This presentation works through Guattari's notion of cartography. Cartography is a non-methodological research praxis. Applied to TEFL, the use of cartography helps us to open and expand our analysis of what works to an enveloping sense of how TEFL fits into the world and what universe eventuates because of it

1. CARTOGRAPHY AND TEFL
DAVID R. COLE
WESTERN SYDNEY UNIVERSITY

2. WHAT IS CARTOGRAPHY?
Maps themselves are like laboratories where experimentations
on tracings are set in interaction. Thus, here the map is
opposed to the structure: it can open itself in all its dimensions;
it can also be ripped apart; it can be adapted to all kinds of
assemblies …

3. 4 DIVISIONS OF THE UNCONSCIOUS DIAGRAM
• The four divisions of the unconscious diagram deal with: 1) cut-outs of existential territories; 2)
complexions of material and energetic flows; 3) rhizomes of abstract ideas and 4) constellations of
aesthetic refrains.
• Perhaps more tangibly, one could say about these 4 zones that they are — i) the ground beneath your
feet; ii) the turbulence of social experience; iii) the blue sky of ideas and; iv) the rhythmic insistence of
waking dreams.

4. EXPERIMENTATION
Put the cartography of Deleuze & Guattari to work in your TEFL
classroom …
Try new techniques
Make a map of your practice, subjective & objective
What makes your teaching ‘take off’?
Every lesson is an egg from which a unique body can grow …

5. COMPLEXITY
• A prominent theme across the current complexity science literatures is that the linear narrative and the
Euclidean image are inadequate to depict the emergence and the behaviour of a complex form. Rather,
instances of complex emergence call for webbed, multithreaded tales and nested, scale independent
geometries to accommodate forms that can become more intricate, more dense, more pregnant with
possibilities.
• Davis, Phelps & Wells (2004, p. 4).

6. RESEARCH
• What are your research questions?
• What is your research method?
• What is your conceptual framework?
• What are your analytical techniques?
• What data are you going to collect?
• Have you thought of the ethical implications of your study?
• Cartography circumvents and bypasses conventional research because it questions simple
representation . However, any research technique can be deployed to make a map …

7. QUALITATIVE RESEARCH
1.Phenomenology
2.Ethnomethodology
3.Grounded Theory
4.Symbolic Interactionist
5.Interpretivist
6.Critical Social Science
7.Feminism

8. QUANTITATIVE RESEARCH
1.Testing theories can 'improve ' them, but it cannot 'prove' them
2.Quantitative research needs to be open and open to criticism - which should be at the heart of
quantitative research
3.Theories that cannot be tested, re-tested and (based on their falsification) be changed should be
dismissed
4.Theory - concept - indicator

9. WHEN DO YOU USE WHICH METHOD?

10. MIXED METHODS
• Mixed methods research is more specific in that it includes the mixing of qualitative and quantitative
data, methods, methodologies, and/or paradigms in a research study or set of related studies. One
could argue that mixed methods research is a special case of multimethod research.

11. WHAT IS A MAP OF PRACTICE?
• External: curriculum, syllabus, policy, social expectations, norms, exam results, qualifications, career
success, community.
• Internal: affects, feelings, atmosphere, feedback, agreements, consensus, purpose.
• Cartography attempts to go beyond this divide and suggests an integrated, collective, complex, mobile
becoming (in-between) …
• What elements can you include in the map of your TEFL practice?
• How is the progression of English learning linked to your map?
• What techniques can you use in your mapping?

12. MIND MAPPING?
Make a mind map of your TEFL
practice starting with a specific
theme (e.g. teaching
communicative competence)
What do you notice?
What do you emphasize?
How does your mind map differ
from your colleagues?
How can you account for these
differences?

13. CARTOGRAPHY AND WRITING
• All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the
very bottom of their motives lies a mystery.
Writing a book is a long, exhausting struggle, like
a long bout of some painful illness. One would
never undertake such a thing if one were not
driven by some demon whom one can neither
resist nor understand.
George Orwell (1947)
… the book is not an image of the world. It forms a rhizome
with the world, there is an aparallel evolution of the book and
the world …

14. NORMALISATION AND EDUCATION
• The various forms of education or ‘normalization’ imposed upon an
individual consist in making him or her change points of subjectification,
always moving towards a higher, nobler one in closer conformity with the
supposed ideal. Then from the point of subjectification issues a subject of
enunciation, as a function of a mental reality determined by that point.
Then from the subject of enunciation issues a subject of the statement, in
other words, a subject bound to statements in conformity with a
dominant reality.
• (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988, p.129).

15. CRITICAL AND CREATIVE THINKING
How does your TEFL practice
encourage critical and creative
thinking?
Can you map how this happens?
What are the most productive aspects
of your teaching and learning
practice?
How does the production of thinking
link to language learning?

16. RHIZOME AND DEMOCRACY?
• The division between a hierarchal tree-like democracy or organization and that of the rhizomian
democracy or organization not only has political implications in the ideas of “leaderless revolution” and
networked dissidence, but also educational implications in how to organize curricula... In this situation,
teaching cannot be easily seen as a authoritarian activity, but more like “subversive activity” in which
teachers, along with their students, compare information from various sources, negotiate their
knowledge and experiences together, and interpret the world …
• Suoranta & Vaden, (2007).

17. WHERE DOES CARTOGRAPHY LEAD TO?
The end of practice and the start of
thought?
How political is cartography?
What is improvement?
What is the ‘bigger picture’ in terms our
existences as educators in TEFL institutes?
Does cartography necessarily imply a
subversive act to the status quo?
Who reads our maps?

18. HOW DOES CARTOGRAPHY WORK?
What is the point
of cartography as a
TEFL practice?
Where/when/how
should cartography
be deployed?
Who cares about
cartography?
How does
cartography deal
with existing
power structures?
Does cartography
solve any
problems?

19. FURTHER READING
• Cole, D.R. (2012). Matter in Motion: The Educational Materialism of Gilles Deleuze. Educational Philosophy
and Theory, Vol. 44. (No. S1), 3 — 17.
• Cole, D.R. (2015). Educational non-philosophy. Educational Philosophy and Theory, Volume 47, Number 10,
1009-1023: DOI: 10.1080/00131857.2015.1036827
• Cole, D.R. (2016). Unearthing the Forces of Globalisation in Educational Research Through Guattari’s
Cartographic Method. In D.R. Cole & C. Woodrow (Eds.), Super Dimensions in Globalisation and Education (pp.
145-161). Singapore: Springer.
• Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1988). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia II (Trans, B. Massumi ).
London: The Athlone Press.
• Guattari, F. (2013). Schizoanalytic Cartographies (Trans, A. Goffey). London: Bloomsbury.
• Suoranta, Juha; Vaden, Tere (2007). From Social to Socialist Media: The Critical Potential of the Wikiworld. In P.
McLaren (Ed.) Critical Pedagogy: Where are We Now?. New York: Peter Lang. ISBN 978-0-8204-8147-0.