and child. Listening involves a whole relationship through action. Is important to make learning visible through documentation, 'continuously interacting and diffracting'. Barad 'uses quantum physics as empirical evidence [sic] that discursive practices have performative agency', that there is a general engagement with the world. Reggio also 'enacts Barad's agential realism', and agrees with Deleuze and Guattari and their 'philosophy of immanence' that we must abandon hierarchical knowledge systems, with objective classifications. If we develop an interference pattern by reading P4 C and Reggio 'through one another' we get to an understanding of emergence, draw on all the child's languages, we disrupt binaries. We do not give or transmit concepts because that would 'mean using the One language that interprets, represents and defines what the concept is'. We have to reject the logic of representation where words refer to separate entities. We have to ask not what concepts mean but how they work in lived experience. This will restore children to the world they share with human and more than human others. [Diffraction means self-confirming via homonyms?] back to social theory