The Teacher–Student Writing Conference Entangled

Abstract

In this article, we seek to un-think the teacher-student writing conference, a venerable and essential pedagogy of the K-12 writing workshop. We do this by thinking data with “material feminisms.” Using this literature, we read our data as intra-activity, noting the relationships between the human and the nonhuman. We read our data as a Deleuzean event of becoming. Our journey in methodology includes the use of writing as inquiry through the writing and rewriting of memory stories based on data collected while conducting writing conferences in a fourth-grade classroom. Throughout this writing process, we use diffractive methodology and elements from rhizomatic discourse analysis to produce invitational data in the form of a memory story, a story written as a Deleuzean art form, to invite the reader to unthink the teacher–student writing conference as an entanglement of the discursive and the material.

Keywords

material feminisms writing conferences Deleuze & Guattari Karen Barad

We collected data as responsible qualitative researchers, attending to matters of trustworthiness: pages of carefully transcribed writing conferences between teachers and elementary children, field notes replete with note-making and sketches, records of our ongoing data analysis, memo writing, and copies of children’s draft and final writing. Data triangulated, packaged, refusing to speak or sing or dance or even whisper a difference (Deleuze, 1968/1994) grounded in such a way, that lines of flight (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987) were imprisoned in the grid-lock of coding, locked in language alone: we all suffered disembodiment and we knew with Foucault (1980/2000), “There are times in life when the question of knowing if one can think differently than one thinks, and perceive differently than one sees, is absolutely necessary if one is to go on looking and reflecting at all” (p. 8).

So this project is our experiential and our experimental (Semetsky, 2006) attempt to think differently, in “seeing with data” (Hultman & Lenz Taguchi, 2010, p. 536) of thinking data creatively so as not to “repeat the already formed and recognized” (Colebrook, 2006, p. 15). This is not an easy task, for our seeing of the teacher–student writing conference is heavily coded, regimented in taken-for-granted habitual practices. After all, the teacher-student writing conference is both a venerable and essential piece in writing workshop pedagogy. It is the space where the teacher is able to differentiate instruction by meeting one-on-one with a student. However, as a pedagogy to be practiced and mastered, it stagnates as knowledge that

once it is defined, taught and used as a “thing made,” is dead. It has been forced to give up that which “really exists”: its nature when it is a thing in the making, continuously evolving through our understanding of the world and our own bodies’ experience of and participation in that world. (Ellsworth, 2005, p. 1)

Calkins, Hartman, and White’s (2003) work on the teacher–student writing conference is widely used among teachers. They describe the “architecture” or four phases of a teacher–student writing conference: the research phrase (to find out what the writer needs), the decision phase (to decide what to teach), the teaching phase (teaching the writer), and the linking phase (to guide the writer to independent writing). Calkins et al.’s work is useful and intended to be open and flexible, yet the word “architecture,” the examples in The Conferring Handbook (Calkins et al., 2003), the accompanying training DVD, and our own presentation of this pedagogy too often represent the writing conference as that which happens outside of itself: as a teacher whose language calls forth writer identity from the child; as a child who does not influence teacher subjectivity; thus, situating the teacher–student conference as insulated from material and discursive realities and the unpredictability of the classroom. What if we approach the teacher–student writing conference as a performative account that “insists on understanding thinking, observing, and theorizing as practices of engagement with, and as part of, the world in which we have our being” (Barad, 2007, p. 133)? Could such an approach open up pedagogical possibilities for us as teacher educators?

To engage with these questions and our data in this way, we rely upon a growing body of literature under the label of material feminisms (e.g., Alaimo & Hekman, 2008; Haraway, 1997; Hultman & Lenz Taguchi, 2010) including Barad’s (2007) work defining agential realist and intra-activity and the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari (1980/1987) and feminists’ use of Deleuze (Colebrook, 2006; Mazzei & McCoy, 2010; Semetsky, 2004, 2006, 2008; St. Pierre, 1997, 2004). Using this literature, we want to read our data as intra-activity, seeing the relationships between the human and nonhuman, noting how “the material and the discursive are mutually implicated” (Barad, 2007, p. 152). We read the data as a Deleuze and Guattari (1980/1987) event of becoming as “events of activities and encounters, evoking transformation and change in the performative agents involved” (Hultman & Lenz Taguchi, 2010, p. 535). We image the teacher–student writing conference as entangled, not “just as any old kind of connection, interweaving, or enmeshment in a complicated situation. [But] . . . with all its requisite refigurings of causality, materiality, agency, dynamics, and topological reconfigurings” (Barad, 2007, p. 160). We do this in order to unthink the normalization of the writing conference as “architecture” (Calkins et al., 2003) because “teaching is not normalizable . . . [it] is an undecidable; [and] . . . That is what saves it from being a skill or a technology” (Ellsworth, 1997, p. 192)—and this is what is necessary if we are to go on looking and reflecting and teaching at all.

A Theoretical Mapping

At one time, we might have began this section with a statement like, “Poststructural feminisms acknowledge the power of language and discourse to shape our thoughts, realities and thus our subjectivity,” but now we draw upon Hekman (2008) who writes, “Language does construct our reality. What we are discovering, however, is that this is not the end of the story. Language interacts with other elements in this construction; there is more to the process than we originally thought” (p. 92). Not only language but also how other human and nonhuman elements mutually interact is an interest of material feminisms. What follows is by no means an exhaustive review of this literature; rather, we briefly highlight key ideas, creating a kind of Deleuze and Guattari (1980/1987), assemblage or a mapping of theoretical connections useful to our project. Hekman (2008) notes, “As the elements of the assemblage change, so does the realm of practice and experience” (p. 100). This is our hope, that our “realm of practice and experience” may change and as a result, we will begin to live the teacher–student writing conference, differently (Deleuze, 1968/1994).

On Being Entangled and Becoming

The work of physicist Karen Barad (2007) brings us the concepts of agential realism and intra-action. “Agential realism . . . proposes the ‘intra-action’ of matter and discourse—the inseparability of objects and agencies of observation” (Hekman, 2008, p. 104). Thus,

Knowing is a matter of intra-acting. Knowing entails specific practices through which the world is differentially articulated and accounted for. In some instances, “nonhumans” (even beings without brains) emerge as partaking in the world’s active engagement in practices of knowing. Knowing entails differential responsiveness and accountability as part of a network of performances. Knowing is not a bounded or closed practice but an ongoing performance of the world. (Barad, 2007, p. 149)

Acknowledging the intra-activity of the local context, culture, political discourses, the human and the nonhuman means that “identity is articulated with and by all others” so that the study of such intra-activity is a “comprehensive process, a process of comprehension, a material reality” (Kirby, 2008, p. 234).

In such a comprehensive process, a process of comprehension, language is not privileged, but part of multiple relationships that is “read horizontally as a juxtaposition rather than vertically as a hierarchy of being” (Frow, 2001, p. 283). In this refiguration, writing is intra-active: a pencil has agency as does the writer and the two mutually perform as intra-active agents. For “writing is not a unidirectional practice of creation that flows from author to page, but rather the practice of writing is an iterative and mutually constitutive working out, and reworking of ‘book’ and ‘author’” (Barad, 2007, p. x). Just as writing is not a unidirectional practice, the teacher–student writing conference, then, includes the discursive, the material, and the human in a “mutually constitutive working out, and reworking” of subjectivity.

To unthink the writing conference as intra-activity is to no longer isolate the voices of the teacher and the student as stand-alones in the classroom. Nor is it just to interpret the writing conferences from separate but somehow equal multiple points of view; rather it is to recognize that within the writing conference there is a multiplicity of alternatives, of possibilities:

Discursive practices and material phenomena do not stand in a relationship of externality to each other; rather, the material and the discursive are mutually implicated in the dynamics of intra-activity entailment. . . . Neither has privileged status in determining the other. Neither is articulated or articulable in the absence of the other; matter and meaning are mutually articulated. (Barad, 2007, p. 152)

In the teacher–student writing conference data in this project, there are discursive practices and material phenomena that are recognizable: the teacher and the student engaged in a writing conference, the student desks, the alphabet strip, the pencil, the composition book, and the overbearing presence of the classroom clock. However, as Semetsky (2006) notes, “It is what is unseen . . . that in the long run decides what is there to be seen” (p. 111).

To understand the material, we look to the discursive to think how both are mutually implicated within the teacher–student writing conference. For example, within the regulated space of the classroom, biopower (Foucault, 1980/2000) as the discursive embodies and names the human and nonhuman; this “unseen” is seen in the bodies and practices of the teachers, students, and the nonhuman. In Barad’s (2007) words, such “discursive practices produce, rather than merely describe, the subjects and objects of knowledge practices” (p. 147). Biopower (Foucault, 1980/2000; McWhorter, 2004) is the use of science and statistics to norm and categorize. Science as used by biopower is present in our data in multiple ways categorizing and naming “Latino” and “good writer”; through statistical use by the State to determine the “successful” student based upon standardized test scores; the use of State statistics to predict a child’s potential to graduate from high school; “evidence-based” instruction or the use of “science” to structure the curriculum and thus the teacher and students’ daily routines. This crafting by discourses of biopower “has very real consequences for how those bodies [human and non human] inhabit cultural space” (Hekman, 2008, p. 101).

To see the material and discursive as mutually implicated in the teacher–student writing conference is to think differently with Deleuze (1968/1994), and to do so undoes the science of biopower. Deleuzean difference is not about separation or categorization or norms. This difference is a positive force—it is life itself (Deleuze, 1968/1994). This difference is a continuum, not a set of relationships or a general system constructing objects, but a “state of constant becoming or differentiation” (Colebrook, 2002, p. 28); it is the result of intra-action between human and nonhuman bodies (Barad, 2007). St. Pierre (2004) calls this Deleuzean way of thinking “science in its most provocative form. . . . This science undoes State science at every turn and requires we rethink the subject” (p. 188).

In this teacher–student writing conference, the “subject can no longer be understood as a fixed being, but rather a ‘way of being’—a verb rather than a noun. The subject is an effect of multiple encounters that entails the history of the previous encounters, the present and the potentialities of the future encounters that might take place” (Hultman & Lenz Taguchi, 2010, p. 532). As a verb, and as becoming the action is in-between: “A line of becoming is not defined by points it connects . . . on the contrary, it passes between points, it comes up through the middle” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987, p. 293). This line movement is asymmetrical—a spontaneous and instantaneous sporadic movement—an event. An “event is always an element of becoming, and the becoming is unlimited, similar to the rhizome whose underground sprout does not have a traditional root but a stem, the oldest part of which dies off while simultaneously rejuvenating itself at the tip” (Semetsky, 2006, p. 78).

A teacher–student writing conference has potential to be such an event, an event in the middle, “never finalized and completed” (Jackson, 2010, p. 538), a learning event, an event that cannot be predicted, planned or prescribed, a “dynamic regime of multiple transformations” (Semetsky, 2006, p. 12), because as Barad (2007) argues, “existence is not an individual affair . . . individuals emerge through and as part of their entangled intra-relating” (p. ix). The teacher–student writing conference cannot be neatly divided into four phases, or executed precisely as “architecture” since the intra-action of the conference is this entangled process of intrarelating between human, nonhuman, and discursive, of becoming.

The Teacher–Student Writing Conference Refigured

Using this theoretical mapping, we refigure the teacher–student writing conference as intra-activity, as a space of the discursive and the material; thus an event of becoming-writer and becoming-teacher of writing—but how do we read the data of the writing conference with this potential? Hultman and Lenz Taguchi (2010) note that what is critical in the reading of relational data is what “emerges in-between different bodies involved in mutual engagements and relations” (p. 530). This requires thinking data differently: “interpretation” is in question, representing data, a dilemma. In the next section, we attend to these matters, considering diffraction (Barad, 2007) and rhizomatic discourse analysis (Honan & Sellers, 2008) as possible methodology, and discussing the dilemma of representing data, but first the context for this project is discussed.

Context and Method

Context of the Study

We collected data over a 6-week period. Two days a week we conducted writing conferences with children in the fourth and fifth grades alongside two classroom teachers in their 3rd and 4th years of teaching. Children in these classrooms carry labels of the State: English Language Learners, Latino/a; ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder); 504 (a category of students established by the Civil Rights amendment to the U.S. Constitution requiring special attention by educators); and Aspergers. These labels establish expectations: Children are represented by mean and mode, as statistics that are tabulated predicting their dropout and pregnancy rates rather than their potential for success.

The school, too, carries a label: Title One (a school in the United States with more than 40% of students receiving free or reduced lunches). Eighty percent of the students receive free or reduced lunches. The school is under the surveillance (Foucault, 1979/1995) of the State to ensure its compliance with federal standards for achievement. There is much emphasis on having all children pass required tests in order to avoid being labeled as an “In Need of Improvement” school and to avoid federal sanctions. If placed under sanctions, a school faces more restrictions and surveillance. Selected children return to the classroom from ice cream incentive parties with stickers proclaiming, “I increased my State reading Test [a mandated test] by X number of points.” The presence of the State and the Test are intimate and pervasive, regulating teachers and children alike. The principal and teachers agreed to our research in part because of the need to “raise students writing scores from 37.9% passing the previous academic year.” As researchers and teachers we brought our recorders, notepads, pencils, writing and conferencing skills as tools to aide this pursuit.

The fourth-grade children (the children for the writing conference we consider in this article) were learning to write persuasive essays. As a test-honored format, children were to write five paragraph essays, complete with a thesis statement, three supporting ideas, and one summary conclusion. They wrote in composition notebooks and sat with “writing buddies” chosen by the teacher to support varying writing abilities. Their desks are moved into quads and although they were to help one another, the quads are divided by eye-height folders, dictionaries, and other tools writers might need. The room is characterized by the sound of desks and chairs and feet scraping across vinyl and carpeted floors. The walls are covered with bright posters admonishing, encouraging, reminding students on all manner of things like: the “6 + 1 writing traits” (Education Northwest, 2011), commonly misspelled words and key questions to ask oneself as a writer. The clock is featured prominently: There is a schedule to keep, and time to mind, and never enough of the clock’s precious commodity.

A Journey in Methodology

Out of this context, we typed our transcriptions (all writing conferences between both classroom teachers and both researchers with children were audio-recorded and transcribed), our field notes (with sketches), written notes from ongoing data analysis conversations and written analytic memos. At the end of the 6th week, we each wrote memory stories—stories of conferencing with young writers that seemed to haunt us, or made us feel successful as teachers of writing, or stories whose accompanying audio recordings we plan to destroy quickly, lest they be used against us. We chose to write memory stories exploring a Deleuzean idea that “the past is not some static being, and it is not a previous present, nor a present that has passed away; the past has its own dynamic being which is constantly renewed and renewing” (Colebrook, 2002, p. 77). We wanted to explore this dynamic past by disrupting the present reading of the data and our habitual memory of the teacher–student writing conference by reading data with Deleuze and the literature of material feminisms and writing with a “full awareness of the power of becoming” (Colebrook, 2002, p. 52).

And so we began to play with the writing of these stories and subsequently, the analysis of the data.

We wrote first drafts of the memory stories; then, we wrote and rewrote after and between reading the literature of material feminisms, after long walks and runs, after waking in the night—after thinking. We found the writing of these memory stories to be a method of inquiry (Richardson & St. Pierre, 2005), a way of playing with data, a way to study the phenomena of the conference (as opposed to the object or the casual relationships of the conference), because as Barad (2007) writes, “Phenomena are constitutive of reality. Reality is composed not of things-in-themselves or things-behind-phenomena but of things-in-phenomena” (p. 140).

We wanted to think with these data using Deleuzean concepts and processes, “not focusing on the abstract, but instead engaging the implications of those concepts and processes for research methodology and ethics in educational research” (Mazzei & McCoy, 2010, p. 504). We were intrigued with the work of Honan and Sellers (2008) and their use of rhizomatic discourse analysis and the idea of following “the lines of flight that connect these different systems in order to provide accounts of (e)merging (mis)readings” (p. 111). What were the lines of flight in our data on teacher–student writing conferences? How might this provide an account of (e)merging (mis)readings? We read Deleuze and Guattari (1980/1987), “rhizomes are anomalous becomings produced by the formation of transversal alliances between different and coexisting terms with an open system” (p. 241). We returned to our memory stories; we wrote again.

And our writing became the gnarly and unpredictable pathways of rhizomes producing a map, a cartography of relating described by Semetsky (2006) as a process that proceeds autopoietically: “the new relations generated via rhizomatic connections are not copies, but each and every time a new map, a practical cartography” (p. 87). With Honan and Sellers (2008), we learned that “rhizomatic thinking and writing involves making ceaseless and ongoing connections” (p. 112)—we could not “finish” a piece of writing. We found ourselves in endless movement, intra-actively with data, in data, by data—and the memory stories moved in places we did not always know or recognize. We rediscovered with St. Pierre (1997) “that nothing is innocent and that everything is dangerous” (p. 175).

We also wanted to practice reading the data diffractively (Barad, 2007). As a principle of physics, “Diffraction has to do with the way waves combine when they overlap and the apparent bending and spreading out of waves when they encounter an obstruction” (Barad, 2007, p. 28). Barad (2007) goes on to describe diffraction as an “apt figuration” for methodology—a way of attending to “patterns of difference” (p. 29). Haraway (1997) adds that diffraction “is a narrative, graphic, psychological, spiritual, and political technology for making consequential meanings” (p. 273). We practiced this kind of reading of our data even as we read with Deleuze and Guattari (1980/1987), Barad (2007), Haraway (1997), and the idea of rhizomes and the concept of the event and becoming, understanding, then, that diffraction is not a replication nor it is a reflection (Barad, 2007)—it is a riding of the wild and unpredictable waves, the following of lines of flight along the contorted paths of rhizomes, finding whatever “our” and “selves” might be, entangled in the phenomena we once thought we knew as the “architecture of the writing conference.”

And so we wrote the memory stories again, not as a habit memory but as a “singular memory that allows the past to break the lassitude of the present” (Colebrook, 2006, p. 81).

Hultman and Lenz Taguchi (2010) write “a diffractive ‘seeing’ or ‘reading’ of the data activates you as being part of and activated by the waves of relational intra-actions between different bodies and concepts (meanings) in an event with the data. As you read, you install yourself in an event of ‘becoming-with’ the data” (p. 537). We experienced this installment of ourselves, particularly in talking/walking/writing/reading/thinking with the memory stories. We played data against each another—seeing what pieces of data seemed to resist one another; watching it, as it were, roll, push, and transform, around, over, and through itself, denying boundaries because “what is ‘inside’ and what is ‘outside’ are intrinsically indeterminate” (Barad, 2007, p. 161); and we felt ourselves roll, push, and be transformed in this process.

And we wrote the memory stories again—because “the past is one expression of life’s power to differ” (Colebrook, 2006, p. 82).

We remembered Colebrook’s (2002) explanation of Deleuze, “We only think when we allow the world to affect us, to grip us, or to do violence to our fixed and common-sense ways of perceiving” (p. xliii). We stopped trying to see how we used the architecture of the writing conference and instead began to see how the architecture of the conference used us. Who is becoming now, the data or us? The separation, of course, did not exist.

At one time, we attempted situational mapping (Clarke, 2005) but this only resulted in a separation and a settling of the data. Clarke (2005) instructs the researcher to work with situational maps many times until “it has been quite a while since you felt the need to make any major changes” (p. 108), yet Deleuze and Guattari (1980/1987) seems to warn against such a settling, urging us to keep re-creating, to allow our writing to be transformed, to resist the need to connect data. Barad (2007) writes, “possibilities do not sit still. . . . Possibilities aren’t narrowed in their realization; new possibilities open up as others that might have been possible are now excluded: possibilities are configured and reconfiguring” (p. 177). How to keep the possibilities within the data as “configured and reconfiguring?” How to keep the data opening up, transforming the way we think?

It seemed we could keep these possibilities moving as long as we were moving (walking/talking/writing/reading/thinking); the dilemma became the representing of the data or the putting data down, as in this manuscript, as within a structure that sits, as rhizomes photographed rather than pushing through dirt: You can “install yourself in an event of becoming-with the data,” but how do you package it in such a way to keep possibilities open? How does a researcher create invitational data, data that invites an unthinking, a traversing of rhizomes, a riding of unpredictable waves? How does the paper with its black symbols incite a “comprehensive process, a process of comprehension, a material reality” (Kirby, 2008, p. 234), a possibility of continued events of becoming when academic format and language says so much even before it is read?

Writing With Magical Realism

Ellsworth (1997) suggests that academics might consider using elements of magical realism in their writing. Zamora and Faris (1995) write, “Magical realism is a mode suited to exploring—transgressing—boundaries, whether the boundaries are ontological, political, geographical, or generic” (p. 5) or materialistic, we might add. Such writing is excessive, but then, isn’t this Deleuzean,

Life’s power is best expressed and evidenced, not in the general and everyday, nor in the normative, but in the perverse, singular and aberrant (for this is when life exposes its creative and diverging power, not the illusion of sameness which we require for utility)? (Colebrook, 2006, p. 20)

Could using elements of magical realism while writing the data keep possibilities within the data “configured and reconfiguring” (Barad, 2007, p. 177), illustrate the discursive and the material, act as an event for future readers?

And so we wrote the memory stories again: As the process of methodology and as methodology as process, we transformed our memory stories into stories of magical realism, as a way to tease, play the data inside out—and outside in—to illustrate intra-activity, the diffractive action of the data, the rhizome of relationships entangled in the teacher–student writing conference: the teacher–student writing conference as an event. Deleuze and Guattari (1980/1987) write, “Make a rhizome. But you don’t know what you can make a rhizome with, you don’t know which subterranean stem is going to make a rhizome, or enter a becoming, people your desert. So experiment” (p. 246)—we embraced their advice.

With Honan and Sellers (2008), we attempt in this article and in the story of data to follow to “produce writing that is rhizomatic, in that it transgresses generic boundaries, is partial and tentative, but that will also be accepted within the educational community” (p. 113); yet in the end, perhaps we have given in or given up or given with and attempted writing as a Deleuzean (Deleuze, 1983/1986) art form to help us unthink the boundaries of the teacher–student writing conference.

Introduction to the Memory Story

We have chosen one memory story, rewritten multiple times as described above, for this article. We could say that this story was written by Donna, that this is her writing of a single writing conference event. This would, of course, deny the theoretical mapping of this project. Barad (2007) explains that while the intra-activity of her own writing does not deny her own agency as a writer, it does “call into question the nature of agency and its presumed localization within individuals (whether human or non human). Furthermore, entanglements are not isolated binary co-productions as the example of an author-book pair might suggest” (p. x). Given our methodology of talking/walking/writing/reading/thinking, authorship as a solitary writer-self is shattered: Mindy’s playing/talking/reading/thinking of the story, multiple distant colleagues whose work disrupted our thinking and penned “our” writing with our fingers, the wireless and wordless keyboard, the children of the story who run through the words, the iPod keeping audio-recordings, running shoes—and so much more constitute the “writing” of this story. We, a multiple and collective we, are all installed in the story.

And the story is emerging—we still change it each time we read another piece of scholarship, think another possibility, we wonder, learn, and find our pen. We chose this story because in some way, it chose us. The researcher conducting the conference (Donna) had offered to help the student several times prior to being directly asked to do so by the classroom teacher. She had not worked with the child prior to this time. Immediately, she learned from the other children and, upon reviewing the writer’s work, that English was not his first language; writing was not his strength.

In writing this story, we have attempted to illustrate intra-activity, the discursive and the material as mutually constituting one another, the teacher–student writing conference as entangled. As an illustration, the story is not an attempt to represent or even re-present data nor is it met to be metaphorical. The purpose is to unthink the teacher–student writing conference using these data in a different way, to show ourselves as we emerge from our coexistence with the world (Hultman & Lenz Taguchi, 2010), our coexistence with the teacher–student writing conference. In our writing, we use punctuation in unconventional ways, we change point-of-view, our sentence structure and formatting is meant to act as diffraction, overlapping, bouncing, deflecting, even while illustrating the web of discursive and material relationships present.

We have also deliberately resisted writing a conclusion to this article because how can an article “conclude,” have a final curtain call when the intent is to have the reader carry on the thinking, the questioning, the becoming, even as the last word of this article falls of the page and continues another life? Writing conferences don’t “end.” When the teacher leaves the presence of the young writer, the intra-activity doesn’t stop: the rhizome continues to grow. As invitational data, the story may act as an affect on the reader, as in a Deleuzean response that creates a difference (Deleuze, 1968/1994; Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987) and might this lead to a transformation exceeding the story itself? If this were a possibility, then any attempt at a conclusion would be a pretense at best.

Richardson and St. Pierre (2005) note, “There is still one major difference that separates fiction writing from science writing. The difference is not whether the text really is fiction or nonfiction; rather, the difference is the claim that the author makes for the text” (p. 961). Our claim as authors is that the following story is intra-activity, a play with language and data, intended to evoke and provoke a difference, a rhizomatic continuance in unthinking the teacher–student writing conference. We have allowed ourselves the possibility that data written in this way has the capacity to introduce “some small glitch in the machinery that produces” (MacLure, Holmes, MacRae, & Jones, 2010, p. 554) the teacher–student writing conference.

The writing of the story has transformed our way of thinking about the teacher–student writing conference: Does it transform yours? Does it keep the data and thinking moving? Does it invite a difference?

The Teacher–Student Writing Conference Entangled

“No” he says.

So “I”¹ walk away.

[Why do “I” walk away? Can’t force myself on kids—Ah, the writing teacher as predator. Forcing those kids to mine words from underground and put them on a page without even earning a living wage—“you write before you leave.” So much for empowered writing. [Who privileged writing anyway?] “I” am too many things so walking away, in “my” Anthropologie shoes, “I” seek easier prey.

But the Teacher’s eye meets my eye, a direct line of connection, “You might help Adolpho.” Now many (I)’s/eyes follow “me”: The Girl one table over with the sticker, “I” improved my state reading test by 6 points!” [She got ice cream.]; the children’s eyes who see “my” eyes/(I)’s widen; The Eye of Time, State Authority and Accountability and the upcoming writing Test hold (us): 6 + 1 Writing Traits² commands and directs—“I” am to conference with Adolpho, the wolf.³

The evidence⁴ is before (us):

Thepagewithletterswrittenaltogheter. The Composition Notebook, smudged, refusing to lay flat, no page with more than two lines. Tworuntogetherlines that name his identity.

The Pencil: awkward, blunt.

The Children watch “me” kneeling beside him, the wolf, as he hunkers down.

“How are you doing as a writer today?”

Earnest voice, sounds just like Calkins et al. (2003) [Phase 1: research], bounces against The Clock, the four WALLS, leaps for the locked windows and try to get away as Children’s Eyes look aghast. All three, sitting in the table group, with the wolf, legs of tables, humans swinging feet, pencils erasing, clicking, working with their fingers—all stop. The perky question stops them with a power it didn’t know it had (it was suppose to just be research).

An unintroduced pause fills the space.

He doesn’t write.

Doesn’t even know his letter sounds.

No ENGLISH.

Not like (Us).

“Quien sabe dos lenguas vale por dos”—whispered but no one sees a mouth; disembodied, it goes unnoticed.

Writing partner leans over Dividers of The Collaborative Writing Group pointing to letters. Adolpho copies letters: there is no in-between. (We) hunt for signifiers but there is no recognizable box in which to locate them.

Because wolves don’t write. Not wolves that are caged. And this one came in a box stamped “import” with a warning label: dangerous, lazy, job-killer. Besides, the TEST has data that demonstrate: “Does Not Yet Meet.”⁵ [Maybe (We) can hide his scores] This one, predestined by the Gaze (Foucault, 1979/1995) will surely satisfies State statistics (Foucault, 1979/1995; McWhorter, 2004), the probability curve: dropout, violent acts, early pregnancies, “falling in-between the cracks” they say, those predetermined in-betweens, not the-in-between of imaging differences (Deleuze, 1983/1986): he, a chopped rhizome stem, must grow another way (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987).

The page with letters written altogether snarls, joins hands with Children, State Authority: what other evidence do you need?

He can’t write.

His other name: Tier 3⁶ At-Risk/Deficient

[For the record—(who’s record?)—This session isn’t on the teacher–student conference training DVD.]

“We” kneel next to Adolpho, the wolf. “We” lean in. This Adolpho plays basketball with Luis. Every day. After school. “Next time you play basketball, are you going to beat him?”

Adolpho grins. His court. Luis, come lately, arms crossed, stands in the corner, bigger than Life. This could be fun. ¿Qué clase de juego va a ser este?

“How much you gonna beat him by? 10 points? 20 points, 30 points . . . maybe 100 points?”

(We) laugh.

Clock Frowns.

“We gotta write that down fast!” on this, The Clock insists.

Fast?

The Pencil is too fat. His fingers too weak. Clumsy, grinding out letters to a dirge, a funeral march—silence, no music at all. Still The Wolf rises and wills the Pencil to create; and the Pencil wills him to move heavy lead: Pencil becoming-with Adolpho; Adolpho becoming-with Pencil. The Words writing Adolpho; Adolpho writing the Words (Barad, 2007; Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987). But first: (We) must find the letters. Girl Student flips through Alphabet strips, points, waves, “¡Hache, Hache!”—mining for that h, it is buried deep and so much depends upon the h (Williams, 1986).

The teacher [but not the real Teacher] puts her finger down forcing a separation of letters, forcing a grouping that will be called “word” and then “words” and then “sentence” with an appropriate dot (if the dot will stand still) and this will (surely!) signify meaning.

The Wolf wants to beat Luis by 100 points—gotta get this down; Luis teases from the sidelines—YOU gonna get this down? You write it, I’m gonna hold you go it tonight, mi amiguito. The teacher asks, “You gonna be a professional basketball player when you grow up?”

The table jerks. Boy Student kicks it and wood plays out the reverberation: laughter. Luis grins longer. State fills the space with scorn. “You don’t fit the probability curve.” Adolpho’s feet swaying in the air unable to reach the Floor that keeps dropping.

ALL FOURTH GRADERS ARE BIGGER AND SMARTER THAN YOU.

(Who said that? Did second-person You scream that? No body can be found but everyone hears this. Remember, there is evidence.)

Even the Pencil knows this, the pencil suffering in the sweating hand. [The Pencil making becoming-writer difficult—a struggle of an effect (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987): they must work through this emergence, and who can know what will emerge in-between?] Meanwhile, in these four WALLS, there is no other way to think out of this repetitiveness. This is how (we) write: Pencil to lined paper in composition notebook, all those ideas subject to the boundaries of the notebook, to be committed to this article, not to be left idling in space. Now write.

The teacher has forgotten the teaching point. Accountability reminds her of this. Gaze (Foucault, 1979/1995) feels hot on neck. The Clock measures times precisely: There is no getting around the upcoming State writing Test that calls identity and names the Writer and embodies the teacher, embodies the students, embodies the composition notebook and encircles the Wolf.

(We) write.

“Are you going to be a famous basketball player? Are you going to be rich?”

Wolf grins (he hasn’t found his fangs yet), but Pencil is so slow, so heavy, and his fingers are red from this mutual acting upon one another, each trying to make the other behave. Teacher’s finger still forces space, which forces words. The Alphabet strip is too slow, pushing against this becoming-writer. Teacher says letters. Girl Student translates letters. Boy Student adds word, because Adolpho is writing (an emerging) story.

Luis grins from the corner; good thing Chavez has joined him, “¡Si, Se Puede!” But maybe this is for someone else, not for this, for writing a not-even-close-essay.

The Clock moves with pretend measured units of would-be-productivity because (we) cannot see it any other way: the school day marked into blocked minutes of “learning” through routine, repetition—the habitual (Deleuze, 1968/1994). (They) don’t know but everyone is waiting for the SHOCK to upend and send us thinking, but instead The Teacher’s Gaze, subjected by this Time, announces, “10 minutes to clean up! Your essays must be typed by the end of the period today” [Or else what? No one thinks to ask. (We) follow the routine; too numb to think a difference.]

(We) push on: Girl Student, Boy Student, Luis, Chavez, Adolpho, the Pencil, the Paper, now smudged over with lead, (me); (we) all work together, create one another, overlap one another: intensities and speed folding around one another (Deleuze, 1988/1993) as teacher’s finger keeps marking space(s) that are arbitrary and real and becoming-words, all causes without a destination.

“Will you still be friends with Luis when you are rich and famous?”

Hell, yes, says Luis. (He ducks behind the door—inappropriate words will get him sent on track to the statistic-that-must-be-filled.) Clock reinforces position, guards the Tower of Learning and Accountability; The Teacher’s Gaze penetrates (my) clothing. “I” am sweating—why? (We) write but not faster. Must finish this page. Can finish this page. If the Teacher Would Stop Gazing. If The Clock Would Stop Counting. If the System Would Stop Being So Accountable.

(We) skip sounding out letters [How do letters sound? If they are a signifier, do they sound? Do they argue? Do they resist being put together with sounds that make no sense? Do they resist representation, as in the actual-sound-in-print? Do they scream, “We are not who you think we are?” How do they make us, (us)?]

Teacher Says, “Quiet now and Listen UP.”

(We) listen down and keep mining those words—gotta keep hunting those words, gotta find prey that we can keep and not share; besides (we) are all pushing, pulling, zigzagging simultaneously, differently, getting dizzy, if only there were a border on which to cling (Barad, 2007; Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987).

Even though Luis may be jealous, we will still be friends, this (we) write and page calls us to itself. Luis hoots and hollers and leaves with Chavez—Teacher is getting a little “fed UP” with this: Ready for listening eyes. Listening hands. Listening ears. Obedience is key. The posted schedule is scared: TIME IS UP. LISTEN NOW.

But (we) just have a bit more to go and the page is full of writing and the lead on the page is only and all that (we) can see: Adolpho, Pencil, Composition Notebook, Words, Spaces, teacher—(all)—emerging through the entanglement (entangled now again; Barad, 2007).

The State and The Clock and The Test roll eyes: it doesn’t really count, can’t count. Not an essay. Just messy, sprawled words across a lined page—can’t even see what is in-between, intra-acting.⁷

Prologue

which, of course, it cannot be, since this would defy convention and place “Prologue” precisely where it does not belong; yet, it is certainly not an epilogue, and we have already refuted the notion of a “conclusion.” Like Gough (2006) who wrote a, we are deeply suspicious of tidy structures and any “preconceived meanings associated with them” (p. ix). But the reviewers have asked just one question of this piece:

“Where Do We Go Next?”

It is not the question so much as all the white space, or perhaps the white noise (Who are all the “we’s”? Do we know them? Where have we met them before? Oh! These linguistic markers and their “whispered imperative”—that “free indirect discourse—reported speech not attributable to an identified speaker” (Massumi, 1992, p. 33). Of course, “we” have met “them” before.) It is this surrounding white space-noise that momentarily paralyzes until we begin moving again: walking/talking/writing/reading/thinking: it is not a question to answer, nor is there “an answer,” only another beginning, no a becoming (again). It is a question with an opportunity in this time and place of educational research marked by a gold standard; the striated space of the statistic, script or the code; the furious effort by many to rebuild “foundations” of truth and knowledge. It is not a question to answer but an invitation to the work of rebuttal, of protest, the careful and playful work of possibility: to think a difference, to honor the entangled work of teaching and learning—because even “striated space is constantly being reversed, returned to a smooth space” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987, p. 474).

Just over a decade ago, editors St. Pierre and Pillow (2000) wrote in the Introduction of Working the ruins: Feminist poststructural theory and methods in education that the task of the educational researchers featured in the collection was to “ask questions that produce different knowledge and produce knowledge differently, thereby producing different ways of living in the world” (p. 1).

Massumi (1992) asks such questions, too; actually, he changed the question, “The question is not, Is it true? But, Does it work? What new thoughts does it make possible to think? What new emotions does it make possible to feel? What new sensations and perceptions does it open in the body?” (p. 8). It is a good space for becoming-qualitative.

If after reading our work readers are left with a sense of wonder, melancholy, confusion, despair, excitement, or yet some other unnamed emotion that produces a question for those of us doing the work of qualitative research, then we position the question as not so much seeking a direction, but the question as a direction, a permission to act on an invitation, to dig our nails into the would-be defiant skin of the rhizome, taste the dirt, draw in the earth through inquiring nostrils, and follow the trail. Then we might “produce knowledge differently,” we might produce “different ways of living in the world” (St. Pierre & Pillow, 2000, p. 1)—this world, our material, discursive world, and our entanglement in it.

Footnotes

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

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