Rhyzomagic Award by guilia.forsythe CC-BY-NC-SA 2.0

Today I attended Dave Cormier’s (@davecormier) #ETMOOC session on ‘Rhizomes, MOOCs and Making Sense of Complexity’ (hopefully the recording should show up here soon).  It was an interesting session and I found myself. and others judging from the chat, wondering how this might work in K – 12 education.

Cormier defines rhyzomatic learning as follows:

“The rhizome is [the] stem of plant, like hops, ginger or japanese bamboo, that helps the plant spread and reproduce. It responds and grows according to its environment, not straight upwards like a tree, but in a haphazard networked fashion. As a story for learning, it is messy, unstable and uncertain. It is also, as anyone who has ever had one in the garden will tell you, extremely resilient. As with the rhizome the rhizomatic learning experience is multiple, has no set beginning or end, – “a rhizome creates through the act of experimentation.”

I understand this way of learning because this is how most of my own informal learning occurs.  But when Cormier started to talk about an ‘Open Syllabus’ whereby the teacher and students agree on what they will learn I wondered how that would work in K – 12.  Cormier did explicitly say that this type of learning is not meant for all contexts.  For example, if students need to learn 10 specific concepts, rhizomatic learning is not the way to go.

Then things started to click for me.  Until this year I have always taught courses where there was a major focus on covering lots and lots of prescribed learning outcomes.  This year though, I do not have a long list of prescribed learning outcomes.  I can construct the curriculum with my students.  In fact, one of my students has expressed dissatisfaction as he felt that things were too teacher driven and he wanted more input.  So now I’m excited!  I have no idea how to achieve rhizomatic learning with my students, but I know that I want to give it a try.

How about you?  Are there areas of your curriculum that are amenable to rhyzomatic learning?  Can you see this working with students in the K – 12 system?  Or, do you have any tips on how to successfully do this in a K – 12 context?  I’d love to hear from you.