The Classroom as Rhizome

Abstract

This article calls attention to the unexamined role of diagrams in educational research and offers examples of alternative diagramming practices or tools that shed light on classroom interaction as a rhizomatic process. Drawing extensively on the work of Latour, Deleuze and Guattari, and Châtelet, this article explores the power of diagramming as a creative force in research rather than a reductive one. The concepts of rhizome, assemblage, and knot are developed and applied to the study of classroom interaction. The author then shows how these concepts and their application to classroom interaction can be studied through topological knot diagrams. The author discusses the specific qualities of knot diagrams that make them suitable tools for the study of rhizomatic processes and offers some examples of such diagrams. The author offers these knot diagrams as tools that actually undermine the usual conventions of graphic representation in our field, not simply to disrupt for the sake of disruption, but to invite speculation about how one might develop different diagramming habits that better capture the entanglement of interaction.