Educational Philosophy and Theory,Vol. 43, No. 9, 2011 doi: 10.1111/j.1469-5812.2009.00559.x
Undoing the Knots: Identity transformations in a study abroad programme epat_559
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Constance Ellwood University of Melbourne
Abstract In times of globalised flows of students, this paper offers an alternative way of conceptualising identity change in the experiences of students on study abroad or student exchange programmes. Despite the ‘identity turn’ of recent years, modernist notions of identity continue to impact on the ways in which study abroad experiences are conceived, resulting in failures both to facilitate productive change and to recognise blocked, or ‘knotted’, attempts at change. The discussion considers data collected in an ethnographic study of a tertiary-level English language programme in an Australian university and suggests that a closer look at the specific experiences of four individual study abroad students, through the lens of the Deleuzian concepts of the molar, the molecular and the line of flight, offers a way looking at identity which may help both educators and learners open more usefully to the possibilities for self-transformation. Keywords: identity, study abroad, Deleuze, transformation, subjectivity
Learning is an investment in what one is to become. A corollary of this is that all second language pedagogy needs to address the issue of identity transformation. Questions of continuity and change in identity are investigated here through a Deleuzian framework which considers the impact of relationality on identity within the pedagogical space of a foundation English programme for study abroad students. Study abroad, particularly when accompanied by the learning of another language, is commonly viewed as providing an opportunity for transformation since it allows the student to widen perceptions, challenge norms and rework personal characteristics and attitudes. It has been seen as enabling a redefinition of the self ‘publicly, socially and personally’ (Pellegrino Aveni, 2005). It has also been acknowledged that the study abroad experience may be ‘far from a linear progression’ (Wilkinson, 1998, p. 34) and, at its worst, it has the potential to provoke a disturbing collapse in social functioning. Drawing on the literature and the research data, the paper first discusses the ways in which responsibility for change and adaptation to the new culture has been predominantly located in students as autonomous individuals. However, the deployment of the discourse of an autonomous subject, with its psychological approach and capacity to pathologise, disregards the relational aspect of context. Some parallels are drawn between dominant © 2009 The Author Educational Philosophy and Theory © 2009 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA
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views of cultural adaptation both in the literature and in recent classroom practices, particularly with regard to perceptions of change and responsibility for change.The paper then considers, in the light of Deleuzian concepts relevant to identity, perceptions and experiences of continuity and change as expressed in interview by four study abroad students in an English-language programme in an Australian university. Interest in identity in second language teaching and learning contexts has increased over the last decade (for overviews, see Block, 2007; Menard-Warwick, 2005; Swain & Deters, 2007). Seminal work by Bonny Norton Peirce (Peirce, 1995; Norton, 2000) McKay and Wong (1996) and others has signalled the importance of considering identity as ‘multiple, a site of struggle and subject to change’ (Peirce, 1995, p. 9) and as a site ‘of contestation [in which] subjects with agency [...] positioned in power relations and subject to the influence of discourse, also resist positioning, attempt repositioning, and deploy discourse and counterdiscourses’ (McKay & Wong, 1996, p. 27). These and more recent studies (for example, see Ellwood, 2009; Shi, 2006; Warriner, 2004) have detailed the ways in which identities are discursively produced, and the ways in which individuals are positioned by others according to discourse. For the most part, these studies have been concerned with the negative and restrictive consequences of discursive positioning. As Menard-Warwick (2005, p. 261) points out, however, ‘the reformation of subjectivities’ is generally less well theorised. Thus, few studies have successfully focused on the passage of movement out of or between discursive constructions. Processes of ‘untying the knots’ of sedimented histories and cultural norms remain undertheorised and the issue of the extent to which discourse fully determines or produces identities has not been resolved. Thus, Peirce’s (1995) work has been criticised (Price, 1996) for discrepancies in her claim that identity is a site of change since she also portrays it as stable. Notions of desire (Ibrahim, 1999) and investment in imagined communities (Norton, 2001) have made some contributions to thinking through the way change occurs. Nevertheless, a continued conundrum has been characterised by MenardWarwick (2005, p. 262) as a ‘contradiction between continuity and change’. From the perspective of a pedagogy which recognises that all learning requires transformation, this is a crucial issue. Scholars outside the applied linguistics field are increasingly drawing attention to an excess to identity which is beyond existing discourses and outside known forms of representation. This excess has been characterised as ‘affective, contentious and not yet realized in nature’ (Papadopoulos, 2008, p. 148), as ‘the “stormy” overflow that cannot be contained or ac/counted for in a binary structure’ (Davis, 2000, p. 89), and as evading the ‘logic of identity’ (Albrecht-Crane & Slack, 2003, p. 56). To comprehend this notion of excess, scholars have drawn on the philosophy of Deleuze who, writing of excess as ‘relatively free or unbounded points, points of creativity, change and resistance’, says that ‘it is perhaps with these that we ought to begin in order to understand the whole picture’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 44).This excess is also referred to by Deleuze and Guattari as desire; that is, ‘everything that exists before the opposition between subject and object, before representation and production. It’s everything whereby the world and affects constitute us outside of ourselves, in spite of ourselves. It’s everything that overflows from us’ (Guattari, 1996, p. 205). Unlike more conventional notions of it as lack, desire does © 2009 The Author Educational Philosophy and Theory © 2009 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia
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not seek to attain a particular object, but, in fact, ‘is revolutionary in its own right’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, p. 116) and thus seeks only its own expansion. Desire, in keeping with Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of concepts as ‘intellectually mobile’ (Deleuze, 1995, p. 122), ‘does not provide blueprints, models, ideals or goals. Rather it experiments; it makes; it is fundamentally aleatory, inventive’ (Grosz, 1995, p. 180). Desire/ excess is what ‘make[s] us vibrate’ (Guattari, 1996, p. 214) with joy.This paper draws on this notion of excess and its links to the ‘process of desire [as] “joy”’ (Deleuze & Parnet, 2002, p. 100) and, while continuing to recognise the constructive role of discourses for identity, seeks to investigate the ways in which transformation occurs. As the data discussed here show, differences in response to the exchange experience are commonly explained in terms of personality. Students who appear withdrawn or depressed are likely to be viewed by teachers as possessing personal characteristics or deficiencies which block adaptation. That this explanation does not draw on the conception of identity as ‘multiple, a site of struggle and subject to change’ (Peirce, 1995, p. 9) indicates the ongoing divide between theory and practice in second language teaching (van Lier, 1997). The discussion here employs this notion of identity as subjectivity, drawing in particular on the work of Deleuze, to reconsider teachers’ and students’ uses of ‘personality’ as an explanatory factor in students’ varying responses to the study abroad experience. Through data from interviews with study abroad students, the multifaceted and unstable processes of identity—processes which shift over time and in interaction with others— can be recognised, as can the drive for coherence and stability which causes the subject to cling to previous identifications. Identity is also demonstrated here to be a multidirectional process in which individuals are positioned by others according to the latter’s own identifications. Three interlinked concepts developed by Deleuze and Guattari (1987) describe movements of identity: the molar, the molecular, and lines of flight. These concepts open a path away from modernist conceptions of the subject with its essentialised, fixed and psychologised personality. In line with an increasing number of contemporary studies which draw on Deleuzian concepts for education (Borgnon, 2007; Semetsky, 2005, 2007; St Pierre, 2004; Zembylas, 2007), these concepts enable a fresh consideration of the kinds of events and capacities which enable or block identity change. In what follows I discuss the experiences of identity change of four students in the light of these concepts. The students—three female and one male—were enrolled in a fulltime English-language programme at an Australian university for a period of between six months and one year. The data are drawn from an ethnographic study of the language programme. Around 40 classroom hours were observed and recorded, and all participants were interviewed three times over their first semester. Participants in the wider study included 15 students (six Japanese, two German, five French, one Italian and one Chinese) and four female teachers (all of Anglo-Australian background). The data that I discuss here are drawn from the interviews and observations, with a focus on four of the students—Tomoko and Noboru from Japan, Chantal from France, and Ursula from Germany (all names are pseudonyms). In my discussion, I include the impact of myself as researcher/interviewer on the data as one of the factors in the co-production of the students’ identities. © 2009 The Author Educational Philosophy and Theory © 2009 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia
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Responsibility and Personality Many studies in the area of identity change for study abroad students refer to the individual as autonomous, and as responsible for any change and for their own successful adjustment. In this view, an individual who takes up the study abroad challenge is assumed to have the capacity to discover whatever it is about the new culture that is needed to be known in order to make the necessary adaptations and adjustments (Anderson, 1994; Chapdelaine & Alexitch, 2004; Oberg, 1960; Paige, 1990; Searle & Ward, 1990).Thus, in the model developed by Furnham and Bochner (1982), the Social Skills and Culture Learning Model of Culture Shock, the onus is on individual students to increase their knowledge of culture-specific modes of interaction which will allow them to adjust to local norms. This view is retained in more recent discussions. Chapdelaine and Alexitch (2004, p. 168), for example, refer to the ‘individual’s ability to make correct attributions about the cultural values, beliefs, behaviours, and norms of the new society’. The onus remains here on the individual student to know or discover the norms of the new culture. This idea that students must take the responsibility for change upon themselves was also seen in comments from teachers in the study. Teachers said of students that ‘they’ ‘need to change a little bit ... to fit in and to feel more comfortable’, and that ‘they’ needed to make themselves understood: ‘they are still using Japanese body language habits, they haven’t realised that something will have to change for them to make themselves understood’. A major factor from the teachers’ point of view is personality; what students bring with them determines the success or otherwise of their adaptation. An assumption is made in language classrooms that learners are there to learn the language, and that if they fail to show signs of adapting or learning, it is likely to be their personality which is at fault. Several teachers felt that whether students would change or not ‘depends on personality’. One teacher, referring specifically to two of the students discussed below, said, ‘Noboru, maybe Tomoko as well, are the ones who are least ... um ... able really to participate as far as language goes and it’s their personality that’s holding them back’. Another teacher, less certain of the reasons for change or its absence, nevertheless postulated personality as a possible cause, ‘I think certain students change and others don’t and I don’t know if it’s because they—I don’t know why that would be, is it a personality thing?’. In order to manage their classes, teachers tend to make unquestioned judgements of students according to currently circulating discourses. Ellwood (2009) discusses the way teachers employed discourses of cultural difference to make erroneous assumptions of their Japanese students as not capable of critical thinking. Here, discourses of personality provide an easy explanation for the frustrations teachers experience with some students. As I will discuss below, discourses of personality are often also drawn upon by students to explain their own failure to adjust. Alongside this continued promotion of an autonomous psychologised subject is a relative absence of acknowledgement of social context. In the perceptions of both the students and their teachers, the role played by context and power, particularly in the form of social relationships, tends to be largely ignored. Omitted from consideration by teachers in this study were ‘the social relationships permitted and negotiated’ within the classroom (Norton & Toohey, 2001, p. 314). The teachers’ understandings tended to © 2009 The Author Educational Philosophy and Theory © 2009 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia
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ignore the ‘situated and embodied difference’ (Appadurai, 1996, p. 13) which contributes both to the complexity of power relationships in interactions and to the ways in which identities are co-constructed in interaction. Deleuze: Three Movements In order to explore change and continuity, and the role played by relationality, the paper draws on three kinds of movement relevant for subjectivity—the molar (or territorialisation), the molecular and lines of flight (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). In this section I briefly introduce these concepts before using them to discuss the student interview data. The molar relates to that which forms the habitus (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1990) of the subject. It refers to ‘subjectification proceedings’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 80), or territorialisations, which can be witnessed in many culturally- or socially-formed dispositions. For example, the normative institutionalised roles of teachers and students provide the molar structures of classroom practices. Likewise, the ways in which subjects sometimes conform to stereotypical cultural or gendered behaviours makes up the molar aspects of their being. The molar thus describes what is fixed and limiting: the ‘knots’ in our identities. Because it is already determined, the molar reduces the range of connections beings can make with the world around them, diminishing their potential for difference and becoming-other. While it is important to note that molar identities are needed in order to function in the world—‘our very reason’ (Deleuze & Parnet, 2002, p. 138), there is a rigid quality to molarised identity which makes it difficult to change. The study abroad experience challenges the molarised identities which have manifested in individuals’ biographies because the new context and conditions unsettle these stable formations of self. However, when the coherent sense of self is threatened, subjects seek to re-molarise, by identifying with normative discourses. This means that attempts at identity change or redefinition of self can involve reterritorialisation where the new state is a re-subjectification; that is, a re-fixing which occurs in the drive for a unified identity. This re-fixing can be retrograde in terms of a clinging to the comfort of known identities; it becomes a retreat to the molar. Or reterritorialisation may also follow a change in identity, when the redefinition of oneself takes the form of a new fixing which clamps down on openness to further change. The second kind of movement, the molecular, refers to connections with others and objects at the micro-level of interactions. It is about affecting and being affected, in ways which may augment or diminish. It comes about through the ‘intermingling of bodies in a society including all the attractions and repulsions, sympathies and antipathies, alterations, amalgamations, penetrations, and expansions that affect bodies of all kinds in their relations to one another’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 90). The importance of the molecular is that it draws our attention to the ways affects and our connections with others spark or block movement or change. Identity change, then, is process of movements involving a letting go of molarised roles and rigid identifications in response to being affected. The power to affect and be affected by others is a crucial part of this change. The molar and the molecular are inextricably interrelated. Thus, on the one hand, molar social codes ‘seek to channel and block’ (Deleuze, 1995, p. 19) the molecular © 2009 The Author Educational Philosophy and Theory © 2009 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia
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flows. On the other hand, the molecular work in any particular context makes or breaks the ability of the molar to function. Students’ passions for and hatreds of teachers, teachers’ frustrations and exhaustions, for example, are all part of the molecular movements in a classroom which are rarely acknowledged yet which have concrete effects. It is the connections and affective responses on the molecular level which make identity change a possible, but not necessary, outcome of study abroad. For the third kind of movement Deleuze uses the term ‘lines of flight’. Lines of flight are neither molar nor molecular but refer to a breakaway from both of these, a de-territorialisation. They are movements away from subjectivity, movements of a-subjectification, of non-subjectification or excess, spaces of transition, moments in which the subject’s sense of self disappears in the face of new, as-yet unknown, possibilities (Albrecht-Crane, 2003). A line of flight does not and cannot operate at the level of a controlling, all-knowing subject, but carries us ‘towards a destination which is unknown, not foreseeable, not pre-existent’ (Deleuze & Parnet, 2002, p. 125). Significantly, it is the molecular which opens possibilities for a line of flight, but the molecular is also capable of returning us to the molar, of resulting in a reterritorialisation onto the known. The experience of a line of flight is one of joy, or desire, as Deleuze and Guattari would also have it.
Retreat to the Molar: Tomoko and Chantal All the students began the semester positively, but their changes within the study abroad context differed greatly.Tomoko expressed, in her class writing and the interview early in semester, her optimism about the possibility of good changes occurring in herself. She predicted that ‘all of my experience in Australia makes me more confident’. Thus, in the first interview, in week one of semester, when I asked her to describe herself, she associated herself with positive thinking. Tomoko: I don’t have negative thinking. I’m positive thinking. If I failed or don’t—if I experienced bad things, I dep—depress—depressed once. Interviewer: You get depressed once. Tomoko: Yeah I once but after that I can never mind. Interviewer: Okay so you can let it go. Tomoko: Yah. So I think I’m positive. However by Week 9 of semester, this positivity appeared to have been compromised. She referred specifically to one of the classes, to the ‘depression’ produced in her and to the need to develop a positive attitude. Tomoko: But we Japanese students have to get like a-a-attitude ... mmm ... positive positive (?) positive attitude for class. Interviewer: Hmm mm you have to? Tomoko: Mm I think so. Interviewer: Why? Tomoko: Ah but Japanese students including me have not so positive attitude. © 2009 The Author Educational Philosophy and Theory © 2009 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia
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By this time, then, there had been a shift in earlier perceptions of herself as a positive person. She reflected on the difference from her personality in Japan. Tomoko: Mmm in Japan I didn’t depress so many times but after came to here I depress more often about my pers—charac—character ... Mmm mmm so I like in—I like my lifestyle in Japan. I have to attend many classes but I’m—I have to part-time job and I attend my club activity. I’m very busy but I like my lifestyle in Japan but now I don’t have enough. Interviewer: To do? Tomoko: Enough to, yeah. Many free time, much free time. She felt responsible for motivating herself to fill this free time, saying ‘I have to find good way to using my time’. Just three months had already passed since I came here, so I got used to this life and I got used to—to be—to no[t] many friends, and teacher, and my—I got used to my life, home, family, all things good, is going good but [...] we don’t have any special problem but I feel something lack, I have to something new thing, I have to start something new. Drawing on discourses familiar to her,Tomoko named this malaise as being similar to the experience, common among her peers in Japan, of ‘May sickness’, a motivational slump which occurs after the excitement of Golden Week, a highly significant holiday in Japan. She referred to this experience as ‘a kind of disease’. Tomoko: And after that we feel we can’t have motivate or—we can’t have motivation or we don’t mmm sorry [checks dictionary] ... mmm ... we tend to—we tend to become do—dour—we tend to become durable or uh ... aah sorry ... don’t motivate. Interviewer: Oh demoralised! Tomoko: Demoralised ... yeah ... many people feel that. Interviewer: After Golden Week? Tomoko: After Golden Week in Japan got used ... but lack of something. Interviewer: Mmhmm, something’s missing. Tomoko: Something missing or after new situation got used to the situation after that we feel [...] I feel kind like situation at the moment I have to find new things new motivation or new opportunity to start something. This lack of motivation had resulted in a situation of conflict, producing Tomoko as struggling to develop strategies to manage her new situation. This struggle is accepted as her own responsibility; it is the ‘I’ who has to make changes. Very bad [said in an undertone, laughs] I don’t like this situation this mmm [...] I eat too much or I [eat] too much or I got enough sleep or I don’t have ... opportunity or assertive—to [be] assertive for everything [...] I have to get—I have to erase—I have to get off this situation. I have to remove this situation. In Tomoko’s case, her isolation from the discourses which normatively produced her identity led to a loss of identity and a loss of agentic choice. In the light of the fact that © 2009 The Author Educational Philosophy and Theory © 2009 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia
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the exchange experience involves the disruption of students’ normative discourses, in this case, it appeared to realise a becoming which entailed ‘a major risk to the subject’s integration and social functioning’ (Grosz, 1994, p. 174). Tomoko actively seeks reterritorialisation in her attempts ‘to get off’ or ‘to remove’ the situation. As Deleuze says, we cling to ‘[o]ur security, the great molar organization that sustains us, [...] the binary machines that give us a well-defined status, [...] the system of overcoding that dominates us—we desire all that’ (1987, p. 227). Whereas previous approaches to identity change might describe Tomoko as suffering from anxiety or low levels of confidence and would see her as fully responsible for her own state of mind, several contextual and cultural factors can be seen to contribute to this situation. First of all Tomoko brings with her to Australia a specific set of cultural discourses with their associated identities. Among them are the activities which produced her identity in Japan, as university student, part-time temple guide, part-time employee. This is the molar aspect of her individual identity which finds no easy equivalent in Australia, where there are no temples, where university students manifest their identities differently, and where she cannot easily find a part-time job. Related to this, were the Japanese students’ strong identifications with Japaneseness or Japanese culture, seen in the reiterations of their Japaneseness, through statements such as, ‘I am Japanese’, ‘Japanese people are [...]’. A number of writers have discussed the way this ‘consuming interest in their national and cultural identity’ (Kowner, 2002, p. 169), or discourses of nihonjinron, operate in Japanese culture to strongly affirm a homogenous Japanese identity. In this study abroad context, the discourse impacts to reinforce students’ identifications with molarised Japanese cultural identities. So for example, Tomoko referred to another German student’s response to the Japanese students: ‘I think she could understand what Japanese people is’. This comment positions Japanese people in a molarised way, and reveals Tomoko’s expectation that the concept of Japaneseness has a final, homogenised, unitary and therefore understandable character. Thirdly, Tomoko’s ‘retreat to the molar’ was also supported by a discursive positioning, in terms of molarised cultural identities, of the Japanese students by the teachers. While the European students—German, French and Italian—were grouped as one category (see also, Ellwood, 2009; Vollmer, 2000) and referred to as lively and easier to get to know, the Japanese students were seen as alien and difficult to teach because of their so-called passivity. A discourse of orientalism operated here in which the Japanese were discounted as valid students. I witnessed, for example, in an observation of the ninth week of a course at which Tomoko’s attendance had been impeccable, the teacher saying to Tomoko as she came into the room, ‘Who are you? I’ve never seen you before’.This teacher, who in interview described the Japanese students as ‘alien’, appeared to have few resources for making affective links with them. Thus, in terms of the molecular, the Japanese students’ affective and connective possibilities appeared more limited than was the case for the non-Japanese students.This discursive positioning also occurred student to student. Thus for example, Tomoko’s experience of Doris, one of the German students, was of disapproval. She described a particular expression of impatience and annoyance often seen on Doris’s face when one of the Japanese students was speaking. As Tomoko said ‘when I see those face, I can’t make © 2009 The Author Educational Philosophy and Theory © 2009 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia
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opinion more’. (For a discussion of factors impacting on the Japanese students’ classroom participation, see Ellwood & Nakane, 2009.) Tomoko’s retreat to the molar must be seen in this context, as the product of the complex interplay of numerous factors: her own biography, the discursive norms of Japanese life, including the impacts of nihonjinron, but in particular the limited availability of connective possibilities, aggravated by the molarised views of Japanese cultural identity held by teachers and some of the other students. It would be inadequate to assess Tomoko’s responses as purely internal and psychological, and to attribute her with the need to develop qualities of risk taker. Rather, it is important also to consider ‘the unstated and unstable interaction of multiple factors’ (Kumaravadivelu, 2003, p. 29) which impact the affective possibilities which enable change. In a similar way to Tomoko, Chantal can be viewed as retreating to the safety of the molar. However in her case one could say that she made little attempt to leave it. Chantal’s purpose in coming on exchange was to improve her English language skills because she ‘had’ to. Because I’m a student so I study foreign languages, Spanish and English, so I had to go to the country [laugh] to be able to speak. I mean you can learn language at school but it’s [laugh] different. I mean you can’t speak fluently at school if you don’t go to the country. She had also come to Australia because the opportunity was there: ‘I heard that there were an exchange in October and nothing was planned so I just applied because first of all it was only six months [...] I don’t like—I like travelling but—’. A relative absence of optimism or excitement and a sense of obligation are implicit in these comments. Like the other French students in the programme, the opportunity to go on exchange had been presented rather serendipitously and she had taken it for the sake of improving her language skills, even though she was not a keen traveller and described herself as shy: ‘I think I’m shy, very shy and um not so not so open and ... because I don’t dare to speak in English sometimes because I’m afraid to make mistakes or something’. The short time—six months, the time limit for the French students—had appealed to her as being not too long, unlike the one-year exchange period for the Japanese students. When asked in her first interview what she would like to achieve while in Australia she did say she sought to be ‘more independent perhaps’. This independence, she revealed, was specifically from her boyfriend of five years. Although initially she found independence liberating—citing an opportunity to watch whatever she wanted on television—she eventually found it onerous, saying two months later that she was ‘looking forward to going home’. This time she said of her boyfriend ‘I’ve been with him for five years so and we’ve never been separated for more than one month so I find it pretty hard to cope with that’. However this difficulty coping was in the light of possible alternatives: ‘if I had been single I think um I would have enjoyed it more because yeah ... there are many opportunities here’. In this way her molarised fidelity to her boyfriend appeared to block new connections. While sexual fidelity is considered a virtue in many sections of Western culture, it can be clearly seen to maintain social order by blocking the flow of new connections. Chantal’s statement, ‘if I had been single I think I would have enjoyed more because, yeah’, © 2009 The Author Educational Philosophy and Theory © 2009 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia
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expresses an awareness of the blocking of the molecular affect which leads to new connections and expansions. At the same time, another factor also functioned to molarise Chantal’s exchange experience. This was her Australian half-brother, a result of her mother’s first marriage to an Australian man. Chantal’s half-brother managed a hotel in the countryside and it became her habit to visit him every weekend. Because of this simple event, her life in Australia became very circumscribed: weekdays busy at university in the city and weekends with her brother. Thus although she did meet people on the weekends, these meetings were generally limited to the hotel where she was regarded as ‘the cute French one’. I was therefore not surprised when she commented of her experience of Australia that ‘I don’t like many things here’ and she looked forward to going home because of ‘the way of life’ in Australia did not appeal to her. These two males—her boyfriend and her brother—contributed in different ways to a circumscribed existence which in turn circumscribed her possibilities of new connections. A third factor which also constrained her connections derived from her various responses to many of the other students in the class. Different kinds of reticence seemed to be in operation which blocked connecting with them. She made little attempt to participate if allocated to a group with Japanese students, stating ‘They didn’t understand what I was trying to say so there was nothing to say’. As for the other female French students (all immigrant French), she had a clear aversion to them stating variously ‘well I don’t really have connections with the—’; ‘I’m not here to be with French’; ‘I don’t feel like being with them’; and of one in particular ‘sometimes it’s pissing me off when she always want to—to— to—not to boast, but to make everybody laughing’. In this way her classroom connections were also reduced, leading again to a reduction in the possibilities for her own becoming something other. The Disjunctive Power of the Molecular: Noboru As stated earlier the second kind of movement, the molecular, is about how we affect and are affected by others in ways which allow or disallow change. The molecular offers one direction of movement away from the molar, insofar as our desires and dissatisfactions can lead us to challenge the rigid norms of society. At the same time, the molar works to clamp down on desire because of desire’s potential to escape social norms entirely. In the case of Chantal, above, we saw some glimmers of such desires in her reflections on her situation but she did not enact these desires and remained within the molar. For Noboru, desires for change were strong in both idea and action, but these desires were ultimately undone by the strength of the molecular. For Noboru, the exchange experience was an opportunity to rethink his career direction. He saw it as his ‘one chance to broad[en] my world [...] and change career’. He was on exchange from a prestigious Japanese university where he was enrolled in engineering but he was uncertain about the validity of this career for himself. He described engineering as ‘boring’, saying that he ‘hate[d] the engineering because I saw a lot of engineers who has narrow, narrow world’. He described his ‘task’ as being ‘to find out what I do in my future and maybe umm ahhh mmm management or ...’. Noboru actively sought to make friends outside the class in a number of ways. One of these was to enrol in a scuba-diving course which he specifically chose because it was not © 2009 The Author Educational Philosophy and Theory © 2009 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia
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attended by any Japanese classmates. Another was his choice to live with a host family in order to maximise his contact with the new culture. He also referred in each interview to ongoing friendships with a Norwegian boy who he had met soon after arrival, as well as to an Australian, an Italian, and a Chinese who he had met on the scuba-diving course. However, underlying this ‘task’ of clarifying his career direction and his focus on new experiences and new friendships, Noboru was struggling with a relationship break-up. This was intimated in the second interview in week 9 of semester which ended with him concealing his tears by looking for something in his bag. He had been talking about being happier on exchange than he had been in Japan but nevertheless he was, he said, ‘not sure it’s a best place for me’. I asked ‘what do you want that you are not getting in this place?’. Initially he replied ‘friends’: I need more, especially in class ... so if I got a lot of friends, I’m ... happy and uh I’m ... yeah ... yeah I would say if ... if ...—I’m careful about my statement—... if ... I ... if my ... girlfriend come with me in this Australia, I’d be more happy. In my field notes I commented that the statement had been made ‘as a declaration from the heart, tentative, private, almost tearfully’. At that time, I assumed this to be a momentary sense of loss or an aspect of the ‘downward curve’ of culture shock and in that sense a ‘normal’ event in the exchange process. However in the final interview, at the end of semester, he referred to a feeling of having just woken up after a long period of oblivion: ‘I can’t remember what I’m do—what I did, and it’s hard to remember. It’s like I just arrived here two weeks ago. Like when I wake up, it was the day before [final] presentation and I wake up maybe one day’. He described his presentation as ‘a disaster’ and said ‘I used to be logical ... I don’t know why I was so ... why I haven’t manage my schedule for prepare my presentation’. The mystery of this experience however became clear later in the interview when I asked what he had found to be the biggest difficulty of being in Australia. His first response to my question was to clarify its scope, asking, ‘including personal difficulty?’. I replied ‘yes, inside the class, outside the class, anywhere’. Noboru then named his biggest problem as maintaining what he called the high tension which he had felt at the beginning of his sojourn. He explained this as ‘too much energy and encouragement of something [...] when you drink alcohol you got high tension [laughs] and you started dance and you started talk and talk—talk and ... and do funny things’. The high tension, he said, had been present at the beginning of his stay: ‘because I was excited to being here and succeed to go abroad for study. It was my long-term dream since I was a 12 years old’. He described this period as one in which ‘I try to speak to a lot of person and I curious about a lot of things’. Indeed, I had witnessed this bold energy in my classroom observations during the first week of the programme where Noboru volunteered a story to the whole group in response to the teacher’s request to the class. However, in my later observations, this level of participation was absent and a reason for that was revealed in the interview. Noboru: I have a lot of stress because of my language skill, because of my friendship ... uh friendship with not the friend here ... but the friend ... somewhere [laughs] ye-es ... you know, girlfriend and—[laughs] and—. © 2009 The Author Educational Philosophy and Theory © 2009 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia
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Interviewer: Is she still your girlfriend? Noboru: No [very low volume]... that can be ... big reason I think it’s very difficult to keep myself in high tension. Noboru then described his feelings for this girlfriend as being ‘deeper than the Japanese sea, deeper than any other sea’. He explained what had taken place. Seven weeks earlier his girlfriend, who was also on exchange but in Europe, had suddenly stopped contacting him: Even if I write an e-mail she wouldn’t reply and when I call her she wouldn’t took her phone because she know the phone is from me ... and then I spend more than one month ... trying to contact ... in this month I did nothing without thinking and worrying about her, so I lost maybe 40 days only thinking about. I think that is the one reason I can’t remember what I do. The purpose of detailing this personal story has been to show the way in which affect impacts ‘silently’ on the trajectory of the exchange process. Noboru’s initial optimism and energy, on the face of it, followed a recognised path on the culture shock curve. However knowing the details of his story helps us to see the specificity of events.The loss of his girlfriend appeared to tie up all his affect which diminished his being to the extent that he was as if not present. His inability to remember what he had done or should be doing equates with an inability to be aware of the moment. His continued growth and movement in the exchange process was effectively blocked by this negative affect. Without the interview process and the research, this event would have remained unseen. The teacher who assessed Noboru’s final presentation, for example, was unaware of this unfolding personal drama and expressed irritation with his lack of preparation and apparent failure to take the task seriously. Although he took up an agentic position early in his sojourn, the unpredictable and uncontrollable events with his girlfriend blocked his agentic flow leaving him, at the moment when the research project ended, with a deep sense of sadness. However as a result of his assessment of these events, namely that he had taken the relationship too seriously and had been foolish: ‘she ... did her own things for her future. She get seriously about her future but I get seriously about relationship and ... and ... soooo ... I feel, what I’m doing [laughs] what I’m doing, how idiot I was’, he now resolved to change his approach and to think more about himself because no relationships were secure. Because [of] her I change, I notice I change and I have to think [of] myself, I have to think more about myself, maybe only myself [laughs] rather than think with the partner, there is no guarantee with getting together the rest of life. His change then involved a closing down to the possibilities of new identities, to the possibilities of positive affect, as he struggled to come to terms with the negative affect produced by the relationship break-up with his girlfriend. On a Line of Flight: Ursula Deleuze’s term, lines of flight, refers to a movement or break from both the molar and the molecular. Since it is the molar and molecular which provide a sense of self, lines of © 2009 The Author Educational Philosophy and Theory © 2009 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia
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flight are a-subjective moments, full of potential and a sense of liberation. As Deleuze says, they are neither controllable, nor something that can be generated by a rational subject (Deleuze & Parnet, 2002). Rather they are spaces of transition and openness to as-yet unknown possibilities. Where Noboru sought to put himself in the way of this newness and potential for change, but was overcome by the power of the molecular, Ursula seems to have achieved an openness recognisable as a line of flight. Like Tomoko, Ursula began the semester with optimistic views of the changes she expected in herself. Study abroad was seen as an opportunity for change. Early in the semester, week 2, she said: Yeah the most important thing will be that I think more about myself, about my way to live ... um ... which is the better way? or which makes it easier to be comfortable with yourself? It was also viewed by her as providing a challenge: Another important thing is to see how you can live in another country where you don’t know anybody and how you react, how you feel, how you can handle your bad situations when you can’t speak in your mother tongue and you have to express yourself and it’s sometimes very difficult because you don’t know all the words you normally use so ... This opportunity and challenge would not have been possible, Ursula felt, had she stayed in Germany where, she said, ... you are limited in your possibilities because you go everyday the same way, it’s not that you use the same street but you go—you have your life, you have your same—the same friends [...] your routines, and it’s very hard to—to get out of this routine um in the same country. We have to change and lots of people wouldn’t understand it, it’s definite more easier to go to another country and to make it there too, it’s like a new beginning too, maybe you change some things you don’t um ... you don’t like or you wouldn’t have done or you would be—you wished they have never happened in Germany and you try to a new beginning yourself. While there are clear differences in the language levels of these four students, there is a commonality in their expectations of good changes, seen for example in Tomoko’s ‘more confident’ and Ursula’s ‘easier to be comfortable with yourself’. However, Ursula’s desire to ‘get out of this routine’ points towards a definite wish to move away from old molarisations which is not evident in the data from Tomoko or Chantal who desire rather to escape unpleasantness. In terms of factors specific to the individual, one contextual factor which appeared to contribute to Ursula’s sense of freedom from routine was separation from her family. In her first interview, she expressed an awareness that living away from home could provide opportunities to develop herself. I’ve a very big family, I have six brothers and sisters and I am the oldest and I feel sometimes a little responsible for them when it’s um—um—I have never © 2009 The Author Educational Philosophy and Theory © 2009 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia
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lived alone without friends or family and that is very important for me to look how can I handle it and am I strong enough to get through it and I what um—what um advantages can I—can I take from the situation to develop myself. To be strong and to get ‘yes, I can do it’! For Ursula, it was possible, in this new context, to abandon the molar identity of responsible older sister. In this way, she differs from Tomoko in terms of an escape from molar identities. Where Tomoko appears to seek routine, Ursula feels a sense of freedom without it. Supporting Ursula’s desire to escape molarised identities are both the classroom context and my own response to her in an interview. In the classroom context, in terms of positioning by teachers, and in contrast with two rather rebellious French girls and a very domineering German girl, Ursula was unremarkable. She was neither a particularly quiet student, nor a particularly assertive one. Because of this, no strong identifications appeared to be attached to her by others. She was ‘outside the radar’ and this enabled an openness to identity change which was not the case for Tomoko who was continually aligned with molarised identifications, both by herself and by the teachers. In terms of the interviews, one of the contextual factors which I would postulate as being relevant to this openness to change was my own ignorance, displayed during the first interview, about the impact on identity of the relationship between the two Germanys. When I asked Ursula which part of Germany she was from, she replied: ‘From Berlin. I was born on the eastern part [›]... but I yeah—and I lived in the eastern part’. Here her raised intonation and pause after she told me she was ‘born on the eastern part’ can be read as a hesitation, a possible question to me about the significance of an East German identity. However in my ignorance at the time, I missed the significance of this and offered a bland ‘okay that’s interesting’ and went on immediately to ask her about the other English-speaking countries in which she had lived. In this way, unlike the Japanese students who are strongly molarised by the teachers’ stereotypical understandings of their cultural identities, my failure to position Ursula with a particular identity can be seen as freeing her from that identification. Both in the class and in interview, Ursula escapes the imposition of molarised identities by others. The sense of freedom produced in this combination of factors resulted in different outcomes for Ursula. In her second interview, in week 10, Ursula expressed delight in a sense of expansion in mind and personality and described the ease with which she was making social contacts. The description she gives here demonstrates the importance of affective connection with others for becoming. I feel so relaxed and I feel that I’m—that my mind grows, it’s like I feel it’s my personality grows, I never um um ... I’m so communicative at the moment and met so many new people and I don’t have any problems to talk to them and to um yeah when I remember or when I look back in the past I was always sometimes a bit shy and was a bit ‘Oh my God what shall I say?’ and ‘Am I interesting enough?’ and that’s not a problem at all mm its like ... great! and I really feel the change. This sense of expansion was marked by a feeling that there were no limits to what she could do or achieve. © 2009 The Author Educational Philosophy and Theory © 2009 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia
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This limitlessness is indicative of a line of flight. The only limit is felt by Ursula to be in her mind, in other words, in the representational and signifying nature of language which limits and fixes. In fact, at one and the same time, this limit is challenged, and the sense of limitlessness is expressed, by the unvoiced ‘wow!’ and Ursula’s recourse to gesture. At this moment, she is carried towards the unknown, the unforeseeable, as ‘pure movement’ (Deleuze & Parnet, 2002, p. 127), an asubjective experience which exemplifies Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of desire. Ursula: It’s like a knot that it’s undoed suddenly. Interviewer: You can go anywhere. Ursula: Yeah [laughs] I feel this [laughs] It’s like ‘Okay, that was the first step. What comes next?’. This kind of desire—an asubjective force—does not seek reterritorialisation or resubjectification; that is, it does not seek a new identity, but rather it ‘make[s] us vibrate’ (Guattari, 1996, p. 205). Undoing the Knots in Becoming The deployment of a Deleuzian conceptual scheme in this discussion permits a different kind of reading of identity transformations of students on study abroad. While all the students in this study began the semester optimistically and with expectations of identity change, the results were not the same. For Tomoko and Noboru, a conjunction of contingencies produced negative affect and these led to ‘a black hole’ of despair (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 229) which in turn limited further connection and positive affect. As Deleuze comments, ‘[S]adness, sad affects, [...] reduce our power to act’ (2002, p. 61). Tomoko’s movements of desire can be seen to be ultimately forms of reterritorialisation in which desires to escape from particular identifications are, at the same time, desires to escape to other identifications, in other words to re-territorialise. Chantal too sought to reterritorialise, limiting the possibilities for affective connections and ultimately seeking to return to the safety of the familiar. For Noboru, the break-up with his girlfriend produced disjunctions of affect which blocked his capacity to experience the new context. This, too, is a reterritorialisation which foreclosed on positive change. For Ursula, a conjunction of positive affect in connection and freedom from stereotyped positioning appears to have produced a line of flight as an experience of joy. Importantly, Ursula’s experience was an a-subjective one in which a sense of a fixed identity was dissolved, enabling new possibilities to open to the unknown. From this discussion of a short period of six months, and drawing only on the students’ subjective expressions of their experiences at specific moments in that period, it can be seen that, although subjects do undergo change, the direction and result of such © 2009 The Author Educational Philosophy and Theory © 2009 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia
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change is not necessarily predictable and cannot be said to involve conscious acts of agentic choice. Connections and disconnections resulting from powers to affect and be affected play a significant role in change, however, where such connections lead remains unknown and beyond conscious control. Perhaps the only intentionality possible lies in remaining open to connection. This Deleuzian framework opens up new ways of conceptualising identity change for students on exchange programmes and has important implications for teachers. The concept of the molar points to the ways in which individuals are pulled towards the safety of known discourses and habituated self-understandings. The teacher’s role here can be to facilitate greater self-reflection on the ways in which habitus forms and becomes entrenched, thus allowing students objective insight into the constructed natures of their identities. The concept of the molecular draws attention to the importance of affect and the vital role it plays in classrooms. Positive affect must be engendered in all the ways teachers can utilize. These include maintaining openness to difference, using relevant materials, gaining students’ input into content and method, and so on. At the same time, negative affect can be allowed expression and investigated in relation to molar constraints and reterritorialisations. Most importantly, awareness of the possibility of lines of flight can alert teachers to the potential for openness to change in all students, a longing for which could be seen in the students in this study. Finally open discussion of these concepts in classrooms can also enable identity change for teachers who, no less than students, are a molar-molecular machine seeking joy.The goal then would be to manifest teaching as an experience of joy. The concepts discussed in this paper rest on the recognition that we do not exist as singular and individual beings separate and apart from each other and the world. Rather, there is an always already being-with-others/being-in-the-world, an inescapable connection between the self and the world, between the self and the ‘outside’. All interaction is a process of becoming if we allow exposure to this outside. We disallow exposure both through seeking other than what is—as with Tomoko and her desires for familiar ways of being in the world, as with Noboru as he focuses on his disappearing girlfriend—and when we assume that ‘what is’ is already other—as with the teacher who classifies her Japanese students as alien and is thereby unable to see them as valid students, and as with Chantal who closes herself off from peer connections in the classroom. Allowing exposure means recognizing the excess, the overflow that cannot be accounted for in conceptions of ‘us’ and ‘them’. In order to encounter change and others with joy, both students and teachers must turn away from interactions which are carried out solely on the basis of comprehension/recognition according to already programmed perceptions of self and other. Only in this way can we ‘receive from the other beyond the capacity of the I’ (Lévinas, 1969, p. 51). If the ‘unassimilable surplus’ (Lévinas, 1986, p. 353) of the subject (self and other) can be accepted, desire/joy can flow in a double deterritorialisation and becoming (other) is enabled. Coda This paper has sought to work within Deleuze’s call to put his philosophy to use. The Deleuzian conceptual scheme offered here goes against the trend in study abroad © 2009 The Author Educational Philosophy and Theory © 2009 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia
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literature which seeks to find ways to encourage students to adapt to the new culture and sees teachers as facilitators of that process of adaptation. Such a process, however, is inherently molarising since at its foundation is a privileging by teachers of the dominant discourses of their own culture. Deleuzian concepts provide an invitation to teachers to remain open to their students in ways which have the potential to enable something unexpected to occur within their own subjectivities as well as within the subjectivities of their students. What Deleuze offers then is a recognition not only of some of the contextual factors which impact on the students’ and teachers’ capacities to untie their own knots, but also a conception of subjectivity open to having its knots untied. This conception has benefits for all concerned. References Albrecht-Crane, C. (2003) An Affirmative Theory of Desire, JAC, 23:1, pp. 563–598. Albrecht-Crane, C. & Slack, J. D. (2003) Toward a Pedagogy of Affect, in: J. D. Slack (ed.), Animations of Deleuze and Guattari (New York, Peter Lang Publishing), pp. 191– 216. Anderson, L. F. (1994) A New Look at an Old Construct: Cross-cultural adaptation, International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 18:3, pp. 293–328. Appadurai, A. (1996) Modernity at Large: Cultural dimensions of globalization (Minneapolis, MN, University of Minnesota Press). Block, D. (2007) The Rise of Identity in SLA Research, Post Firth and Wagner (1997), The Modern Language Journal, 91, pp. 863–876. Borgnon, L. (2007) Conceptions of the Self in Early Childhood: Territorializing identities, Educational Philosophy and Theory, 39:3, pp. 264–274. Bourdieu, P. & Passeron, J. C. (1990) Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture (Newbury Park, CA, Sage). Chapdelaine, R. F. & Alexitch, L. (2004) Social Skills Difficulty: Model of culture shock for international graduate students, Journal of College Student Development, 45:2, pp. 167– 184. Davis, D. D. (2000) Breaking Up [at] Totality: A rhetoric of laughter (Carbondale and Edwardsville, IL, Southern Illinois University Press). Deleuze, G. (1995) Negotiations, 1972–1990 (New York, Columbia University Press). Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1983) Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (Minneapolis, MN, University of Minnesota Press). Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (London, Continuum). Deleuze, G. & Parnet, C. (2002) Dialogues II (New York, Columbia University Press). Ellwood, C. (2009) Uninhabitable Identifications: Unpacking the production of racial difference in a TESOL classroom, in: R. Kubota & A. Lin (eds), Race, Culture, and Identities in Second-language Education (London & New York, Routledge), pp. 101–117. Ellwood, C. & Nakane, I. (2009) Privileging of Speech in EAP and Mainstream University Classrooms: A critical evaluation of participation, TESOL Quarterly, 43:2, pp. 203–230. Furnham, A. & Bochner, S. (1982) Social Difficulty in a Foreign Culture: An empirical analysis of culture shock, in: S. Bochner (ed.), Cultures in Contact (Oxford, Pergamon Press), pp. 161–198. Grosz, E. (1994) Volatile Bodies:Toward a corporeal feminism (Bloomington, IN, Indiana University Press). Grosz, E. (1995) Space, Time, and Perversion: The politics of bodies (Sydney, Allen & Unwin). Guattari, F. (1996) A Liberation of Desire, in: G. Genosko (ed.), A Guattari Reader (Cambridge, MA, Blackwell Publishers), pp. 204–214. © 2009 The Author Educational Philosophy and Theory © 2009 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia
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