The Education Assemblage

This collection works with the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, and his collaborator Felix Guattari, in the context of education. Deleuze once remarked that we get the philosophy we deserve because of the questions that we ask. Deleuze saw that the work of philosophy was the creation of concepts – those working with his theory are admonished not to follow but to think. For Deleuze, education remained a philosophical problem because it is connected to problems of language, authority, meaning and what it means to learn and think. With that in mind, these contributions were chosen because they apply this ethic to education to think again about what constitutes a problem. In this book, Deleuze’s conceptual contributions such as affect, assemblage, the logic of sense and control society and modulation are put to work to consider various educational problems in educational settings. What brings these contributions together, apart from working with Deleuze, is that they present education as a problem requiring new concepts. Readers are invited into an encounter with Deleuze’s thought because of the situations in which we find ourselves. The chapters in this book were originally published as journal articles by Taylorand Francis journals.

Introduction Greg Thompson 1. The offence of theory Maggie MacLure 2. Pedagogy as Friendship Christa Albrecht-Crane 3. Deleuze as a Philosopher of Education: Affective Knowledge/Effective Learning Inna Semetsky 4. A feel for numbers: affect, data and education policy Sam Sellar 5. The logic of data-sense: thinking through Learning Personalisation Greg Thompson and Ian Cook 6. Deleuze and the girl Alecia Youngblood Jackson 7. Deleuze’s children Anna Catherine Hickey-Moody 8. Policy prolepsis in education: Encounters, becomings, and phantasms P. Taylor Webb and Kalervo N. Gulson 9. Ghostings, materialisations and flows in Britain’s special educational needs and disability assemblage Julie Allan and Deborah Youdell 10. Methodology in the fold and the irruption of transgressive data Elizabeth Adams St. Pierre 11. Bon mots for bad thoughts Jason J. Wallin

Greg Thompson is Associate Professor of Education Research at Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia. His research focuses on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, educational theory, education policy and the philosophy/sociology of education assessment and measurement, with a particular emphasis on large-scale testing. His recent research projects include reconceptualising test validity; commercialising public education; the topologies of global education policy and assessment, time and education policy and the impending impact of learning analytics/Big Data in schools.