Hi Dave,
I have been following your ideas on rhizomatic learning after #ETMOOC, and I find this metaphor powerful, I wonder if it is because it suits my learning style.
I tend to be “messy” when learning and when teaching too. Note: messy, curious and a questioner.
I’m trying to be as honest as possible because I want to learn, and I need a helping hand. This year I encouraged my learners to create their own e-books, I teach one to one and am a freelancer, not following any textbook. The first challenge was that the google docs we use to collect students productions and tasks, were so messy it took us (not them, brutal honesty once again) so long that some gave up. But this challenge brought me back to the rhizome metaphor, my first idea was that we were jumping from one thing to the other as we were moving forward and because of emergent needs my students had. Needs sometimes were questions that rose as a consequence of the learning process. The editing was a whole unintentional process of assessment. My students were not only trying to follow and find a logical thread to put their productions together but as they had produced some material at the beginning of the year, learning had happened, their use of English as a second language had evolved, (mine as well) and they wanted to re consider every piece of what they had written.
It has been an amazing adventure, though there was a moment I thought that we were facing complete chaos and felt that I might have led them to failure. (The Cynefin framework: Simple and Chaotic boundary)
If I get to understand your view about the syllabus, you are not saying there’s no syllabus, there’s not much content which is quite different. And I like that because again, it suits my teaching/learning style. Every year I sit in front of my computer and try to write a list of topics we are going to work with, and it simply does not work in my classes, my students come to class and they know what they need to learn, or they need different things as we move forward. How can I predict topics? Is it possible in a rhizomatic mind? Yes, yes I am taking things to an extreme, I am aware of this.
I suspect I might be the only EFL teacher involved in this discussion, but I find this rhizomatic metaphor so attractive that my idea is to discover to what extend it is applicable to different learning environments, like EFL for example.
If I got everything wrong, please let me know. I am messy but not lazy,
Thanks Dave