Blank Maps

‘Other maps are such shapes, with their islands and capes!
But we’ve got our brave Captain to thank’
(So the crew would protest) ‘that he’s bought us the best—
A perfect and absolute blank!’

(The Hunting of the Snark, Carroll, [1876]1974, p. 56)

A becoming-teacher – as brave as a Captain with a ‘blank map’ – draws an unfurling chart with children during a civics class. With a mind-mapping activity that entails co-constructing subject content collaboratively, on the go, navigating the lesson becomes an intuitive practice guided by a ‘blank map’. For the becoming-teacher, mind-mapping as an activity requires experimentation and playing by ear in ‘presentness’, on the one hand, and knowledgeability in subject content, on the other.

Still, expeditions rely on more than brave captains. Captains and teachers alike are but part of the crews they work with, and the ships they sail. In fact, the entire configuration becomes a relational cluster with the seas they travel on – part of an assemblage, if you will. It is then the assemblage that draws and re-draws blank map routes.

‘Blank maps’ must not be mistaken as mere metaphors. Whilst ‘mind-mapping’ happens to be the descriptive name of a commonly deployed lesson activity, experimentation and ‘navigating by a blank map’, conversely, speaks of the speculative process of teaching as chart creation. In fact, the entire ecology of education is assembled as prospective blank maps to navigate by; the curriculum, the syllabus, the lesson plan, the activity instruction, the schedule – all examples of blank maps. ‘Blank maps’ are therefore maps that arrange bodies to specific space-times all the while remaining open for experimentation. Blank maps are invitations to worlding (Manning, 2020) where lands are created as we move through them. I suggest that such worlding might be facilitated through navigation by ‘blank maps’ guided by transitory coordinates.    

This mosaic follows the unfolding events of a civics class where becoming- teacher is followed navigating ‘presentness’ using only a blank map during a mind-mapping activity. The question asked is, ‘how do encounters unfold and with what effects?’

Mind-Mapping

It is morning and becoming-teacher has just gone through today’s schedule. “Do you know what pollock is?” becoming-teacher asks when announcing today’s menu (F, p. 2). Having agreed that it is a fish, the nineteen children and becoming-teacher move on to the scheduled civics where mind-mapping is on today’s lesson plan.

Succes-Priming

What do you come to think of when I say Sweden? You have three minutes to write, becoming-teacher says holding three fingers into the air. Becoming-teacher reminds the class to write small since their mini-whiteboards are small. Becoming-teacher walks around the classroom, exemplifying areas one might write about. One minute of writing left, becoming-teacher announces. […]

Now you have to put down your pens. Oh my god! You could have written for ten more minutes. Look at everything you’ve written and everything we’ve learnt, becoming-teacher declares. Becoming-teacher then draws a popsicle stick with a child’s name on it to decide who gets to answer, saying; Try to figure out what you want to say if I draw your name. (F, p. 2)

Through verbal and/or bodily cues becoming-teacher proactively guides children: three fingers push into the air to visually demonstrate how many minutes they have at their disposal; the physical area of the mini-whiteboard is commented on to make child-hand aware of the need to adjust font size; the class is offered suggestions on areas to write about, thereby avoiding reducing the task to a mere  memory test. Through becoming-teacher’s assisting comments, ‘hows’ become bypassed so that children’s efforts can be devoted to subject content and identifying ‘whats’. Said differently, matters of form are sidestepped and subject content brought to the fore. This process can be seen as a form of success-priming, a practice that serves to help children succeed.

Another instance of success-priming unfolds as becoming-teacher exclaims, ‘Oh my god! You could have written for ten more minutes! Look at everything you’ve written and everything we’ve learnt!’. Boosting the collective becomes the overture to ensuing tasks where children are asked to plunge into unknown waters and share individual contributions publicly. Success-priming thereby entails dodging practical obstacles all the while encouraging children to try. The projection of positive renditions of children’s unfolding knowing is enabled by becoming-teacher at all times keeping one step ahead of the class to help them navigate the path forward – ‘Try to figure out what you want to say if I draw your name’.

Popsicle Stick-Shifts and Transversal Inquiring

During the ensuing nineteen minutes of mind-mapping, a stark relief emerges between rigidly scripted turn-taking practices and what I propose as transversal inquiring guided by a ‘blank map’. ‘Transversal inquiring’ borrows from Manning’s call for ‘radical pedagogies’ where “[t]ransversal operations for the creation of ways of knowing emerge from the ground up. They are singular and speculative at once, emboldened by the creativity of the everyday” (2020, p. 12). Mind-mapping thus builds on the child as “researcher of life, and maker of worlds” (Manning, 2020, p. 6), where becoming-teacher moves with children’s unforeseen and singular contributions. A speculative practice guided by a blank map unfolds that unfurls routes in accord with children’s contributions So how does the practice of popsicle stick-shift work?

Popsicle sticks with children’s names on them are drawn from a jar to decide whose turn it is to read from one’s mini-whiteboard. No name-stick is snuck away[1], as all bodies are regarded as equally competent. Answers feed a growing mind-map that stretches its crooked tentacles across the whiteboard. Each child’s verbal contribution generates a material counterpart in the written format mediated by becoming-teacher. The iteration between individual ‘offering’ of reflections and ‘writing’, becomes a sort of visual affirmation of individual contributions constructed as collective knowing.

A look now at the tandem movement between becoming keywords on a mind-map (left side), and the ‘transversal inquiring’ through verbal and bodily speculation (right side). Popsicle images mark shifts to new contributors (becoming-teacher: BT):

Illustration 1: Mind-Mapping as Transversal Inquiring

The distilled rhythms of mind-mapping unfold as follows[2]:

II:‘Popsicle stick’-answering- ‘transversal-inquiring’-writing:II

Each popsicle stick-shift keeps becoming-teacher on their toes. With no way of knowing what children will come to say, becoming-teacher is balancing on the cusp of presentness in each exchange. The growing word-creature on the front whiteboard contracts the immediacy of children’s creative contributions with the authority of becoming-teacher being the one writing keywords. Bodies collaboratively craft mind-map tentacle-arms.

There is a productive ambivalence between the becoming ‘Knowledge’ pinned to the whiteboard, and the experimentation through transversal inquiring; because while keywords materialize and stabilize, children’s voices keep sounding erratic narratives with no fixed paths – “knowing is about finding a way, fielding a map” (Manning, 2020, p. 7). Keywords attain a performative function; keywords offer a dutiful shadow language that merges with children’s probing inquiring. Thus, sidetracks become main roads when navigating by blank maps.  

Worlding as Navigation by Blank Maps

Blank maps should not be taken as an absence of maps nor as ‘anything goes’. Instead, the blank map conceptualizes how an assemblage – here a becoming-teacher-and-children-‘mind-mapping’-civics-assemblage – actualizes the drawing and re-drawing of lines through joint experimentation.

In asking for ‘radical pedagogies’, Manning urges for ‘heterogeneous dialogue with heterogenous fields’ where ‘opening one’s own assemblages’ also must entail a willingness to put at risk what we may have come to know as Knowledge with capital ‘K’ (2020, p. 4 ff.); travels themselves become ways of knowing, Manning suggests. In the mind-mapping context, I translate this as the willingness to put yourself and singular and static versions of Knowledge at risk to stay open to additional ways of knowing. How often does education not ask children to put themselves out there and invest in education, even though it remains unclear to what extent education manages to offer an education with problems worth investing in?

The worn out saying summarizes the core of the matter, ‘it’s the journey that matters, not the destination’. The ‘speculative pragmatism’ prompted by ‘following and remaking’ suggests that “[t]he child’s ‘why’ question is never, after all, a question that could properly be answered. It is a question that begs a worlding” (Manning, 2020, p. 8). I propose that mind-mapping is a form of transversal inquiring that resonates with ‘worlding’. Mind-mapping involves intuitive navigation by blank maps where civics become an open process guided by children’s contributions. Questions leap between ‘what gender might have meant for kings and princesses of the forlorn’ before being thrust into present day situations and personal accounts of family travels. It is an oscillation where child- and adult-milieu collaboratively explore the boundaries of civics and each other in a process of becoming rather than static entities. Put plainly, their joint venture is a worlding, a navigation by a blank map.

The Center of Peripherality

How might a Deleuzoguattarian lens help make sense of mind-mapping events? Travelling at the center of peripherality makes mind-mapping an event in which the subject is deterritorialized and then reterritorialized by becoming-teacher’s ramifying co-storying or a new popsicle stick. Experimenting in the peripheral have children become the ‘experts’, which nullifies stagnated power relations and minimizes the risk of failure. It is not that mind-mapping as activity prevents failure, it is that there is no such thing as failing in the assemblage. There are but degrees of difficulty for becoming-teacher to detect clever connections related to the subject of civics in children’s answers.

In a late popsicle stick turn, a child is seen gazing in silence at the mini-whiteboard filled with scribbles:

The child looks at the mini-whiteboard on the desk and has nothing to add to the mind-map. Becoming-teacher scans the mini-whiteboard from afar and says, There is already so much on the whiteboard that you have contributed to. (F, p. 2-3)

An effect of the growing mind-map is an increasing risk that the three suggestions on the mini-whiteboard have already been listed when your turn to answer finally comes. In other words, the level of difficulty increases the longer it takes before your name turns up on a popsicle stick. But becoming-teacher, always one step ahead and determined to ensure the children’s success, has already noticed what is happening. Instead of probing for an answer, becoming-teacher simply affirms the child’s contribution by saying, ‘There is already so much on the whiteboard that you have contributed to ’. The comment cancels the child’s silence as a sign of not knowing and turns it into a liable consequence of their collective knowing.

Success-priming thus indicates that becoming-teacher continuously enacts children as capable, knowledgeable, and desiring to contribute with the means available in each moment. Sometimes this can be attained by a simple switch from a focus on individual efforts to collective achievements. As becoming-teacher makes failure increasingly implausible, experimentation becomes less risky and the children become be more willing to contribute.

I therefore propose that unfolding encounters and unpredictability is what this becoming-teacher nurtures. One way of supporting the proliferation of experimentation is through success-priming. Or perhaps is success-priming a response to children’s uncertainty? Perhaps is becoming-teacher determined to show the potentiality of hesitant contributions. Yet, a precondition for experimentation is becoming-teacher’s capacity to navigate presentness by blank maps in the first place. Experimentation, meanwhile, requires mobilizing resources to plug children’s inventive answers into. Put simply, it seems that becoming-teacher’s broad repertoire of subject content knowing comes to augment children’s affective capacities through joint worlding.

References

Carroll, L. ([1876]1974). The annotated Snark: the full text of Lewis Carroll's great nonsense epic The hunting of the snark and the original illustrations by Henry Holiday. Penguin.

Manning, E. (2020). Radical pedagogies and metamodelings of knowledge in the making. Critical Studies in Teaching and Learning, 8(SI), 1-16.