Following John
Simon Says is a children's game for three or more players. One player takes the role of "Simon" and issues instructions […] to the other players, which should be followed only when prefaced with the phrase "Simon says". Players are eliminated from the game by either following instructions that are not immediately preceded by the phrase, or by failing to follow an instruction which does include the phrase "Simon says". It is the ability to distinguish between genuine and fake commands, rather than physical ability, that usually matters in the game; in most cases, the action just needs to be attempted.
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Following John […] A similar Swedish child's game is "Följa John" meaning "following John", where physical actions are conducted by "John" […], and where remaining participants are replicating the activities shown by John. However, the commands are silent, and based on the remaining participants observation of John's actions. (“Simon Says", 2023)
Early on we learn how to play Simon says. We practice in schoolyards, by dinner tables, and when crammed into the backseat of cars where we become experts at rapidly following the instructions of the shifting Simons in our lives – the faster we follow a genuine order, the more successful we become.
The Swedish version of the game Följa John, or Following John, has made away with the excess of verbal instruction and the need to specify whento imitate. Instead, all aspects of a John are to be imitated, and the slogan is – don’t think, justdo! Rather than focusing on speed, Following John requires a different skill set where the key is to perfect imitation.
This mosaic examines a process where a becoming-teacher observes and assists a qualified teacher during a Swedish lesson and what happens in an encounter where becoming-teacher comes across what is called ‘pausing’. The inquiry engages in an exploration of education as a striated space in which ’imitation’ and ’following’ are intersected by episodes of pausing. In what follows we will look at the effects of this pattern by exploring ‘how encounters with pausing unfold and their ensuing effects’.
Watch and Learn
Twenty minutes into eighty-five minutes of Swedish, a group of seven children are still doing exercises in a workbook. Becoming- teacher is in this classroom to observe and assist a qualified teacher– a colleague – as part of a practicum lesson:
An Encounter with Pausing
At 11.05, forty-one minutes into Swedish class, the colleague introduces the notion of pausing. But the proposed ten-minute pause soon turns infinite. Becoming-teacher’s aimless strolling between desks shifts into impatient pacing, checking the time in a schedule pinned to the wall, taking a phone out of the pocket to double check what time it is, asking the colleague how long children have been pausing only to receive the reassuring answer that the children ‘have a handle on things’ – all while the loud ticking sound from a clock on the wall materializes time passing.Importantly, what could have been a simple expression of anxiety surrounding time can also be viewed in terms of what Deleuze has called a ”fundamental encounter” where “[s]omething in the world forces us to think” ([italics in original] [1968]2014, p. 183). This something, Deleuze goes on to clarify, is notan object of ‘recognition’ ([1968]2014). Twenty-five minutes into a ten-minute pause, a becoming-teacher goes to fetch four children playing Old Maid, for it seems that the ‘fundamental encounter’ with twenty-five-minutes-of-pausing has becoming-teacher ‘thinking’.
Learning as a Response to a Pausing-Sign
“Learning takes place”, Deleuze states, “in the relation between a sign and a response (encounter with the Other)” ([1968]2014, p. 27). Children playing Old Maid for twenty-five minutes during Swedish class is a sign that a becoming-teacher responds to by ending the game and bringing the group back to the classroom. “It is the signs which “cause problems” and are developed in a symbolic field”, Deleuze continues to explain ([citation in original] [1968]2014, p. 213). On a threshold between a classroom and group-room a becoming-teacher takes on twenty-five-minute-of-pausing as Deleuze’s swimmer takes on the sea, by
conjugat[ing] the distinctive points of our bodies with the singular points of the objective Idea in order to form a problematic field. This conjugation determines for us a threshold of consciousness at which our real acts are adjusted to our perceptions of the real relations, thereby providing a solution to the problem. Moreover, problematic Ideas are precisely the ultimate elements of nature and the subliminal objects if little perceptions. As a result, “learning” always takes place in and through the unconscious. Thereby establishing the bond of a profound complicity between nature and mind. (Deleuze, [1968]2014, p. 214)
In the ‘problematic field’ formed from the fundamental encounter, the question is not whether fetching the children is ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, but to pay attention to how an experience can shock thought and jolt a body into thinking. Becoming-teacher does not simply do as told. Instead, becoming-teacher’s ‘real acts are adjusted to the perception of the real relations’ which come to ‘provide a solution to the problem’ – what happens seems to overrule the colleague’s communicated version of how to understand the situation. The ‘threshold of consciousness’ born in the unforeseen encounter with pausing thus trumps even the recommendations from an experienced colleague.
What is it that we can glimpse in the encounter with pausing? There seems to be something in the experience that comes off as ‘off’, a disjunction becoming-teacher acts upon; “[t]o learn is to enter into the universal of the relations which constitute the Idea, and into their corresponding singularities”, says Deleuze ([1968]2014, p. 214). Checking schedules, looking at a clock, double checking a cellphone to make sure the time is right, one group of children playing Old Maid outside a classroom, three other still inside continuously doing exercises in a workbook – and the fact that the scenario is sanctioned by a teacher – these are some of the elements that make up ‘the universal of the relations which constitute the Idea’. An encounter with pausing-as-problem seems to be what forces a becoming-teacher into trying to consolidate the disjointed-ness of this world.
Learning, then, in the Deleuzian sense of the word, says Bogue, is not “the mere acquisition of any new skill or bit of information, but instead the accession to a new way of perceiving and understanding the world” (Bogue, 2008, p. 2). So rather than grasping a situation “as unjust and unwarranted (it is always someone else’s fault)”, becoming- teacher becomes ‘worthy of the event’ (Deleuze, [1969]1990, p. 149). Becoming ‘worthy’ in this situation has to do with the way this becoming-teacher forms and enters the ‘problematic field’ of twenty-five-minute-pausing. Said differently, becoming-teacher acts with the unfolding reality as it is, rather than passively judging the situation or going along with the colleague’s image of how it ‘should’ be.
(De-)learning through Imitation
The foursome from the group-room is back in the classroom, while the group of three that has remained in the classroom the entire lesson has now spent sixty-nine minutes working in a workbook before asking becoming-teacher:
While previously having gone against the
colleague’s advice on how to handle the situation already once, becoming-teacher
this time imitates the colleague. However, neither Old Maid, Lego,
Tick-tack-toe, nor ‘just chilling out’, interests the child who wants to continue
working.
“I encounter bodies, my body never stops encountering bodies” Deleuze explains (20 Jan. 1981); the thousands of encounters with questions, teaching materials, gestures, schedules, facial expressions, etc., during a lesson, continuously causes the re-formation of modified ‘problematic fields’. So, when the same child four minutes later rephrases the question, it seems becoming- teacher has another encounter that gives rise to new thoughts:
Is it ok to continue [doing more exercises in the workbook]? Becoming-teacher replies I don’t know; you’ll have to ask the chief [refers to the colleague]. (I, p. 6) This time, it seems that it is asking for permission to do schoolwork that forms a new ‘problematic field’. Becoming-teacher has no answer to offer the child. Instead, the answer is reframed as a question about authority (‘the chief’). In this move, becoming-teacher distances themselves from the teacher by making an alliance with the child and becoming yet another ‘un-knower’ (‘I don’t know’), as opposed to the colleague who is enacted as ‘knower’ (‘you’ll have to ask the chief’) who decides on matters. Imitating a colleague’s demeanor and language may be one thing, imitating someone’s thinking, conversely, would implicate subjugation. Already in the encounter with pausing, becoming-teacher articulated the problem at hand differently than the colleague. To have a reason for what makes no sense to begin with seems difficult. “[I]mitation plays only a secondary and regulatory role in the acquisition of a behavior”, Deleuze suggests, “it permits the correction of movements being made, but not their instigation” ([1968]2014, p. 27). The point of the matter is that not even perfect imitation enables the learner to become the (colleague) John of the game. Instead “even the simplest imitation involves a difference between inside and outside” (Deleuze, [1968]2014, p. 27).
Perhaps is becoming-teacher also curious to learn how the colleague thinks about the child’s question. Imitation when practiced as a form of “do with me” (Deleuze & Guattari, [1980]1987, p. 27), on the other hand, could offer the potentiality of becoming Other, a kind of broadening of one’s repertoire for forthcoming experimentations. Whereas there is no prospect for learning if one fails to understand that even imitation is about perpetual repetition of difference, albeit a regulated difference:
What often passes for learning is simply the reinforcement of commonsense notions, standard codes and orthodox beliefs. But the commonsense, conventional, orthodox world is ultimately illusory. Genuine learning, the learning through signs, takes us beyond the illusions of habit and common sense to the truths of what […] Deleuze labels “differences.” (Bogue, 2008, p. 2)
This is to say that learning through signs puts becoming- teacher in direct communication with a problematic field where there are no readymade solutions, no ‘habits’ to copy, no ‘commonsense’ pausing, only unfolding difference. Imitation, meanwhile, is a regulated and standardized response to unfolding difference. The question is, what are the mechanisms in the striation of educational space that has this reluctant imitator copying the ‘standard codes and orthodox beliefs’ of a colleague’s persistent pausing? Before taking on this question, however, we will look at whether there might be another way of thinking about the relation between ‘knower’ and ‘learner’, ‘novice’ and ‘expert’.
Educated for Critical Thinking, Schooled to Follow
Upon completion of Swedish compulsory school, children as future members of society should have developed the capacity to “make use of critical thinking and independently formulate standpoints” (Skolverket, 2018, p. 12). It is also declared that “[t]he school should stimulate pupils’ creativity, curiosity and self-confidence, as well as their desire to translate ideas into action and solve problems” (Skolverket, 2018, p. 8). The question is whether these fundamental aims of education are at risk because of a parallel program whereall stages of education, from compulsory school to academia, devote extensive time to schooling learners to become skilled imitators. By taking a critical look at a few returning practices encountered in compulsory school and higher education – schooling refrains[1] if you will – this section problematizes the striated space of education as an institution by speculating on whether some of the established and well-intended practices may put critical thinking at risk.
Problem-Solvers
Becoming-teachers working in the Swedish education system are in policy articulations instructed to teach children to become ‘problem-solvers’. Schooled to teach in spaces that educate problem-solvers, becoming-teachers themselves, meanwhile, are expected to “demonstrate the ability to identify their need for additional knowledge and develop their competence in the pedagogical work” (SFS, 1993:100). The latter is an articulation that nurtures more open-ended objectives and exploring problems, as opposed to coming up with solutions to already defined problems. In the midst of at times contradictory learning objectives, actualization of education and the way things are done sometimes become the true silent tutors that school bodies into doing things in certain ways. Education does not only school through instruction and ‘order-words’[2] but through organization and how education is designed.
Organization and design are intended to reenforce the capacity of learners to follow instruction. In all stages of education, learners partake in settings and exercises where they are drilled into observing what they then are to imitate; becoming- teachers do so through ‘practicum lessons’ and ‘methods’ taught on campus. Children do so in lessons begun with ‘instructions’ they subsequently are to follow.
Learners need not be instructed to imitate since the arrangement itself says as much when the ‘novice’ is paired with an ‘expert’, the ‘pupil’ with a ‘teacher’, in sequences where ‘knowers’ go first and ‘learners’ follow. But imitation per se is neither good nor bad. The question is how arrangements that presuppose imitation pay attention to the inevitable difference imbued in copying. Not merely as a difference between the performance of an expert and a novice, a teacher and pupil, or between two learners – but as a process of ‘different/ciation’[3] of a learner. Even when the external circumstances and internal parameters seem to be identical from one occasion to another, there is always a difference between inside and outside, between a now and the new now(Deleuze, [1968]2014). This is not a difference translatable into the measurable logics of supposed progress, but difference as explorations of pace, rhythm, force, and feel of movement and action. Imitation as becoming.
For education seems keen on overseeing processes. But is education interested in following and giving space for deviation, creation, or even having to reconsider its aims and objectives? For in the age of artificial general intelligence (AGI), climate crises, book bans, pandemics, and humans working as non-playable characters (NPCs), it becomes increasingly clear that today’s teachers’ and ’experts’ need to form transversal alliances with the yet unknown in order to cultivate learners’ imagination and courage to experiment with increasingly fugitive futures[4]. In fact, Deleuze’s Bergson challenges the notion of the ‘possible’ and offers the ‘virtual’ in its stead, because
the possible is a false notion, the source of false problems. The real is supposed to resemble it. That is to say, we give ourselves a real that is readymade, preformed, pre-existent to itself, and that will pass into existence according to an order of successive limitations. Everything is already completely given:all of the real in the image, in the pseudo-actuality of' the possible.([italics in original] Deleuze, [1966]1988, p. 98)
Thus, we lack not only solutions but ‘true problems’; problems not posed in terms or ‘more or less’ but in ‘qualitative’ terms[5]. The task for education becomes to nurture bodies’ capacity to engage and form problematic fields collaboratively, as opposed to accepting current divisions of labor.
In the meantime, generous efforts are made in both academia and compulsory education to ensure that learners meet the predefined learning objectives in curricula and course plans. Through potent disciplining practices like ‘formative assessment’, education makes sure learners spend time doing the right things to get good grades and pass courses. Who could question such aspirations? Especially when assessment- and grading-machines produce material for performance diagnoses of both learners and teachers. Moreover, the output from the diagnosis also feeds the always-starving quality work-machine that controls performance quality through quantitative output. Doing ‘right’ therefore becomes focal. This is why education not only specifies what constitutes a proper solution but how the process to the desired solution ought to be reached, and everything is carefully detailed in intricate matrixes.
It is at this point that it becomes increasingly difficult to see where learners’ ‘creativity, curiosity and self-confidence’ fits. It is also at this point that it becomes urgent to explore events where this kind of imitation and following the Johns of education become interrupted and in what sense chance encounters could offer an opportunity to dislocate ‘false’ problems. First, a look at how the threat of elimination further disciplines learners into subjugation.
Elimination
In monitored Swedish lesson, the threat of elimination is an ever-present aspect of practicum lessons. The colleague is not merely ‘the chief’ that decides whether a child is allowed to continue working in a book, but also the chief that decides whether becoming- teacher is deemed as ‘competent’ in ensuing assessment. The filled-out form goes to a university examiner in the WITE-program where the assessment plays a part in the decision whether becoming- teacher is judged to pass or fail the practicum course[6]. That is, a decision that may also determine whether one gets to stay in the WITE-program or whether one is at risk of losing one’s job[7]. It may therefore be difficult to resist following the Johns of education. This mechanism is not dependent on any explicit instruction suggesting imitation as a strategy. Instead, it is through organization and design that imitation is encouraged.
Problems
Challenging the culture and orthodoxy of a colleague’s classroom can thus become a risky business. This implied hierarchy also takes an epistemological form as being a ‘learner’ in an educational setting implies there is a ‘knower’ whose knowledge base exceeds your own. However, this situation does not automatically translate into a leader-imitator relationship. Instead, engaging with the ‘knower’ of a classroom can also offer ‘signs’ for a ‘learner’ to read, a someone ‘to do with’ rather than ‘copy’ (Deleuze, [1968]2014). This, in turn, would offer an altogether different kind of education. In this version, education becomes a question about engaging with problems. It would be a move away from an education with a world to ‘discover’ and ‘unveil’, a ‘correct’ way to teach and greet children in classrooms, or an appropriate way to operationalize a curriculum. Instead, engaging with ‘problems’ may lead the way to an education that acknowledges that the problems we ‘create’ affects how we engage with reality:
Schooled into accepting already defined problems, one begins to glimpse the nerve of a becoming-teacher who not merely challenges pausing as the proposed solution to a problem, but rather re-articulates the problem as such. Because fetching the children to come back to continue working with Swedish is a refusal of the situation as being a question about children’s right to a pause from education[8], and reframes it as a question about children’s right to education[9]. The solution to continue working, in turn, enables looking at eighty-five-minutes of fill-the-gap exercises in a workbook as a potential problem that predominantly concerns the lack of variation. Or yet again, perhaps the problem is not how to make eighty-five-minutes of Swedish viable; perhaps the problem is eighty-five-minutes of Swedish. In this version, it might be the schedule that is the problem in need of solving.
Encounters with Freedom
Deleuze proposes that “[m]ethod is the means of that knowledge which regulates the collaboration of all the faculties” ([1968]2014, p. 215), a proposition to take along when thinking about the robust methods that risk turning education into a game of Following John. To put it more pointedly:
Culture, however, is an involuntary adventure, the movement of learning which links a sensibility, a memory and then a thought, with all the cruelties and violence necessary, as Nietzsche said, precisely in order to “train a ‘nation of thinkers’ “ or to “provide a training for the mind” (Deleuze, [1968]2014, p. 215)
To ‘train a nation of thinkers’ through vigorous
‘methods’ nurtured through (school and classroom) ’culture’, might produce
docile learners but jeopardizes thinking. Considering encounters, instead,shows us the disjunctions of reality that remind us that there are escapes
from potential dogma. So, in the light of what has been suggested thus far, one
reading of the visited Swedish classroom is that the classroom – despite what
comes forth as educational inertia – nonetheless actualizes a climate that nurtures
learners’ capacity to resist following.
‘Pausing’ and a child asking for ‘permission to do schoolwork’ are proposed
as encounters that expose the disjunctions of reality and have a becoming-teacher
thinking. A question for education is then how to cultivate and stay
with such ruptures that enable thinking in school assemblages that communicate
command, partly through organizational design.
References
Bogue, R. (2008). Search, swim and see: Deleuze’s apprenticeship in signs and pedagogy of images. In Nomadic Education (pp. 1-16). Brill.
Deleuze, G. ([1966]1988). Bergsonism. Zone.
Deleuze, G. ([1968]2014). Difference and repetition. Bloomsbury Academic.
Deleuze, G. ([1969]1990). The logic of sense. C. V. Boundas (Ed.), Columbia University Press.
Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. ([1980]1987). A Thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press.
Evans, S., Harrison, M., & Rousell, D. (2022). Teaching in the afterward: Undoing order-words and affirming transversal alternatives. Discourse: Studies in the cultural politics of education, 43(5), 785-803.
Reinertsen, A. B., Ulla, B., Larsen, A. S., Moxnes, A. R., Aslanian, T. K., & Andersen, C. E. (2022). Fugitive Futures and Knowledge Brokering: Adding Value, Habits, and Trust in Early Childhood Education and Educational Research. Qualitative Inquiry, 28(8-9), 874-887.
Simon Says. (2023, July 27). On Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Says
SFS 1993:100. Högskoleförordningen [The Higher Education Ordinance]. [Swedish Code of Statutes]. https://www.riksdagen.se/sv/dokument-och-lagar/dokument/svensk-forfattningssamling/hogskoleforordning-1993100_sfs-1993-100/
SFS 2010:800. Skollag [The Education Act]. [Swedish Code of Statutes]. https://www.riksdagen.se/sv/dokument-och-lagar/dokument/svensk-forfattningssamling/skollag-2010800_sfs-2010-800/
Skolverket. (2018). Curriculum for the compulsory school, preschool class and school-age educare 2011: revised 2018. Curriculum for the compulsory school, preschool class and school-age educare
