When the map shakes up the territory. Researching teachers’ learning through a non-representational cartographic approach

Abstract

In this article, I consider how cartographies have become a onto-methodological approach that seeks to produce, rather than represent, the world that they are enacting. Going beyond Alfred Korzybski’s famous axiom that ‘the map is not the territory,’ my point is that the map can shake up the territory. This shift is discussed in relation to the post-qualitative research project How Teachers Learn: Educational Implications and Challenges for Addressing Social Change, which focuses on mapping places and spheres that function as a source of knowledge and experience for thirty educators. The cartographic objects they composed around their learning trajectories became a space for rethinking and reconnecting domains that schools often keep strictly separate. Thus in this case the maps worked as a flat terrain where different layers met and linked outside of traditional hierarchies, which ignore for example corporeality and affects in favour of cognition or formal knowledge.

Keywords:

• Mapping
• non-representational theory
• assemblage
• learning trajectories
• new materialisms
• affects

Acknowledgement

The AP REN-DO project How Teachers Learn: Educational Implications and Challenges for Adressing Social Change is partially funded by the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness of Spain with the grant EDU2015-70912-C2-1-R.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 Founded in 1995, Esbrina—Subjectivities, Visualities and Contemporary Learning Environments ‘is composed of students and teachers of Pedagogy, Psychology, Anthropology, Sociology, Philosophy, Computer Science, Fine Art and Art History who are deeply interested in the conditions and current changes taking place in education, and who are associated with different departments in the Universitat de Barcelona, Universitat Autònoma of Barcelona, Universitat Internacional de Catalunya and Universitat Oberta de Catalunya.’ See more in https://esbrina.eu/en/the-group/