Minor pedagogy: Education as continuous variation

Abstract

In this paper, the authors consider the intersections of philosophy and education. Extending the concept of a minor pedagogy first presented by Mazzei and Smithers (2020), the authors reorient thinking toward more equitable and just pedagogy as a cultivation of difference. This paper has three major sections. In the first two, the authors review Deleuze and Guattari’s (1986, 1987) concept of the minor, and then connect this to the concept of a minor pedagogy. The final section explores the work of a minor pedagogy as continuous variation with the potential to engender difference. Given that racialized neoliberal efficiency and accountability movements have perpetuated injustice across generations, the work of educational practice that contests this must be practice that slips from these major grips to produce new, more just, worlds. Minor pedagogy produces educational justice through everyday shifts in the conditions of our collective possibility, shifts that manifest difference in ways that reject re-form in the pursuit of the not yet.

Keywords:

• Minor pedagogy
• deleuze and guattari
• difference

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 ‘There are pass-words beneath order-words. Words that pass, words that are components of passage, whereas order-words mark stoppages or organized, stratified compositions. A single thing or word undoubtedly has this twofold nature: it is necessary to extract one from the other–to transform the compositions of order into components of passage’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 110).

2 Simalarly, for Webb and Mikulan (2023), ‘escape, fugitivity, and counter-conduct’ (p. 5).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Laura E. Smithers

Laura Smithers is an Assistant Professor of Higher Education Leadership at the University of Nevada, Reno (USA). Her research uses high and low theory to explore the possible futures created and foreclosed by assessment regimes in undergraduate education. With Heidi Fischer and Faith Watrous, she is co-author of Impact/Impasse: Revaluing University Classroom Life (2024).

Lisa A. Mazzei

Lisa A. Mazzei is Alumni Faculty Professor of Education at the University of Oregon where she is also affiliated faculty in the Department of Philosophy. She is interested in philosophically informed inquiry that opens thought to the not yet. With Alecia Jackson, she is co-author of Thinking with Theory in Qualitative Research (2012; 2023), co-editor of Postfoundational Approaches to Qualitative Inquiry (2024), and co-editor of Voice in Qualitative Inquiry (2009). She is also the author of Inhabited Silence in Qualitative Research (2007).