Abstract
Children from multilingual families often attend preschool programming that engages in school readiness including school-based language and literacy through play. This article problematizes the privileged position of school-based language and literacy. Proposing all literacies and languages are equally important, what is the relationality of multilingualism and multiple literacies in an assemblage with families engaged in minority education? Two 7-year-old girls, their mothers, and the researcher discuss literacies, multilingualism, and learning. The conceptual and analytical lenses of Multiple Literacies Theory and rhizoanalysis deterritorialize arborescent learning and reterritorialize learning rhizomatically. Through problematization, multilingualism, multiple literacies, and minority education conceptualize differently.
Today and increasingly, children are born into multilingual families whose parents were not born in the host country. Many of them, like other multilingual families who have been in the host country for generations, favor minority language education. They send their children to preschool and day care programs to gain greater exposure to the minority language. Early childhood learning experiences in preschools and through intervention programs are considered beneficial (Love et al., 2005; Melhuish et al., 2008; Pascal, 2009). In these programs, children are taught school-based ways of being or school readiness, with its social norms, also known as normative or overcoding practices (a form of social control through highly structured regulations as what to do, when, and how). Given the focus on school readiness, with its emphasis on school-based language and literacy through play, what role is there for multilingualism? Just as importantly, what space is there for multiple literacies stemming from home and the community in the context of minority language education?
The purpose of this article is to problematize and deterritorialize in early childhood education a privileged societal position accorded to school-based literacy and reterritorialize the latter so that it becomes nonhierarchically aligned with all literacies (home, community, and school) deemed to be important. Parr (2010) describes deterritorialization as “a movement producing change” (p. 69). A territory is disrupted, deterritorialization, and exposure to the new occurs, which is then followed by a stabilization or reterritorialization. In addition, this article questions how multiple literacies, multilingualism, and a minority educational setting relate to each other in an assemblage (as well as potentially other elements in the assemblage). An assemblage consists of relationships between content (human and nonhuman bodies) and expression (collective assemblages of enunciation) that de- and reterritorialize an assemblage.
The aim is to study how the flow of affect (becoming) functions through an assemblage and in the process how it effects change in which multiple literacies and multilingualism in a minority educational setting might transform rhizomatically.
Up until now, the concepts of majority and minority have often been understood in terms of numbers. The concepts are regularly used for the purposes of nation-building, in this case Canada (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). It follows then that majority and minority refer to the position of English and French in relation to institutional power. This article intends to deterritorialize these conventional concepts and propose instead minoritarian becoming, a concept pre-personal and non-pre-given. This concept emerges from a toolbox connected to Multiple Literacies Theory that deterritorializes the power of dominance (pouvoir) of mother tongue in favor a rhizomatic positioning of power (puissance) in which all languages are equally important in becoming-minoritarian, a power of becoming within Multiple Literacies Theory, a theory of becoming.
A rhizome is neither metaphor nor figuration (Patton, 2010). A rhizome has no tree-like vertical roots. There are only lines within assemblages: (a) molar lines, rigid, and segmenting; (b) molecular lines, supple, decoding in a relative deterritorialization that reterritorializes; and (c) lines of flight, nomadic, that create something novel. When a molar line ruptures, it emits a line of flight (becoming) and changes the relationality of the elements in the assemblage. The characteristics of a rhizome are connectivity, heterogeneity, multiplicity, rupture, unpredictability, and mapping. A class, for example, can be considered a rhizome consisting of multiple, heterogeneous, nonhierarchical trajectories of experiences, some that rupture unpredictably and others that do not and, nevertheless, connect with each other.
The movement from literacy to literacies is a conceptual shift. While literacies are to be elaborated on in the next section, they are heterogeneous, nonhierarchical and multiple. Through words, gestures, and sounds, and so on, human and nonhuman literacies are ways of reading, reading the world and self. A rhizomatic approach counters the arborescent nature of conventional literacy. Multilingualism from a minority perspective can also be arborescent and positioned similar to a game of chess where the pieces are already pre-given and the relationship to each other is pre-determined. On the other hand, multilingualism might be considered a game of go where the relationship of a play piece (stone) to another is created once they enter in a relationship depending on their position on the board which is not determined a priori.
The same can be said about concept creation. Concept creation is relevant because it becomes a solution to a problem (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994). Concepts are not given. If another problem arises, then a solution calls for a different concept to be created. Moreover, what is important is that a concept is always in becoming; it is in the process of relating to other concepts. They do not operate in isolation. The relevance within this article is that concepts such as resistance and minoritarian have emerged from the research assemblage. What happens, for instance, when minoritarian plugs into Multiple Literacies Theory? Through problematization, solutions arise by way of concepts created for a particular solution.
This article is organized according to multiple entryways. Readers enter in the middle of what has been a research project on the simultaneous learning of multiple writing systems in multilingual children (Masny, 2014c). One entry introduces the ontology that governs Multiple Literacies Theory and rhizoanalysis. It is followed by a presentation of Multiple Literacies Theory (Masny, 2014b). Then, the concept of the rhizome connects with the next entry, rhizoanalysis, which is put to work as an analytical lens deployed in this research project. A final entry (not a conclusion but an intermezzo) considers lines of flight (deterritorialization) that create unpredictable and untimely directions for multiple literacies, learning, and minoritarian.
Ontology
Key concepts that characterize ontology in this article include decentered subject, absence of representation and interpretation, becoming, difference, and immanence (for details, cf. Masny, 2015, 2016).
1. Deleuze (1968/1994) moves away from the foundation of the subject who thinks and represents. Rather, it is the subject who is the product of events in life. The humanist Cartesian subject is decentered (St. Pierre, 2004). The subject is not in subject position actively controlling. The subject constitutes an element in an assemblage.
2. In representation, there is the notion of the original and the copy and that the original is hierarchically more important than the copy. Deleuze dismisses the hierarchy. Instead, he creates the concept of the simulacrum, that is, the copy for which there is no original. An example taken from Colebrook (2002) involves the photograph and postcard of a barn painted by an American artist. The barn is a simulacrum for it exists in painting, photograph, and postcard. Many come to visit the barn:
not what the barn is in its concrete reality, but what the barn has become through repeated simulation. The barn is a simulacra precisely because it has no origin . . . the process of imaging and simulation precedes and produces what the barn is. (Colebrook, 2002, p. 97)
It is not a world posited out there that needs re-presentation; rather, it is a world that is real and a world yet to come. Along with representation, there is a search for meaning which calls upon interpretation. To interpret is to judge.
Actually, there is no longer even any need to interpret, but that is because the best interpretation, the weightiest and most radical one, is an eminently significant silence. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 114)
3. Becoming, difference, and immanence: Immanence plugs into many fields including rhizoanalysis and multiple literacies. It consists of a virtual-actual interaction and a becoming that flows between the virtual and the actual. A virtual-actual interaction is continuous and each interaction is different. The virtual is real and asignifying (pre-personal and not pre-given). Once virtual becoming is assigned a presence in time and space it actualizes. Difference is the effect of the constant interaction between the virtual and the actual (Dufresne, 2006). Difference rises to create and invent continuously. Here is an example. St. Pierre’s (2011) encounter with the conventional (received) view of research methodology (data, method, member check, peer debriefing) brings a rupture, a conceptual deterritorialization (transformation) of methodology and a reterritorialization of a research concept: becoming-rhizoanalysis. Through immanence, a different way of doing research and reading non-pre-given emerges. What was a particular form of doing research could be no longer. It is different. Another concept creation emerges in the process of doing research post-qualitatively.
Multiple Literacies Theory
Multiple Literacies Theory and reading (Masny, 2014a, 2014b) consist of words, gestures, sounds, that is, human, animal, and vegetal ways of relating in reading the world and self, ways of becoming in the world. Reading self refers to a relationality of differential elements in an assemblage in the process of becoming (affect). Reading and reading the world and self through text influences the text one continually becomes (Masny, 2015). Accordingly, Multiple Literacies Theory creates potentialities for transforming life.
Text and Sense
Literacies are texts, broadly speaking (e.g., mating rituals, music, visual arts, physics, mathematics, digital remixes) and taken up as visual, oral, written, tactile, olfactory, and in multimodal digital. They produce different vegetal and animal mutations, speakers, writers, artists, and digital avatars. Each text is a machinic assemblage. It is not fixed; rather, it forms with the environment in which it finds itself. For example, flowers contribute to an assemblage that also includes expression (e.g., video presentation, greeting card) and content (bodies: human beings, furniture, etc.). However, flowers take on different sense in an assemblage that includes, for example, flowers as an art installation as part of a machinic assemblage. Text is a sense event. It is asignifying, neither pre-personal, nor pre-given. Sense emerges differently in different settings (Masny, 2014a).
Literacies as Processes: Reading Intensively and Immanently
Literacies conceptualize as processes-in-becoming, constantly deterritorializing and reterritorializing in an assemblage. Literacies are considered as process with Multiple Literacies Theory because of a focus on how literacies function as opposed to literacies as endpoints. Reading intensively refers to reading critically and disruptively, asking how literacies work and what they might produce. Reading immanently refers to what might emerge as a response to the disruption of reading intensive, what might happen (Masny, 2016).
Multiple Literacies Theory: Theory, Practice, and Toolbox
Multiple Literacies Theory focuses on problems and questions that deterritorialize an assemblage to reterritorialize it differently. In addition, Multiple Literacies Theory is interested in how difference that comes about through experimentation transforms an assemblage. From a practical perspective, Deleuze likens a theory to a toolbox: “It has to be used, it has to work” (Deleuze, 2004, p. 208). The toolbox is practical for it consists in creating non-pre-given concepts. How are concepts practical? Concepts are not definitions. Concepts provide new directions for thinking. A concept becomes “this power to move beyond what we know and experience to think how experience might be extended” (Colebrook, 2002, p. 17). Accordingly, Multiple Literacies Theory is interested in praxis, the ability to do, to practice when asking questions about how literacies function, and what they produce when reading intensively and immanently.
Rhizoanalysis
Rhizoanalysis is not a method; in other words, there is no one way to do rhizoanalysis. There are a number of approaches to rhizoanalysis in the literature (Fox & Alldred, 2014; Masny, 2013; Nordstrom, 2015; Sellers, 2013; Waterhouse, 2011). What is rhizoanalysis? How does it function? What does it produce in becoming? Its analytic orientation to research is based on the rhizome (multiplicity, connectivity, heterogeneity, rupture, and mapping). Moreover, in its movement of horizontal lines, a rhizome is nonhierarchical. In other words, every element is equally important. One element enters into a relation with another element. The relationality is one of affect, becoming in the process of mapping connections of lines (trajectories) molar (rigid), molecular (supple) and lines of flight.
What does rhizoanalysis produce? When there is an unpredictable event, ruptures happen and emit lines of flight whereby rhizoanalysis through reading a research assemblage creates new connections of becoming. In this way, rhizoanalysis functions machinically. In other words,
it[a machine] has no subjectivity or organising centre; it is nothing more than the connections and productions it makes; it is what it does. It therefore has no home or ground; it is a constant process of deterritorialisation, or becoming other than it. (Colebrook, 2002, p. 57)
Research Assemblage
This research assemblage consists of content (e.g., children, parents, educator, researcher, research assistants, equipment, research space) and expression (e.g., filming, interviewing, Deleuze and Guattari books) that enter into relationality and affect/becoming deterritorializes the assemblage and reterritorializes it. As noted above, Multiple Literacies Theory explores how literacies function and what they might produce. These questions have contributed conceptually to shape this project. They examine through affect the relationality of experiences of multilingual children with regard to how learning simultaneous writing systems happens and functions, as well as what it might produce in an assemblage that includes minority education.
Elements of a Research Assemblage
A 2-year longitudinal qualitative study was conducted in a French-language minority setting in Ottawa, Canada. Children whose parents or grandparents attended French-language schools have constitutional rights to attend school where French is the sole language of instruction (Government of Canada, 1982). The study focuses on two of five child participants: Anne and Cristelle, aged 7 and 8, respectively. Anne’s parents immigrated to Canada from Hong Kong while Cristelle’s family’s Canadian ancestry goes back several generations. In the province of Ontario, Canada, French is legally considered a minority language while English a majority. Cristelle and Anne (self-selected pseudonyms) lived in the same area and went to the same school and day care center that was attached to the school. Both mothers were civil servants. Demographically, Anne’s mother spoke French, English, and Cantonese while her father spoke English and Cantonese. Cristelle’s mother spoke French and English. She was raised in a predominantly French home in the minority education setting of Ontario. Cristelle’s father spoke English. The families lived in a predominantly English-speaking neighborhood. In this language minority setting, most children would have French, English, and frequently a third home language. Starting at age 3, minority rights parents established through legislation might enroll their children in French day care for economic reasons, social reasons, and passing on French language and culture to another generation; others cite the location near the home. Nonminority rights parents need to request permission to enroll their children in French-language schools. In all cases, exposure to French may vary; hence, day care centers and preschool programs are seen to provide the exposure necessary to learn school-based literacy in French. Data collection happened in the following way: Anne and Cristelle were filmed in class (language arts, mathematics, science, and social sciences), in the day care center, and at home (meals, homework, reading, mealtime). At home, there were selected spaces and times when French was used (homework, story time). Each filmed observation was followed by an interview. Each of these activities happened twice during the school year.
Vignettes: What Are Vignettes? How Do Vignettes Emerge?
In rhizoanalysis, the conventional form of observations deterritorializes and reterritorializes as vignettes (Masny, 2015). Observations have traditionally positioned the researcher as the outsider mindful of not biasing the participants’ ways of behavior. In rhizoanalysis, the researcher is part of the assemblage and in a relationality of affect with the differential elements in the assemblage.
Unlike traditional research where the researcher makes the connections, in rhizoanalysis, the connections happen in the mind but are not controlled or decided by the researcher. The mind is not responsible for selecting vignettes even though the experience of connectivity takes place in the mind. Rather, it is in a research assemblage that content and expression de- and reterritorialize, that is, the power of affect flows through the relationality of differential elements in the assemblage and vignettes emerge. While it may appear putting pen to paper in a conventional manner, transcripts are part of a nonhierarchical rhizomatic research assemblage.
The first two vignettes are accounts on how Cristelle and Anne interact with their mother when it comes to reading and literacies. In both assemblages, the researcher explores literacies/reading in the context of the home. The home is part of the assemblage that produces Cristelle and Anne. This might include family relationships and their investment in multilingualism and minority language education. In addition, there is the mother’s previous experiences in school, Cristelle’s and Anne’s experiences of the day care center, the school and the school personnel they come in contact with, connections with their classmates and each other as they are in the same class.
Mother helps Cristelle with reading using strategies given to the mother by the teacher when Cristelle was in Grade 1.
She brings home a different book each night from school. She wants to finish the book and she wants me to sign it. When she begins to read, she reads a word. She does not look further to the next three or four words to see if it is a sentence or a question Then I think that if she read in her head the words she is reading, it would be better for her.
She goes rapidly through the stories. She does not care. She is indifferent. I want her to take the time to understand what the story is about. When it’s new for her, she only wants to guess or to read the word for the sake of reading the word and not to comprehend what she is doing.
Does Cristelle see you reading?
Not much, the newspaper in English and in French. I bring documents from the office to read.
I want to go out and play.
Does Cristelle want to read with you?
Not really, with her father. She will look at cartoons and I notice she reads a little bit in English. She asks her father questions. Lately, I saw her read a lot of books in English. I was surprised.
Where did she learn that?
She tries to read in English with the help of strategies she learned in Grade 1 in French and wants to adapt them to reading in English. She just finished buying cartoon books in French and English. She likes cartoons.
How do you find her attitude to reading?
She likes to read. She always liked to read.
No, not really
She always liked books even before she began to read.
[CM reprimands C for her behavior saying that impertinent girls go to their bedroom when they misbehave.] She likes to read only when she wants. At the end of the day, she is tired. She has a good attitude. She likes to read, but when she wants. Luckily for us, it happens often.
Does she use the computer at home?
She uses the same websites that they have at school and she uses them and the computer to play games (English and French). Strangely when she had a project to do on an animal she selected the dolphin. She did not do her research on the computer. Instead, she went to the library to do research in books! She is more at ease with her reading. Now she is beginning to read in English with her father. She has lots of books in French and English that her father and I read with her.
What happens when school-based reading plugs into Multiple Literacies Theory? Mother relayed that Cristelle enjoyed reading although a negative comment from Cristelle provided a different response to reading. When confronted with school-based ways of reading in French, might resistance emerge from the relationality of elements through affect that flows within the assemblage? Folding in the concepts of minor and major (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987), there is a move away from the conventional numerical perspective of minority education and the positioning of French education as an institutional power (pouvoir), a molar line traversing the assemblage. When reading from the perspective of Multiple Literacies Theory, there is connectivity involving Cristelle, unhappiness at a French school and reading with mother in French. Reading the relationality of the elements through affect, the molar line deterritorializes. A response from the assemblage to molarization (overcoding educational practices) might be a minoritarian becoming, through resistance, a power for change (puissance).
As an institutional power, French ways of being in school, at home, and at the day care center become the standard against which Cristelle and educational structures are measured (e.g., academic achievement, international evaluation). Recall that Cristelle’s favorite periods in the school schedule were lunch, recess, and gym. At the day care center, she speaks in English contrary to regulations. At home, her tendency to read in English surprises her mother. Cristelle uses certain strategies borrowed from learning to read in French to read in English. There seems to be a creative and inventive concept emerging from the Multiple Literacies Theory and the toolbox that plugs into how reading might happen. Despite Cristelle’s response on reading, mother maintains that Cristelle likes to read but on her own terms. She does not like to read when obliged to do so in school.
From a conventional perspective, English is considered a majority language. Yet, in this context, English might connect to a minoritarian becoming because of the transgressive approach to connecting with English. Minoritarian is in constant becoming and it is from the constant variation through becoming that a norm will emerge. There might come a moment when English reterritorializes as a norm.
Through reading the world and self and becoming with the world human and nonhuman, Multiple Literacies Theory encourages minoritarian becoming. What reading is happening? Multiple Literacies Theory proposes a multiplicity of languages and literacies in which all are equally important. The relationships are considered nonlinear and nonhierarchical. Multiple Literacies Theory is a theory in becoming and on becoming.
In this vignette, Anne’s mother describes teaching strategies used with her daughter.
And I also noticed when Anne is reading, at the end you ask her can you explain the story to me, or retell the story in your own words.
That’s right.
And you’ll make links with things that happened in your life. Were these kind of strategies used by you when you were younger?
That’s right. I try to relate that to some other of my experience so it is easier for me to relate. So I try to relate that to herself so that it’s easier for her to remember.
So this is something you use during the homework or whenever.
Whenever I try to tell her something or read her a story, I try to relate that to her own experience . . . because if it is something that is so far away from her experience, it is hard for her to understand.
Yeah.
I guess it has a lot to do with how I learned when I was young . . . So then I tend to use the same method to show her.
. . .
I think she’s more comfortable in using French and English than Chinese. Last year, naturally she would try to speak in English, even in school, and this year, I see that she’s more into the French. And I asked her last year and this year, “do you find that difficult in the French school?” And she said, “No, I like French. I like this school.” So I don’t know if it’s the language itself or the school . . . but one thing I’m sure is that she’s not afraid of the language . . . but then I see that she’s enjoying it very much. And she keeps telling me, once in a while, “I like French, I like French.”
The reading activities Anne’s mother describes above might be considered preparation for reading and writing in school ways. What happens as school-based literacies plug into Multiple Literacies Theory? How might the assemblage transform in the process of reading, reading world and self? Exploring the multiple and what it might produce creates opportunities to explore disrupting normativity, potentially giving way to more open-ended practices. From this vignette, concepts of smooth or relational space and striated or structured space emerge to guide this exploration. In the context of early childhood education and literacy, striated space might refer to standards in day care centers or schools promoting school-based literacies.
In this vignette, Anne’s mother states that she uses the strategy of relating readings to Anne’s experiences because that was how she was taught when she was young. What might plugging in produce? Smooth spaces overlay striated spaces of literacy creating opportunities for de/re/territorialization and lines of flight (Masny, 2014a). Viewing the interaction of smooth and striated space as productive, the introduction of the mother’s teaching strategies from her own childhood schooling experiences might disrupt concepts of home, school, and reading. This disruption may lead to a de/reterritorialization in an assemblage that includes home and Anne.
From the viewpoint of Multiple Literacies Theory, literate practices are fluid and connect with various domains such as school, home and community (Masny, 2014a). Perhaps other literacies could be explored in the connections of Anne’s school, home, and community, such as the consideration of multiple literacies and Anne’s mother. There is no way to know in what direction reterritorialization might take place. Family literacy intervention programs often describe their purpose as assisting parents as they become their child’s first teacher. This might be one potential direction of reterritorialization.
In sum, as the mothers are assisting their children with reading assignments, they rely on strategies for reading from the previous year in Grade 1 that might help improve their children’s reading. In addition, one mother included her own experience of learning to read. From the assemblage that includes Cristelle, there is an exchange on reading: a resistance to read in French while reading in French entertains a different relationship with Anne.
The children received a notebook that they could use for writing and put anything they could in there. There was some writing.
What about writing?
Besides dictation . . . she will ask me to help write the grocery list. Truth be told, she is not keen on writing.
Does she ask you for help when writing?
No, never, if I suggest anything, she is insulted. She does not want to show what she wrote. She is concerned that she will have to erase and start over again.
Does she love to write?
Yes, yes, she likes to write her name, the names of others, letters of the alphabet. But it is different when asking to write a longer text. I asked her to write something for the notebook you gave them. She resisted a lot. Maybe just a few sentences: . . . Cristelle said: “I don’t want to, I don’t want to.” She wants to do the minimum. She prefers to read than to invent sentences . . . She likes to write within a time frame that she wants and the words that she wants. But for the exercises at school, she has difficulty. I encouraged her to keep a diary. She wants nothing to do with it. She doesn’t like to learn yet . . . I was a bit disappointed because she likes to draw. She likes to draw more than writing words . . . One time we ordered some books for her. With that order she purchased some crayons and diary-looking. When the order arrived, she used the crayons and the book to draw . . .
. . .
At this point Cristelle and I were talking about what she had written in the notebook (Figure 1).
Is this a story?
No, it’s a dictation
[Comment: given her fondness for drawing, I asked:]
There are no drawings?
Mother said the notebook is for writing only.
Tell your mother it is OK to put drawings in. You can put drawings in as well as writing
Anne does not do drawings
. . .
Why don’t you like to write?
It hurts my hand then after my foot begins to hurt after it’s my arm and after it is my head.
When you work at the computer what work do you do?
I just type anything at all. But when I am on the Internet, I have type to correctly.
Cristelle’s notebook.
In response to writing, mother says that Cristelle is not “keen on writing.” She “resisted” writing something for the project. Cristelle prefers to “draw stories.” “She does not yet like to learn.” Reading resistance to writing might also be a resistance to uncertainty (Dufresne, 2006). Resistance is a force that creates a rupture and actualizes toward spatial moments in the school day with gym, recess, lunch, and free periods without institutional judgment/assessment (Masny, 2016). An aspect of learning that receives limited problematization is resistance and the potential sensation actualized as pain that might flow though the elements in the assemblage. To some extent, this aspect of learning associated with pain has been reported with adults as newcomers learning the host language (Waterhouse, 2011) and children learning French as a second language in an immersion program (Dufresne, 2006).
This vignette refers to a dictation exercise completed earlier at school, and although not apparent in the vignette, Anne could be described as a good student. Anne expresses a dislike for corrections made by the teacher in her notebook, and regrets the absence of checkmarks denoting that she has done her work correctly (Figure 2).
…
She prefers reading than writing. She doesn’t like to just write, she likes to make with drawing and make some pattern with colors. Even when she writes, she likes to use different colors. I think in her mind, she likes to sometimes want to do a book. That’s why she writes something and tries to draw a picture around the words.
When you make an error and the teacher makes a correction in your notebook, do you mind? Bother you?
Yes it bothers me a little. I don’t like to be corrected . . .
You don’t like to be corrected? Tell me more.
I don’t like to be corrected when the teacher takes her pen . . . I don’t like that [Anne begins to make the movement of picking a pen and imitating the teacher making corrections in Anne’s notebook]
I don’t like that I don’t like it when a pen comes into my notebook
I like it when [Anne imitates the teacher making a check mark] a checkmark says well done!
How about correcting your own work. Does it bother you when you have to point out the mistakes and correct them?
Yes it bothers me a little.
Anne’s notebook.
From this vignette, Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) philosophical conceptualization of affect emerges. Massumi (1987) explains that affect in this sense is not emotion, but the ability “to affect and be affected” (p. xvi). Colman (2010) describes affect as productive becomings, “the change, or variation, that occurs when bodies collide, or come into contact” (p. 11). As affect flows through the assemblage, colliding, coming into contact, elements come together producing Anne and in turn Anne as an element in the assemblage transforms the assemblage. What might elements of correction and an absence of checkmarks produce in this particular assemblage?
Waterhouse (2011), writing on peace education in an adult second language program, discusses a conceptualization of violence in terms of Multiple Literacies Theory and Deleuze and Guattari. Waterhouse suggests that violence is “a disruption that opens the way for something different to happen” (p. 165). New learning through this kind of disruption can be painful for the learner (Dufresne, 2006; Waterhouse, 2011). In terms of Multiple Literacies Theory, questions arise as to how conceptualizing correction as disruption for learning might alter thinking about correction experiences in early childhood. Anne states that she both dislikes the teacher making corrections in her notebook and the absence of checkmarks when she is correct. Might the corrections refer to violence creating disruption? Anne says, “It bothers me a bit . . . I don’t like to be corrected.” In the assemblage producing Anne, the affective power of the correction experience might produce becomings. The teacher’s corrections might be viewed as painful or upsetting, but also as disruptions for learning.
While Cristelle refrains from writing (in French), Anne seems to enjoy writing. However, when Anne is corrected for mistakes but does not appear to receive enough rewards for doing well, we ask whether the mantle of molarization takes over, that is, the power of dominance (pouvoir). In sum, when Anne and Critselle produce a written document and in turn a written document produces Anne, Cristelle, the teacher, and the mother, there are sensations. A rupture happens in an assemblage that has deterritorialized an encounter with the known. What mapping will emerge is unknown. What we do know is that it will be different.
What reading happens with Vignettes 3 and 4 as they plug into Multiple Literacies Theory? Perhaps it might be the virtual thought of affect actualizing as pain. Is it the vulnerability/fragility confronting the unknown in learning? Taking a page from Spinoza and Deleuze and Guattari (1987):
We know nothing about a body until we know what it can do, in other words, what its affects are, how they can or cannot enter into compositions with other affects, with the affects of another body, either to destroy that body or to be destroyed by it, either to exchange actions and passions with it or to join with it in composing a more powerful body. (p. 257)
But you did this in English.
(Cristelle smiles) because I like to talk in English. I don’t like French school. It (English) is more fun. French has complicated words.
Such as?
constitutionellement. Luis showed me that word. I don’t know what it means.
Do you often speak in English at the day care center?
We have to respond in French.
Do you speak English in class?
We are not allowed.
Do you use the computer? I type anything. When I write a note I type on all the keys. On the Internet, I have to type properly [she goes to the website ABC to play in English and TFO for French games. Cristelle reads cartoon books at the school library at the end of the day].
In Vignettes 1 and 3, the relationality of elements through affect gives rise to flows of intensity in the assemblage. The interaction of elements in the assemblage contributes to how French and English position mother, Anne and Cristelle and, in turn, how human and nonhuman elements (curriculum, teaching personnel, etc.) position French and English. Within the assemblage is the contribution of education. Canada officially espouses bilingualism (French and English) and multiculturalism. How do you plug into a situation in which language(s) through a collective assemblage of enunciation are sanctioned according to categories deemed legal by the State machine? This perspective seems to fix conceptually minority and majority as rigid/molar and potentially molecular segmentations of society.
Deleuze and Guattari (1987) conceptualize language as both minor and major. Language is political. A majority language is linked to power of domination (pouvoir) by means of social control transmitted through order-words. Majority language is a norm, and as such, it is an abstract standard (constant). A constant (standard) is extracted from variables to form a norm. Variables such as language, gender, and culture characterize a minority language. They are variables outside a norm, which at the same time are used to extract a norm/constant. They are different from the norm and exercise a creative power through difference.
In the current assemblage, the relationality of elements is complex (cf. Vignette 5). School and day care attached to the school are considered molar organizations, establishing a standard/constant operating in a French-language setting. Through the assemblage, Cristelle is aware of the overcoding practices whether it relates to experiences of writing and usage of French and English at school, day care, and home. These practices come in the form of order-words that become part of the assemblage in a society of control. Examples of order-words: “we have to respond in French [in day care]”; “we are not allowed [to speak English in class].Might there be ways to “open a passage in the order-words” and in that flow, a minoritarian becoming happen? How might the passage open? Through the lens of Multiple Literacies Theory, there is reading intensively in which creating subversive movements emerge contesting the power of a major form of French with its order-words. Resistance and writing might continue, only this time more explicitly, from the hand to the arm, foot and head. On the computer, she “types anything.” However, Cristelle knows that to access websites you need to type accurately. Through contestation (resistance), a deterritorialization happens and likely to affect and be affected immanently by variations in a minority language. Language is not static. There also inheres in a majority language a “minor element that does not exist independently of its expression and statements” (Conley, 2010, p. 166).
This vignette comes from a discussion with Anne after completing a writing activity with the researcher at the day care center. Anne tells the researcher that she likes to have new ideas, after which the researcher questions the language in which these new ideas appear. Anne states that she writes in English at home so that she does not lose it. French is used at school, and maybe a little bit at home. When asked about Cantonese, Anne says that she does not speak it. However, observations of home life from videos taken in the home demonstrate that Anne speaks and understands Cantonese.
What’s happening with Cantonese?
I don’t speak it.
No? Non?
There is a roof.
Tell me more.
The box in French and English does not have a roof. And Chinese has a roof. That’s the way it is.
Ok.
Well, it is not really like that. But we could say it is that. We could say that my Chinese language is in a tiny cabinet. It has a roof. And we might say that my French and English vocabulary they are in a box with no roof. This way the wind blows them away.
In reading the world and self in an assemblage through the lens of Multiple Literacies Theory, multilingualism opens pathways about how language functions and what it might produce as a major language at some times and at other times as a minor language deterritorializing a major language and becoming-minoritarian. After all, a major language is a constant (a norm) to be extracted from minor language that is in perpetual variation.
With Anne, might Cantonese shut down as it connects with the practice of overcoded school-based literacies? Perhaps the introduction of multiple literacies and a conceptualization of multilingualism as connections to be made and unmade in the school environment might disrupt the roof that keeps the Cantonese words in their box. More experimentation might consider the relationship between and within Chinese-as-minor from which a standard (constant) is extracted.
Multiple Literacies Theory experiments with ideas about language, turning to concept creation and asking questions. One question relates to how conceptualizations of languages in boxes, with and without roofs emerge in an assemblage (Figure 3). Another asks how they function and what they produce. How might these concepts contribute to multilingual becoming of elements in the assemblage, one that includes Anne, boxed and roofed languages, notebooks, corrections and checkmarks, home and school?
Languages in boxes.
Bylund and Bjork-Willen (2012) discuss multilingualism in a bilingual Swedish-Spanish school. Using the concepts of smooth and striated space, they explore “how institutional curricula, policies and organization in educational contexts affect, and are affected by, the constant creation of other, more temporary and ephemeral organizations and expressions” (Bylund & Bjork-Willen, 2012, p. 80). In one instance, the authors describe how children produce incorrect Swedish vocabulary as translations of Spanish words. In keeping with Multiple Literacies Theory, the authors suggest that “what it means to know or learn a language are multiple” as “there is no starting point and no endpoint, but there are multiple points of connections” (Bylund & Bjork-Willen, 2012, p. 89).
What might happen as multilingualism plugs in to multiple literacies? Bylund and Bjork-Willen (2012) suggest the conceptualization of multilingualism “as creative in opening up diversified processes of a constant multilingual becoming” (p. 88). The consideration of language as part of an assemblage producing young learners might open up new ways to think about a multilingual becoming in the early years.
Intermezzo
From deterritorialization to reterritorialization, there is an inbetweeness, an intermezzo: an asignifyer on the path to actualization. However, there is no way of knowing in advance how it will actualize. Nevertheless, the intermezzo/inbetweeness gives way to “thinking’s power.” In the context of this article, it is the power to think in new and different ways. Accordingly, conflicts and paradoxes are potential events that jar one’s body and one’s thoughts. Events lay the groundwork for problematization out of which questions emerge as responses: a process of rhizoanalysis. In this intermezzo, there are four entries that in a rhizomatic way have participated in the deterritorialization and reterritorialization of the following concepts: literacies/multilingualism, alearning, resistance, and minoritarian.
Multiple Literacies Theory consists of reading, reading the world, and self intensively and immanently. It is a theory about becoming and multilingual becoming:
Reading produces diversified processes of multilingual becoming. Becoming here is not ascribed exclusively to human individuals, but should be seen as collective possibilities, enabled through and among the different parts of the assemblage. Consequently, what we call a multilingual becoming is a possible process of change or transformation for the children and the teacher involved, but also for the languages, the book, the policy, research and researchers, the room, and anything else forming a productive part of the assemblage. (Bylund & Bjork-Willen, 2012, p. 82)
Questions that arise in relation to Anne might focus on the de and reterritorialization of boxed and roofed languages, concepts created to “respond to problems posed in the world disrupted by literacies” (Masny, 2013, p. 342). As Bylund and Bjork-Willen (2014) explicate, the transformation taking place in a multilingual becoming is not only of human bodies in an assemblage, but the nonhuman including the languages themselves.
alearning
We never know in advance how someone will learn. There is no more a method for learning than there is a method for finding treasures, but a violent training, a culture which affects the entire individual. (Deleuze, 1968/1994, p. 165)
In the quest to experiment with how learning simultaneous writing systems in multilingual children happen and what learning simultaneous writing systems produce brought about untimely encounters with the unknown. From rhizoanalysis and the research assemblage emerged potentialities on how alearning might happen and what an assemblage might produce in the process of alearning. The indefinite article appears with learning; it is a pre-personal singularity. From the virtual, alearning transforms to actualize learning experiences.
The complexity of alearning is further enhanced in different spaces such as school, home and day care center. Moreover, spaces are embedded with other concepts such as becoming/affect, power. There is the mapping of alearning along multiple segmentation and molecular lines. There is neither an a priori way to know how alearning might happen nor a prediction regarding what the outcome might be. Nevertheless, children at an early age effect and are effected by order-words stemming from overcoding social and educational practices. One way of responding is through resistance.
Resistance
Resistance has become an interesting concept in the context of alearning. Is this resistance to normativity? Roy (2003) asserts that certainty (and norms) inhabits striated space. From resistance, there is deterritorialization to effect a becoming and a reterritorialization. Deterritorialization happens in smooth space. According to Deleuze, to resist is to effect a becoming. Resistance might be a catalyst that kick starts a virtual-actual interaction.
Cristelle in relation with the elements in the assemblage might have accepted the certainty of striated spaces, but there is resistance to order-words, a transgression in speaking English. Moreover, a resistance to writing in French enables a rupture, a deterritorialization that reterritorializes as writing vertically “bonjour mon nom est.” To quote Deleuze and Guattari (1994), “to create is to resist” (p. 110). In other words, resistance is not in the activity of the subject itself but rather in its power (puissance) to create change. Finally, there is the intensity of writing in French: the relationality of the elements through affect in the assemblage, the pain flowing through the assemblage that includes the hand, foot, arm, and head.
Minority–Majority–Minoritarian
In the Deleuze–Guattari perspective, there is fluidity of movement flowing from minority to majority, to which can be added minoritarian. The latter refers to the creative process of becoming different or diverging from the majority. This process of minoritarian becoming subjects the standard (norm) to a process of continuous variation or deterritorialization along a continuum. Through the relationality of affect with Cristelle, Anne, and languages, French as a majority language in school exercises social control by means of order-words. French-as-majority ruptures, deterritorializes, and engages a minoritarian becoming of a major language. At times, it is French (the creative treatment of the French language; cf. Figure 4) and at other times, English (speaking in English at the day care center). Through the relationality of the elements in the assemblage, Cristelle expresses and positions her relation to French (“I don’t like French school”) just as French positions Cristelle. Meanwhile, the positioning of French in relation to bodies that include Anne who expresses a love of French shapes a different assemblage. Nevertheless, in the assemblage, language is subject to a process of deterritorialization and actualization that differs according to the relationality of affect of the elements in the assemblage. The relation is not monolithic. Reading intensively and immanently the fluidity of texts capture the multilayered complexity of minoritarian.
Bonjour je m’appelle . . . (Hello my name is).
In sum, when Multiple Literacies Theory plugs into an assemblage, what pre-personal and non-pre-given concepts created at that moment emerge from a toolbox and its connectivity to reading intensively and immanently the world and self? By creating concepts, becoming-drawing of writing, for example, participants in this assemblage that include the readers might think differently about drawing and writing and how they function and what they produce in an assemblage such as a classroom.
Perhaps plugging in children’s questions and problems connecting with alearning might bring forth a different perspective through Multiple Literacies Theory. How? By proposing to render the invisible visible in an untimely manner. Deleuze (2004) remarks,
If little children managed to make their protests heard in nursery school, or even simple their questions, it would be enough to derail the whole educational system. (p. 208)
Finally, this article is intended to problematize the position in society accorded to school-based literacy. Through the lens of rhizoanalysis and Multiple Literacies Theory, this article experiments with questions and comments from young children, their caretakers, and educators to problematize minority education, schooling, technology, multilingualism, reading, writing, and activities at home and at the day care center. This process of problematization within the assemblage (elements of bodies and expression) provides an exploration of children’s own sense, learning strategies, and production of knowledge (Olsson, 2013). Perhaps the interrogations, problems, challenges that children produce might also produce the children and become the focus of pedagogical interventions. In addition, might problematization deterritorialize overcoding practices of schooling that permeate their lives and other bodies in the assemblage? Might learning therefore be about problematizing within an assemblage and through these problems actualize the virtual (alearning), a solution that is not pre-given but one that gives rise to more questions?
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This project has been funded by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Official Languages Support Program, Canadian Heritage.