A schizoanalytic exploration of the potential of fabulation for the creation of new social collectivities in pre-service teacher education

ABSTRACT

This article draws on Felix Guattari’s proposition of subject and subjected groups to explore the interplay between individual and group subjectivity within the higher education context in South Africa. The exploration is specifically orientated towards considering the pedagogical possibilities of the concept of fabulation. Schizoanalysis is employed to map how six first-year pre-service teachers collectively envisioned a shared future. As a result of the mapping, diffraction is proposed as a pedagogical practice to create the conditions for fabulation to occur. It is argued that the act of fabulation enables pedagogy to be positioned as a practice of resistance to assumed orthodox truths. In addition, fabulation also orientates pedagogy as a practice of experimentation toward the creation of new social collectivities.

KEYWORDS:

• Fabulation
• diffraction
• pedagogy
• experimentation
• schizoanalysis
• subject groups
• subjected groups

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the pre-service teacher students who participated in this research project. This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors. We have no potential conflict of interest to declare.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. In his early writing Guattari referred to subjected groups as object or dependent groups (see for example the essay The group and the person that he presented as a talk at Clinique de La Borde in 1966 and put into writing in 1968).

2. EDUB is a generic module for all first year education students and aims to encourage students to critically challenge their own identities in a diverse world by imagining the possibilities that exist for social responsiveness as an agent of change.