Becoming Rhizome Researchers

Binaries affect many aspects of educational discourse including research and teaching. Although not every binary is negative towards educational ‘forward’ movement, the authors propose that rhizomatic thinking, derived from the writing of Deleuze and Guattari, can open new potentialities for a breaking of different types of binary thinking. Adopting the terminology of rhizomatic research they outline ways that re-envision educational research through the concept of the rhizome, as a hopeful pathway towards new ways of teaching and research. As a guiding quasi-methodology, rhizomatics could help researchers/teachers develop agency but step beyond personal agency to see research/teaching through multiplicities that arise rather than pre-planned forged curricula. Starting in the middle, the authors suggest that rhizome researchers recognize their embeddedness, allow research to lead them, accept that attempts to synthesize are never finished, listen to those before them and on the margins, and give themselves to a life of becoming, thus ‘breaking’ the binaries that can capture or stifle their attempts to be educational researchers constructing symbolic selves.