Rhizomatic Research Design in a Smooth Space of Learning

Racial disproportionality in special education is a symptom of larger social justice problems in a racially stratified society. Despite the favorable expectation of the effects of culture-free, universal and objective “evidence-based” interventions in serving students from nondominant groups, overrepresentation of students of color in special education continues to hinder efforts at achieving equity in and through education. In this article, we draw on Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome metaphor and Vygotskian cultural-historical activity theory to analyze the dominant paradigm for intervention research in special education. We illustrate how the naturalized a priori assumptions and practices have contributed to the reinforcement of the racialization of disability. We then offer a rhizomatic research design as an alternative in which teachers, parents, students, administrators, university researchers, and community members engage in collective knowledge production and decision-making activities to develop systemic solutions to racial disproportionality within their local contexts. Readers are free to copy, display, and distribute this article, as long as the work is attributed to the author(s) and Critical Education, it is distributed for non-commercial purposes only, and no alteration or transformation is made in the work. More details of this Creative Commons license are available from http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-ncnd/3.0/. All other uses must be approved by the author(s) or Critical Education. Critical Education is published by the Institute for Critical Educational Studies and housed at the University of British Columbia. Articles are indexed by EBSCO Education Research Complete and Directory of Open Access Journal. C r i t i c a l E d u c a t i o n 2 Racialization of disability has been a central issue in the quest for equity in education. Since the 1960s, racial disparities in academic and social opportunities and outcomes in special education programs have been widely reported nationally and internationally (Artiles, 2011; Artiles & Bal, 2008; Donovan & Cross, 2002; Dunn, 1968; Harry & Klingner, 2014; Skiba et al., 2011). In the United States, students from historically marginalized communities are subjected to disproportionately higher representation in relatively less visible disability categories (e.g., emotional disturbance [ED], learning disabilities [LD], and speech/language impairments [SLI]), primarily relying on the judgment of school personnel and observational tools. According to the 40th Annual Report to Congress on the Implementation of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (U.S. Department of Education, 2018), African American students are twice as likely to be labeled as emotionally disturbed and placed in special education. Native American students are more than four times as likely to be labeled as having developmental delay compared to all other racial/ethnic peers combined. Racial disproportionality is a complex and spatially and temporally situated conundrum, which reveals varying patterns. For example, the disproportionate representation of Latinx students displays fluid patterns and predictors across a spatio-temporal context. Latinx students are underrepresented in LD and ED categories nationally (U.S. Department of Education, 2016). On the other hand, Latinx students are overrepresented in LD and ED categories in large districts in Arizona and California where the English-only policies have been implemented (Artiles, Rueda, Salazar, & Higareda, 2005; Sullivan, 2011). To address racial disproportionality, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) in 2004 laid the legislative foundations for the implementation of multi-tiered system of supports models (MTSS), Response to Intervention and Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports, as prevention and early intervening services. MTSS models emphasize providing schoolwide academic and behavioral supports delivered through the so-called “evidence-based” interventions that are supposed to be context-neutral, objective, and universal instructions and additional academic and behavioral interventions based on students’ responses to the interventions in each tier of support (Fuchs & Fuchs, 2006; Sugai & Horner, 2009). Despite the favorable expectation of the effects of MTSS models designed to offer a continuum of empirically demonstrated interventions to address improper referrals into special education, overrepresentation of students from racially minoritized groups endures. The purpose of this paper is to provide a cultural-historical lens for re-examining a modus operandi in the dominant paradigm in special education, which may perpetuate and even justify disproportionality. Based on a critical examination of the normative logics of intervention research, we seek to draw an alternative trajectory of intervention for building inclusive and culturally responsive knowledge production activities for systemic transformation. Through the rhizome metaphor presented by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1987), we attempt to depict the stratified landscape of learning and research along the chromatic line while re-envisioning the possibility of rhizomatic research for designing ecologically valid and socially just interventions contributing to the wellbeing and joy of the whole school community, especially students and families from historically marginalized communities. R h i z o m a t i c R e s e a r c h D e s i g n 3 Tree-Like and Rhizomatic Images of Thought The historical emergence of a reflexive turn against positivist determinism in social science and education during the 20 century has accelerated critical inquiry into the dominant assumptions and practices in knowledge production activities in science. The critics came from various fields and philosophical schools. As the leaders of a strand of critical intellectual movements, French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1987) presented new metaphors that led to a creative mode of thought for dissolving the linear and vertical worldview of positive determinism in the West. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) proposed the metaphors of “tree-like” and “rhizome” as conceptual artifacts to examine two oppositional ways of thinking. Despite the oppressive nature of binary modes of thinking, they deliberately employ dualistic images of thought to problematize the Cartesian mode of logic that dominates our lives in social, institutional, and legal domains (e.g., mind|body, individual|social, theory|practice, normal|abnormal, and abled|disabled). The tree-shaped image relies on an autonomous, rational, self-reliant, and universal object (e.g., an individual or a social group) in a fixed space-time. Components of the tree are vertically arranged on the basis of the centralizing taproot. The treeshaped system operationalizes to generate a symmetrical and stable architecture characterized by hierarchical divisions of entities revolving around norms, assumptions, tools, and practices that are taken for granted, and hence often invisible (e.g., ableism, individualism, and racial hierarchy). Figure 1. Juniper (Ehret, 1745). As seen in Figure 1, the tree-like image maintains the well-organized constellation of objects (like a stable pyramid or army formation) by organizing a hierarchical system among components based on similarity to and difference from a centralizing concept of normativity. The tree-shaped modes of thinking mobilize a number of dividing lines to sustain the regime of truth C r i t i c a l E d u c a t i o n 4 and serve as mediating tools to sort out and regulate diverging ways of being and knowing. Homogenizing lines create grids of binaries wherein fixed, predetermined, and recognizable identities are emphasized to legitimize present social orders (e.g., black|white, male|female, and abled|disabled; St. Pierre, 2018). Activity systems are formed around these objects that are constantly reproduced in the corresponding activity systems (Engeström, 2015). Segmenting lines constitute a “striated space” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987), a closed territory wherein multiple and fluid forms of boundaries existing in our lives become territorialized along with strict guidelines and inflexible rubrics. The demarcating lines constitute stratifying systems of life in which transgressive movements against the rigid boundaries are squelched (hooks, 1994). Dualistic thinking cannot fully capture the multiplicity, fluidity, and heteroglossia of social phenomes and the objects incessantly made, negotiated, and co-configured (Agamben, 2000). The rhizome is an alternative image of thought to disrupt the hierarchical ways of thinking prevalent in tree-shaped structures (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). In botany, a rhizome refers to horizontally proliferating subterranean fungus-roots through continual interconnections among multiple and heterogeneous shoots. A rhizomatic network is presented in Figure 2. The figure illustrates the rhizome characterized by a lateral network of nodes without a centralizing taproot. Multiple shoots respectively have distinctive roots. They are horizontally connected for survival and growth (Simard et al., 1997). Figure 2. Pine seedlings with a mycorrhizal network (Read, 1997). R h i z o m a t i c R e s e a r c h D e s i g n 5 A rhizome has no territorialized habitats. Instead, continuous interconnection with other shoots enables indeterminate expansions and horizontal movements. The shared fungal symbionts enable carbon, the energy currency of plants, to flow from tree to tree and possibly from species to species in a forest (Simard et al., 1997). Fossils of the earliest land plants and molecular studies confirm that roots co-evolved with fungal partners to form amalgam structures known as mycorrhizas or fungus-roots: These are almost universally distributed through present-day terrestrial plant communities, yet most researchers (deterred, one suspe