Assemblage Theory
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"I guess I'm just hopelessly fascinated by the realities that you can assemble out of connected fragments." - Junot Diaz
Our study was informed by assemblage theory.
Assemblage theory understands the social world as constituted by ever shifting assemblages of people, things, signs, practices, and events (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987/2004). Taking from this understanding of world, literacy researchers are now looking at ways this theory might help us re-think classroom instruction.
An important aspect of this is pedagogical orientation is indeterminency. Kevin Leander and Gail Boldt (2013) provocatively discuss this concept here:
"The curriculum and the teacher’s pedagogical stance enter into an assemblage with the materials, time, space, experiences, movement, play, emotion, and desires that the classroom participants bring with them. New assemblages emerge, are in constant flux, in constant movement. There is a rhythm of continuity and discontinuity, with some possibilities moving toward closure even as others catch fire. The issue is not only what resources are in use in classrooms. Rather, to be within the pedagogical moment in that classroom, a teacher would need to consider whether he or she and the children are able to bring the materials into a “composition of desire” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 399). Can the teacher make space for fluidity and indeterminacy as the nature of things? Can he or she recognize difference, surprise, and unfolding that follow along paths that are not rational or linear or obviously critical or political?" (pp. 33-34)
Using improvisational games to learn about story building
Similarly, Candace Kuby and Tara Gutshall Rucker (2015) encourage us to think of possibility when we are planning for instruction—to trust our students to have creative capacities and the ability to productively pursue their desirings in relation to literacy that will take the literacy learning to places we literally cannot imagine. They state,
…if we listen, watch carefully, and embrace students’ literacy desiring—even if we aren’t sure about the direction students are going—we can learn a lot about the teaching and learning of young writers. We need to open spaces to hear their desirings and follow the fissures that appear in our agendas. Children look to teachers for permission to learn by playing-with-materials. (p. 323)
We were also inspired by Suzanne Gannon’s idea of thinking about classrooms and their “curious social and material boundaries” (p.86). Following Gannon, we wanted to create “spaces that were “simultaneously permeable and contained arenas for encounters.”
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Informed by ideas such as these, we wanted to provide the children with open-ended, permeable activities for exploring the affordances of comedy by introducing them to tools comedians and comedic storywriters, such as the teams at Pixar use. So we played games such as:
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Monster Tag One Word Stories
Splat Three Things
The Pixar Game Whoosh
Lava
Pixar?
The Pixar Game:
From prompt to plan!
The Pixar Game:
From prompt to plan!
We also wanted to ensure, however, that the kids had some structure to work within, i.e., contained arenas, recognizing that many children benefit from being able to use frameworks as starting places. We also agree with literacy scholars such as Karen Wohlwend (in press), that many children “think in film.” That is, their filmic experiences of story and elements of it, such as story arc, often inform the way they play and the way they tell stories. So we played what is known in improv circles as “the pixar game.” This game gets its name from the observation that Pixar movies all seem to follow a similar plot structure:
Once there was a……
Everyday s/he………
Until one day……
And because of that…….
And because of that……
Until finally…..
And from then on……
We played this game collectively in large groups and in small groups. We wrote stories individually using this framework. And we wrote stories in small groups.
This frame, which is based on the story arc known as the Hero’s Journey, and the small group stories provided a great way to bring the characters students had individually created and profiled into assemblage with each other in a collectively written story.
The groups worked to build their stories by having their characters interview each other (another improv game), playing with refining the characters and story by recursively acting the story out and reworking the story skeleton. Some of this reworking was recorded on the story planning sheets and some of it was simply (and effectively) remembered by the children as they played, rehearsed and revised. We challenged the children to think about the comic technique of “call backs:” how might they surreptitiously introduce a character early in the story and then bring them back in humorous ways as the story progressed?
We also encouraged them to think about puns and language play: for example, how might the names of their characters play on aspects of that characters’ being (see Lily the frog in one of the video exemplars).
Students acting in role as their characters, interviewing each other
Each new time the students embodied their characters and those characters came into assemblage in the acting out of the story, an embodied sense-making took place. We ended the unit by filming the students’ collectively built stories and were excited to see that even as the stories were being filmed, the students were thinking about how to make the story “make sense” and how to make it funny. In this action, they showed us the way they almost intuitively know that stories are never quite finished and their comfort with fluidity and evolution of story.
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While it had not been a part of the plan, the children decided the stories they had devised collectively were not quite finished when the filming ended. They wanted further opportunity to explore the stories they had begun. And so, they launched into several weeks of individual writing projects that allowed them to build stories that took up the story from different characters’ points of view or to explore new trajectories taking flight from the original group story.
Screen cap video opening
We offer this website and this page’s rendering of the way the theory works with pedagogy, not as a blueprint for educators to replicate, but rather as a means of sharing the way children and adults came together on a new literacy learning trajectory. We hope it offers ideas that will launch you and your students on your own explorations of the possibilities of comedy and literacy.
References
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (2004). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia, trans. B. Massumi. London: Continuum [originally published as Mille Plateuaux, volume 2 of Captialisme et schizophrenie, Paris: Minuit, 1987.]
Gannon, S. (2009). Difference as ethical encounter. In B. Davies & S. Gannon (Eds.), Pedagogical encounters (pp. 69-88). New York: Peter Lang.
Kuby, C., & Rucker, T. G. (2015). Everyone has a Neil: Literacy desiring in writers’ studio. Language Arts, 92(5), 214-327.
Leander, K., & Boldt, G. (2013). Rereading “A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies”: Bodies, texts, and emergence. Journal of Literacy Research, 45(1), 22-46.
Wohlwend, K. E. (In press). Quacking hands, modal bubbling, and the fluidity of play. In Frank Serafini & Elizabeth Hayes (eds.) Re-imagining multiliteracies: Looking back, moving forward. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.
The Pixar Game:
From prompt to plan!