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The purpose of this paper is to illustrate and discuss the main features and key challenges of an original post-graduate education program designed according to an innovative theoretical framework promoting design thinking in a rhizomatic approach. By involving different stakeholders, the aim of this entrepreneurship education program is to disseminate rhizomatic, design-based learning competencies and thereby contribute to revitalizing a region’s socio-economic fabric.

Through the use of a pilot case, the paper exemplifies the application of the design thinking approach combined with the rhizomatic logic. Design thinking enables dealing with the complexity, uncertainty, and ill-defined problems that often characterize a business reality while the rhizomatic process combines the production of collective knowledge through a non-linear, complex and emergent path that nurtures innovation.

This entrepreneurship education program exemplifies a viable strategy to deal with a regional economic crisis by engaging different local actors including enterprises, local institutions, municipalities, and universities. It demonstrates the potential value of a new educational approach as a powerful lever to activate the energy of people, their competencies, relationships, shared projects, and new entrepreneurial ventures. The first edition of the program offers ideas, practices, and challenges to all stakeholders of potentially similar education projects.

The depicted pilot case allows us to exemplify how a design thinking framework reinterpreted on the basis of a Deleuzian rhizomatic perspective can enable developing innovation as a way of overcoming difficulties and succeeding, an essential prerequisite for many entrepreneurial organizations today.

Culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) students enrolled in a Masters program at an Australian university are often invisible or less visible in class; however, what is visible is their academic practice, which is often viewed as a deficit. Instead of comprehending how CALD students can become productive members of a community, research regularly examines ways to upgrade their academic literacy practices. This study contends that these students have much to offer, and if these students are to be considered valuable members of the higher education context, the learning community needs to perceive their difference as positive. This implies going beyond the institutional assessment of their academic practice as a deficit and examining spaces of learning as rhizomatic. Drawing on the theory of Deleuze and Guattari, this study highlights how the process of becoming for the students and the teacher teaching them is never static, but is one constituted of deterritorialization and subsequent reterritorialization, resulting in the rhizomatic principle of variegated subjectivity. Data collected over two years illustrated how, for the researcher/teacher, molecular level difference was possible within the molar level academic expectations. Themes of being and becoming and rhizomatic reimaginations demonstrated the desire of the students to achieve as a positive attempt to celebrate their difference and, for the researcher, her academic positionality as a fluid, ongoing process where the molar and the molecular interact to illustrate teaching as a productive venture.

This chapter decenters the methodological unfolding of a qualitative research study on mainstream teachers of English learners, shifting from a sociocultural emphasis on individuality and agency towards affect as a productive post-structural concept. The researcher, participants, and findings are positioned as mutually constituted elements in an enmeshed entanglement of discursive processes, material contexts, animate bodies, and social norms and practices. The work employs concepts introduced by Deleuze and Guattari (1987): the rhizome, assemblage, and affect. The chapter discusses how the activity that constituted the research study was informed and influenced by affect that reverberated beyond the scope of the immediately observable. The multiple positionalities, past history, and values of the researcher and participant contributed to the methodological decision-making during data collection and analysis in conscious and unconscious ways. Affective distributions permeated throughout the study, contributing to the functioning of activity among and between the elements of the study. Ultimately, elements of the study contributed in ways that extended beyond the normative constructions of research, researcher, and participant. Elements affected and were affected, contributing to methodological excess, insights beyond the scope of normative systemic inquiry. This chapter demonstrates the productiveness of rhizomatic concepts to decenter the elements of a research study and affect as a productive construct to understand systematic inquiry. This move intentionally disrupts traditional conceptions of research and researcher objectivity, explicitly attending to the affective interplay among elements of the research assemblage and how this interplay functions as a primary means of scholarly engagement.

Social studies teachers engage a vast subject area within which they can enlist a wide scope of possible curriculum and pedagogy choices. Despite the opportunity to engage students with an abundance of potentially fruitful themes, topics, and ideas, social studies teaching can be captured by the need to cover specific content in particular ways. Philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1983), in Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, would connect such an agenda to the capitalistic machine that shrinks potential sources into what Foucault (1980) sees as tendencies to seek control rather than the openness of becoming. We contend that Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the rhizome opens new lines of flight in social studies curricula and works to revolutionize social studies as a subject area that often has been over-standardized and taught as one-size-fits-all. We also contend that rhizomic thinking can renew how students see the world and transform how they interpret events, epochs, eras, and cultures by drawing from rhizomic research’s bamboo-like qualities.

This chapter relates quantum storytelling consulting (QSC) to ensemble leadership theory (ELT) by Rosile, Boje, & Claw (2016). What kinds of leadership does it take to attend to the forecaring in advance of the future and how does this relate to quantum storytelling? In a music ensemble, no one musician is the star: they are equal, all are the stars of the show, emerging as stars and then taking a supporting role in cyclic rotation. ELT is important to the world ecology because it is a together-we-are-all-leaders approach. Rather than restricting leadership to one or a few people, the ensemble of many networks of leadership is important. I will contrast ELT with more familiar models of leadership: dispersed, distributed, and relational that restrict leadership to a few. One primary difference is that ELT includes both community and ecology and it is rooted in Indigenous Ways of Knowing (IWOK) that extend from the ancient Southwest US and Mexico. My contribution here is to recognize that ELT is rooted in the rhizomatic fractal, whereas the other models of leadership discussed here (dispersed, distributed, and relational) have been linear-, cyclic-, or spiral-fractal waves. A fractal is defined as recurring self-sameness patterns across scalabilities. I will look to Deleuzian rhizomatic-fractals, which ELT purports to be and make an observation: ELT revived and reinvented in late modern capitalism, must be a correlate with the dominant hierarchic kinds of leadership of here and now, which is this world situation we are now in. Does not each revolution (steam, diesel/gas combustion, cyber-information, and liquid modernity) actually create anew the enslavement of human beings in hierarchic forms of leadership? At the end of this chapter, ensemble leadership will be related to whole-world ecological health.

Faraoyść is a translinguistic portmanteau neologism that describes the moment when oppressive systems are shaken and appear to be coming to an end, and joyful, liberated worlds feel within reach. The purpose of this research is to demonstrate that faraoyść helped participants helped participants to expand their situated imaginings, which increased their capacity to imagine decolonized worlds.

This research was guided by faraoyść as a conceptual framework that explores the empirical experience of joy through collaborative world-building activities. These praxis-based exercises were tested in a series of workshops both at the 2020 UNESCO Futures Literacy Summit and in collaboration with Negligence Refugees from Lebanon.

When activated by collaboratively designed speculative objects and stories generated through the lens of faraoyść, participants created spaces of rhizomatic world-building that allowed them to imagine beyond the boundaries of their situated imaginings. Once participants had mapped the ways their imaginations were limited by current colonial systems of power, they were able to reorient their roles and develop new means to act within decolonized systems.

Faraoyść is a novel conceptual framework that contributes to current movements to decolonize futuring and foresight. This paper also introduces the concepts of rhizomatic world-building – an emergent approach to co-imagination, and situated imaginings, which are the systemic frameworks within which one imagines the ways the world has, is, will and must work. In practice, faraoyść is grounded in abundance and the power of liberatory joy to strengthen and celebrate local traditions, storytelling, world-building and community power.

Purpose – The purpose of this chapter is to understand how disruptive innovations related to digital literacy can improve traditional approaches of teacher education.

Approach – First, the evolution of teacher education from tradition to the digital era is discussed, highlighting the evolution of various traditions, theories and models of teacher education. The authors then ask the questions, “Why do teacher education programs continue to lag in the creation of a true alignment with the current needs of modern students?” and “How can this be done and where should we begin?”

Findings – The authors believe that professional growth is the key to teacher success. Reformed teacher education programs where digital literacy is grounded in relevant contexts, collaboration, and multimodal designs will promote collective collaboration among students and teachers. Digital literacies curriculum should draw on multimodalities and position students as producers of knowledge for a public audience. These disruptive forces function to improve traditional notions of teacher education, providing a catalyst to the democratization of knowledge for teacher development.

Practical Implications – Collaboration across digital platforms promotes learning through crowd-accelerated learning, rhizomatic learning, citizen inquiry, massive open social learning, maker cultures, and blockchain platforms. These approaches can foster genuine and relevant learning in teacher education programs, modernizing and matching instructional techniques with the teacher preparation demands of today and tomorrow.

This study aims to model the creative pedagogy of children's book development and then engages teacher education students in this work, as a way to explore and express conceptions of teacher quality, across cultural perspectives.

This self-study engages a/r/tography and currere to explore teacher quality in a teacher education classroom in a Chinese university. A/r/tography (Irwin et al., 2006) considers teacher quality through the conventional lens based on standards and through a more aesthetic lens shaped by cultural nuances and personal experiences. This self-study engages currere (Pinar, 2004) as a methodology marked by contiguous living inquiry explored with an abstract lens aimed to see openings for insight leading to transformation (Pourchier, 2010).

Discussing similarities and distinctions across the presentation and conceptualization of teacher quality in the created children's books promoted dialogue considering intercultural, international pictures of a caring student–teacher relationship. A/r/tographic, currere approaches to exploring this enhanced reflective insight and supported acceptance of diverse notions of teacher quality.

As 21st-century global societies evolve, the meaning of progress also evolves from vertical linear trajectories to horizontal, webbed transformations, driven by differences leading to rhizomatic global connections. A/r/tography and currere are meaningful methodologies to explore the concept of teacher quality from aesthetic angles and on a more personal level so that our understandings may be shaped meaningfully by more diverse perspectives and voices.

The work of David John Farmer has been recognized as critical to the Public Policy and Administration canon. Its impact has been far-reaching both geographically because of its international application and theoretically because of the vast array of public administration challenges it can help resolve. This paper uses the concepts of rhizomatic thinking and reflexive interpretation to describe Farmerʼs work. And because a critical piece of Farmerʼs work is a bridging of the gap between theory and practice, it formally introduces Farmerʼs research approach as Farmerʼs Method. This article is intended to serve as a useful tool for students, practitioners, and theorists in understanding the vast contributions of David John Farmer and the practical application of his work.

The purpose of this study is to offer exploration of pedagogic frailty as a framework to support professional development of university teachers in a personalised and discipline-sensitive way.

The method involves participants constructing a concept map for each dimension of the model. These maps must have high explanatory power to act as a frame for developing a personal narrative to support reflection on practice. This reflection starts from the academic’s current knowledge structure and provides a bespoke, individualised focus for further learning.

This conceptual paper is informed by case studies of academics’ interactions with the frailty model that have helped to refine it as a faculty development tool. This is clarified by providing explicit requirements of an “excellent” map, and places the reflective process within a learning theory that is aligned with the values that underpin the model.

The type of rhizomatic learning that is supported by the model, in which there are no imposed learning outcomes or strictly delineated pathways to success, is particularly suited to support the professional development of more senior academics. This represents an innovative approach to faculty development.