Abstract:
Too often when teachers let go of traditional control in their teaching to embrace more student-led approaches, they acknowledge some of the challenges in opening up new spaces for learning. But is this acknowledgement and letting go enough? We plug in Deleuze and Guattari to this problem, asking if this might be seen as a malfunction of “desiring machines” (apparatuses) and desires unleashed for their own sake. To help delineate this impasse of desire(s) we ask: What would Gert Biesta, the arch-critic of learnification say about this moment? We employ an example of a community dance artist in an early childhood centre to explore what ‘good’ functioning desiring machines might look like and how a pedagogy of affect may be productive.