I got a very simple request from someone a few weeks ago to give a 300 word description of rhizomatic learning for an upcoming book. I thought “hey, 300 words, that’s not a big deal”. Moron. It’s been a bit of a challenge, and I’m mostly only sending it off because I”m a couple of days passed the deadline, not because i think it pulls together all my feelings about the last 6 or 7 years I’ve been grappling with the idea.
The rhizome is stem of plant, like hops, ginger or japanese bamboo, that helps the plant spread and reproduce. It responds and grows according to its environment, not straight upwards like a tree, but in a haphazard networked fashion. As a story for learning, it is messy, unstable and uncertain. It is also, as anyone who has ever had one in the garden will tell you, extremely resilient. As with the rhizome the rhizomatic learning experience is multiple, has no set beginning or end, – “a rhizome creates through the act of experimentation.” http://rhizomes.net/issue19/suhr.html ?
The web is an ideal place for this kind of learning. By exploring a community or a context, you can get to know how language is used, what the customs are and how decisions are made. You can get a feel for knowing in that field. The idea is to think of a classroom/community/network as an ecosystem in which each person is spreading their own understanding with the pieces the available in that ecosystem. The public negotiation of that ‘acquisition’ (through content creation, sharing) provides a contextual curriculum to remix back into the existing research/thoughts/ideas in a given field. Their own rhizomatic learning experience becomes more curriculum for others.
Rhizomatic Learning developed as an approach for me as a response to my experiences working with online communities. Along with some colleagues we started meeting regularly online for live interactive webcasts starting in 2005 at Edtechtalk. We learned by working together, sharing our experiences and understanding. The outcomes of those discussions were more about participating and belonging than about specific items of content – the content was already everywhere around us on the web. Our challenge was in learning how to choose, how to deal with the uncertainty of abundance and choice presented by the Internet. In translating this experience to the classroom, I try to see the open web and the connections we create between people and ideas as the curriculum for learning. In a sense, participating in the community is the curriculum.
Feel free to chime in.
dave
I run this site... among other things.
Hi Dave, stumbled on this on twitter and appreciate your thoughts and effort at conciseness and clarity. Very useful and i’ll keep it in mind as i continue to make use of rhizomes as i did here: http://spinweaveandcut.blogspot.com/2012/10/rhizomatic-kaleidoscopic.html
Thanks, best, Nick
I think that collaborative learning and project planning online is one more way to get things done. Deciding when it is the appropriate tool to get the job done may be more of the construct in your post.
The parts that resonate with me are your emphases on negotiating, experiencing, experimenting and participating… precisely those aspects of learning that are in between the nodes of content, the things. Verbs and adjectives rather than nouns! That’s what I see as rhizomatic’s disruption to the educational status quo.
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I like especially your comment that rhizomatic learning is “an ecosystem in which each person is spreading their own understanding with the pieces available in that ecosystem.” The problem with traditional education is that the teacher is the sole source of all the value within a class. In rhizomatic education, on the other hand, students bring as much, or more, of the value of a class, which in my experience, almost always makes for a richer class, a richer ecosystem.