Rhizomes, nomads, and complexity: A new relational

pedagogy for the era of networks, social media and artificial

intelligence
Alexios Brailas
Hellenic Open University

Abstract

Today, we live in an era characterized by unprecedented technological development and

the rise of artificial intelligence mediated technosocial spaces. In this context, it becomes
more and more evident we need a different conception of learning that shifts the focus
from the consumption of disembodied knowledge to the catalyzation of personal and
collective development through the formation of meaningful and transformative
synergies. knowledge exists only in a web of relationships and education's primary goal
should be to facilitate the development of learning communities where students can
engage in meaningful relational activities with their peers and with the world outside.
Rhizomatic learning networks are self-organized collectives able to demonstrate
emergent properties like novelty and innovation. In this article, we try to envisage a new
nomadic pedagogy for the 21st century that facilitates the development of learning
rhizomes, negentropic islands in an entropic environment, self-organized and evolving
learning organizations. We suggest there is something in learning that you can realize,
understand, and take advantage of, only if you look at it as the developmental process
of a living rhizome.

Keywords: rhizome, rhizomatic, learning, pedagogy, autopoiesis, technology, artificial

intelligence, networked learning, relational learning, education

1
Introduction

Nowadays information is abundant, everything is searchable on the web, and learning

resources can be easily located and retrieved. On the other hand, knowledge results
from the active process of filtering, comparing, integrating, interrelating available
resources, while developing new connections of meaning. Today, it becomes more and
more evident we need a new conception of learning that shifts the focus from the
consumption, or production, of disembodied knowledge to the catalyzation of personal
and collective development through the formation of meaningful and transformative
synergies. Participatory learning communities catalyze that kind of transformative
learning. Rhizomatic learning networks, which is the focus of this article, are self-
organized collectives able to demonstrate emergent properties like novelty and
innovation. The Rhizomatic conception of learning was popularized as such through the
work of Deleuze and Guattari (1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia. Inspired by the developmental process of a botanical rhizome (Figure 1),
in the first chapter of their book, Deleuze and Guattari develop the notion of the
philosophical Rhizome as an acentric multiplicity, a dynamic network of entities that is
always expanding, always developing, and always in the becoming: “the rhizome
pertains to a map that must be produced, constructed, a map that is always detachable,
connectable, reversible, modifiable, and has multiple entryways and exits and its own
lines of flight” (p. 21). The specific socio-cultural context in which the rhizome idea
emerged is what Manuel Castells (1996) calls the Network Society, the chronotope of an
ever-interconnected global village, an era of exponential growth for digital networks:
“while the networking form of social organization has existed in other times and spaces,
the new information technology paradigm provides the material basis for its pervasive
expansion throughout the entire social structure.” (p. 500)

Rhizomatic learning as a theory (re)locates learning in the web of relationships between

a person and the world around them. By shifting the focus from the parts to their
interrelation and interdependence, rhizomatic learning can be defined as the process of
catalyzing the development of a dynamic network of knowledgeable agents, human or
even artificial or technobiological actors in the present day, along with their learning
resources (Figure 2). In the words of Deleuze and Guattari (1987), A rhizome “has no
beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo …
Proceeding from the middle, through the middle, coming and going rather than starting

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and finishing” (p. 25) In such a view, learning can be understood as a non-linear dynamic
process, as the creative capacity of a learning rhizome to build upon existing resources
and further develop, creating new connections, acquiring new nodes, and expanding
even further in different directions (Brailas, 2020c). As Lu & Chang point out, knowledge
is a dynamic network of interconnections without beginning nor an end, and without a
predefined pattern, “Just like a botanical rhizome such as ginger or crabgrass extends its
horizontal stems and shoots from nodes” (pp. 12–13) Learning rhizomes are dynamic
networks of transformative possibilities, patterns that always moving, always
rearranging, ever expanding, always in the becoming. Nevertheless, they maintain every
moment an autopoietic structure.

Figure 1. “Pando (Latin for ‘I spread out’) is a clonal colony of an individual male quaking aspen
determined to be a single living organism by identical genetic markers and assumed to have
one massive underground root system. The plant is located in the Fremont River Ranger District
of the Fishlake National Forest at the western edge of the Colorado Plateau in south-central
Utah, United States. Pando occupies 43 hectares. The root system of Pando, at an estimated
80,000 years old, is among the oldest known living organisms.” Source: Pando (Tree) article,
Wikipedia, CC-BY-SA-3.0. In a botanical rhizome there is no starting or ending point, only an
under the surface horizontal development of the interconnected root system toward all possible
directions. In the case of Pando, the appearing individual aspen trees above the surface are just
manifestations of the same underground rhizome.

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Figure 2. A networked conception of learning. We could imagine a complex learning rhizome is
a performative confluence of human and non-human actors that engages people, resources,
processes, and contextual parameters in a transformative dance. In this view, the focus shifts
from the parts to the pattern which connects the parts; an autopoietic pattern that is always in
the becoming.

Castells (1996) describes vividly this dynamic, always in the becoming, nature of the
networking organizational form: “Networks are open structures, able to expand without
limits, integrating new nodes as long as they are able to communicate within the
network, namely as long as they share the same communication codes” (p. 501). Fritjof
Capra points out that the network pattern is the very defining pattern of life, the way life
developed and conquered the whole planet from its beginning. But this refers to a
conception of network as a dynamic process not as a static structure, or a
representational instance like in a printed map. According to Capra, the network pattern
“is one of the very basic patterns of organization in all living systems. At all levels of life
– from the metabolic networks of cells to the food webs of ecosystems – the
components and processes of living systems are interlinked in network fashion.” (Capra
& Luisi, 2014, p. 306) Nevertheless, it is the information and communication
technologies as manifested through the rise of the Internet and the cyberspace that
made the existence of this pattern more evident than ever before. Social media
intensified social interactions making more visible the emerging social networking
patterns (Gkini & Brailas, 2015; Koletsi et al., 2021).

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Google n-gram viewer is a tool that allow users to search for the appearances of any n-
words sequences in the corpus of all digitized published books from 1800s and
onwards. As we can observe by searching for the term rhizomatic it appears only
sporadically during the 20th century, while is increasingly used after 1980, a year that
coincides with the publication of the seminal postmodernist work by Deleuze and
Guattari A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. We observe that the use of
the term rhizomatic develops in parallel with the use of the term Internet in the
published corpus digitized by Google (Figure 3). Maybe Google itself can be understood
as a developing learning rhizome trying to achieve an Omega point, the ultimate
noosphere in the words of Teilhard de Chardin (Zwart, 2022).

Figure 3. Graph produced by Google N-grams viewer. The Internet development as the
manifistation of a rhizomatic network pattern.

In a networking conception of learning, learners can be understood as autonomous,

while interdependent, nomads creating and traversing their personal learning networks
in their own ways in the context of a community of co-learners and in the context of a
chaotic external environment of available learning resources and potential pathways.
The role of the educator in a rhizomatic ecology of learning is to perturbate rather,
instead of directing, participants in order to create alternative connections, new
(sub)networks of thinking, and new patterns of relating with each other, and with other
available human or non-human nodes, and learning resources in an empowering
confluence, a co-evolutionary dance (Brailas, 2020c). Nevertheless, it is not the educator

5
that “teaches” the students. The rhizome as a whole becomes an autopoietic learning
process, the teaching apparatus, a multiplier of perspectives, and an amplifier of
synergies: “the rhizome creates the background, the contextual validity, and the situated
meaning for individual actions. By developing learning rhizomes, self-organizing
confluences of human and non-human in the becoming, we participate in anotropic
performative dances which help us unfold our full living potential.” (Brailas, 2020, p.
313). Confluence is a term often used by Gergen (2009) to vividly render the dynamic
nature of an assemblage in the theoretical framework of Deleuze and Guattari which can
refer to “machines or particular arrangements within a context for which pieces of
heterogeneous human, material, and nontangible elements, conditions, or forces
interact to coproduce something in the process of becoming.” (Lu & Chang, 2022, p. 13)

Rhizomatic Learning as a process of autopoiesis

In the networked socio-technological context of the second half of the 20th century, it
was inevitable for scholars to be inspired by the network and rhizome metaphor and try
to apply it in the educational field. In Deschooling Society, Ivan Illich (1970) used the
term learning webs to describe a non-hierarchical and bureaucratic educational system,
a horizontal web-like alternative that provides “all who want to learn with access to
available resources at any time in their lives; empower all who want to share what they
know to find those who want to learn it from them” (p. 75). As regarding the specific use
of the term rhizome/rhizomatic, in a Google Scholar search, we can trace one of the first
explicit uses of the composite term rhizomatic learning back in 2003, in the PhD thesis
by Harald Kraus including a section entitled “Rhizomatic Learning: an Introduction?”
Kraus calls for a practical application of the rhizome conception, in a pedagogy that
acknowledges “a need for conditions in which 'lines of flight' are not prevented or cut
short, but instead are encouraged: the more resources and experiences that are made
available, the more chance the learner has of developing a deeper, one might say three-
dimensional web of socio-cultural associations.” (pp. 222–223). In 2004, in the book
chapter Technology-enhanced language learning environments: A rhizomatic approach,
Andrew Lian describes a learning system for language learning based on postmodern
thinking where the process of learning is identified as a process of meaning making by
the individual participants. The power of such an approach to learning “lies not only in
each of its parts but particularly in the high level of connectivity between its parts:
essentially a rhizomatic approach.” (p. 1) In the modern unpredictable world, “to learn
implies an act of comprehension which challenges the learner’s personal
representational and logical systems … it is an act of violence (in the sense of violating

6
the regularities inferred by the individual on the basis of the past).” (Lian, 2004, p. 3) Lian
also highlights the previous work done by Petar Guberina, conceptualizing deafness not
so much as a physical deficit of the individuals but as having a different pattern for
organizing the world in comparison to the neurotypical ones. Again, there is here a shift
on the focus from the qualities of the parts to the pattern which connects in the words
of Gregory Bateson (1979). In regard to this view, a characteristic example of Batesonian
thought is his counting of a hand’s finger: He did not focus on the number of fingers
(five units) but on the number of relationships between the thumb and each other
finger, a kind of operational definition. Therefore, it is more practical to say that an
individual has four pairs of fingers in each hand (Bateson, 1972).

Lind (2005) highlights the importance of a rhizomatic view on children’s learning

focusing on the interplay between visual, verbal, and linguistic patterns: “Elements or
signs that connect in an unpredictable manner characterise a rhizomatic process. This
process is not ruled by a plan for definite goals” (p. 257). Irwin et al (2006), demonstrate
how rhizomatic relationalities drive knowledge development: “theory is no longer an
abstract concept but rather an embodied living inquiry, an interstitial relational space for
creating, teaching, learning, and researching in a constant state of becoming ... this
means theorizing through inquiry, a process that involves an evolution of questions.” (p.
71) Sharma (2006) argues that “to propose a ‘rhizomatic pedagogy’ is, in many respects,
oxymoronic. The institutional hegemonies and cultural authorities operating in the
university space make such an endeavour a precarious activity.” (p. 214) In the same
direction, Livingston ( 2000) develops a rhizomatic conception of the curriculum as a
medium that encourages learners to produce multiple performances, so as to “affect
central power mechanisms, proliferate infinite political thoughts, and shatter the
concepts of classes, sexes, gender, and race … to show how everything is indeed
ambiguous and what has been created by people can also be uncreated by people.” (p.
x).

Cormier (2008), in his work Rhizomatic education: Community as curriculum, proposes a

rhizomatic model of learning where curriculum “is not driven by predefined inputs from
experts; it is constructed and negotiated in real time by the contributions of those
engaged in the learning process. This community acts as the curriculum, spontaneously
shaping, constructing, and reconstructing itself and the subject of its learning” (p. 3). A
rhizomatic learning experience can be realized as a process of constant adaptation,
development and growth, despite the inevitable obstacles: “The rhizomatic flow
develops in an unpredictable way and progressively takes shape while continuously
avoiding the obstacles it meets. Robustness epitomizes the rhizome” (Bissola et al.,
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2017, p. 2). Brailas et al (2017), define rhizomatic pedagogy as an approach where “the
learning of the participants depends not so much on their individual action, as on being
the coevolving parts of a self-organized whole.” (p. 1) Bateson (1979) long before
highlighted the importance of the interrelating pattern: “Break the pattern which
connects the items of learning and you necessarily destroy all quality” (p. 8).

Autopoiesis, a concept initially developed by Varela & Maturana to describe biological

systems and further developed by Luhman for social systems, provides a critical ground
for understanding rhizomatic learning dynamics. Living systems are autopoietic, in the
sense that “continually create, or recreate, themselves by transforming or replacing their
components. They undergo continual structural changes while preserving their web-like
patterns of organization.” (Capra & Luisi, 2014, p. 316) Therefore, a learning rhizome,
being as a whole a living dynamical system, would be able to produce or acquire the
components it needs to sustain its development. Living systems need to be open to
their environment to maintain their function. But at the same time, in order to maintain
their boundaries, their own existence and organizational autonomy, this openness is not
unconditional. Therefore, a learning rhizome should be operationally closed in the sense
that “its self-production (autopoiesis) is a function of production rules and processes by
which order and identity are maintained and which cannot be modified directly from
outside.” (Meyers, 2009, p. 7) A direct pedagogical consequence of the autopoietic
nature of learning systems is that a teacher cannot actually “teach” anything to anyone;
teachers can only perturbate the learning rhizomes of their students so as to catalyze
and facilitatie their development.

Capra & Luisi (2014) vividly describe this process of perturbation in autopoiesis:

Living systems, then, respond to disturbances from the environment

autonomously with structural changes – that is, by rearranging their
patterns of connectivity. According to Maturana and Varela, we can never
direct a living system; we can only disturb it. More than that, the living
system not only specifies its structural changes; it also specifies which
disturbances from the environment trigger them. In other words, a living
system has the autonomy to decide what to notice and what will disturb it.
… As a living organism goes through its individual pathway of structural
changes, each of these changes corresponds to a cognitive act, which
means that learning and development are merely two sides of the same
coin. (p. 256)

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In this direction, rhizomatic learning networks can be understood as enabling
constraints in the sense that Davis et al (2015) define the term: “The phrase might at
first sound like an oxymoron, but it actually refers to a necessary condition for complex
emergence. Complex unities are simultaneously rule-bound (constrained) and capable
of flexible, unanticipated possibilities (enabled). That is, enabling constraints define a
system’s affordances.” (p. 219)

Artificial intelligence, singularity, and a meta-learning ecology: The learning

rhizome as an anotropic dissipative structure

What is the relation between rhizomatic learning, artificial intelligence, and the modern
networked techno-social spaces? Humans always developed technology to survive,
adapt, and evolve in the natural world (Koletsi, 2022; Koskinas, 2018), this is not
something new. Nevertheless, today there is a fundamental shift in the technological
development. Artificial intelligence brings a brand-new feature: the ability to evolve and
transform itself. According to many scholars and philosophers, we are approaching a
critical threshold, the so-called technological singularity point. Singularity is a term used
in Physics for describing black holes in space. Close enough to a black hole there is a
point where gravity becomes infinite so as even the light itself cannot escape the
gravitational force. Technological singularity usually refers to the scenario in which
technological advances would ultimately lead to the rise of an infinite artificial
intelligence through a chain-reaction of self-improvement cycles, a positive feedback
loop that reinforces its output (Eden et al., 2012). Verner Vinge (1993) argues that “The
acceleration of technological progress has been the central feature of this century. We
are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth.” Technological
singularity right now is a thought experiment, a logical argument, a scenario that seems
plausible:

An artificial intelligence that surpasses human intelligence will trigger the

process of technological singularity. If human intelligence is capable of
creating an artificial intelligence that surpasses its creators, then this
intelligence would, in turn, be able to create an even superior next-
generation intelligence. An inevitable positive feedback loop would lead to
an exponential intelligence growth rate. (Brailas, 2019, p. 72)

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Back in 2003, an era characterized by the rise of social media, Ilya Prigogine argued that
“The Internet gives us a lot of information and it leads probably to a new form of society
but we don't know what kind of society it will be.” (p. 72) According to Prigogine, we
were facing a critical tipping point. Modern humans have already acquired cybernetic
cognitive extensions in the form of “always carrying with me” smartphones (Brailas &
Tsekeris, 2014; Vakali & Brailas, 2018). If we combine the cybernetic-enhanced biological
self with the networked society and the development of ubiquitous artificial intelligent
actors, would it be possible for this unprecedented combination to trigger the
emergence of a complex techno-social distributed intelligence? Can we think of the
techno-social rhizome as a new kind of brain? Afterall, human brain is itself a vast
network of interconnected neurons that is always in the becoming (neuronal plasticity),
a kind of a neuronal rhizome, an acentric multiplicity where the sense of consciousness
as an emergent property.

In the middle of the 20th century, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (a paleontologist,

theologian, philosopher, and catholic priest) placed a strong emphasis on the co-
evolution and the transformative interrelation between the biosphere and the human
culture. He introduced the concept of the Omega point, an ultimate state of biocultural
development for the whole universe, a state of maximum evolutionary complexity and
consciousness (Teilhard de Chardin, 1947). In a symbolic interpretation of the term used,
Omega is the last letter in the Greek alphabet and also appears in a phrase at the book
of revelation to describe the God: "I am the Alpha and the Omega". So, the concept of
Omega point bears a profound teleological weight. Teilhard is credited of having
anticipated the development of the internet, the network society, the Anthropocene and
the Gaia theory (Brailas, 2019; Zwart, 2022). Teilhard's put an emphasis on the
combination of the technological and biocultural evolution. He identified computers and
networks as the two key ingredients for developing a kind of a rhizomatic network that
finally took the form of the Internet (Vidal, 2021). Teilhard further developed Vladimir
Vernadsky's concept of the noosphere, and connect it with his teleological concept of
the omega point. Teilhard viewed the ultimate rise of the noosphere as a kind of a
superorganism, the inevitable result of the accelerating human techno-cultural
development (Vidal, 2021). Teilhard’s noosphere can be understood today as the
ultimate phase of development of the global techno-bio-cultural rhizome, a
superorganism in the sense of being an evolving networked whole with emergent
properties.

10
 Isn’t bizarre how in just two decades we gained a new extension to
ourselves, an object with which we have more skin-to-skin contact than
anything or anyone else in our lives? And what will happen in the next two
decades or more? Will we acquire more such extensions and become
complete cyborgs, or is there another direction to go in? I already noticed
that our senses are gradually being altered by technological developments.
Take our sense of distance, for example; it is obvious that the physical
location of our body is no longer a barrier to communicating and
interacting with people from other parts of the world. Considering the
speed with which the enhancement of our bodily functions is taking place,
it may well lead to the complete replacement of our senses by new and
advanced ones in the near future. (Vishnevskaia, 2018)

In the introduction of this article, we defined rhizomatic learning networks as

spontaneous and self-organized collectives able to demonstrate emergent properties
like novelty and innovation. We argued that in a networking conception of learning,
learners can be understood as autonomous, while interdependent, nomads creating and
traversing their personal learning networks in their own ways in the context of a
community of co-learners and in the context of a chaotic external environment of
available learning resources and potential pathways. We also argued that the role of the
educator in a rhizomatic ecology of learning is to perturbate rather, instead of directing,
participants in order to create alternative connections, new (sub)networks of thinking,
and new patterns of relating with each other, and with other available human or non-
human nodes, and learning resources in an empowering confluence, a co-evolutionary
dance. We continued suggesting that by developing learning rhizomes, self-organizing
confluences of human and non-human in the becoming, we participate in anotropic
performative dances which help us unfold our full living potential.

Teilhard (1960) noted that evolution is the “general condition to which all other theories,
all hypotheses, all systems must bow and which they must satisfy henceforward if they
are to be thinkable and true. Evolution is a light illuminating all facts, a curve that all
lines must follow.” (p. 219). What would be the effect of artificial intelligence agents
entering this kind of evolutionary dance? Self-organization and the evolution of life itself
seems to be an oxymoron in the context of an ever entropic universe condemned to
disorganization, deterioration, a thermodynamic death. Teilhard de Chardin passed away

11
in 1955 being “exiled” by the official church in China and prohibited from publishing his
work. After his death, the publication of his works inspired the world scientific
community, especially in the fields of cybernetics, complex systems, information theory,
and internet studies (Kreisberg, 1995). A few years letter in 1977, Ilya Prigogine, a
physics and chemist scientist, became a Nobel laureate for his work on dissipative
structures, far from the equilibrium dynamic systems, and the irreversibility of chemical
processes. Later, Prigogine developed and epistemology for complex living systems,
demonstrating how life is possible in an entropic context. Living organisms sustain their
structure and further develop by being open enough to dissipate their excessive entropy
in the environment and taking in information that allows them to self-organize and
evolve (Prigogine & Stengers, 1997). “There is something special about life in general
and human existence in particular … whereas the general movement in the universe is
towards entropy and dissipation, life evolves in a juxtaposed direction, ascending
towards complexity: life as ‘negative entropy’” (Zwart, 2022, p. 215).

Anotropy, literally meaning in Greek moving (tropi) upword (ano), was a term
introduced by George Vassileiou back in the the 1970s to refer to negentropy, avoiding
the double negative connotation in the term (Polemi-Todoulou, 2018; Vassiliou &
Vassiliou, 1985). Anotropy refers to the inherent ability of living systems to self-
organization and develop toward more complex forms, against entropy and the second
law of thermodynamics (Brailas, 2020c). What Teilhard brought in philosophy of science,
among others, was a teleological belief to a better, more anotropic (aka negentropic)
future. Teilhard argued that the ultimate evolutionary goal “is not the attainment of
maximum entropy as assumed by physical science, but the attainment of maximum
consciousness. Chardin maintains that the increase in entropy is just necessary payment
to achieve this goal.” (Gowan, 2014) In the context of the work of Teilhard de Chardin
and Ilya Prigogine, learning rhizomes can be realized as social dissipative structures able
to demonstrate self-organization amid an entropic, always degrading (at least in energy
terms), environment. Would the introduction of artificial agents in learning rhizomes will
catalyze further their developmental process, and toward what direction? Prigogine
answers, who knows? The future is not given (Prigogine, 2003). We already live in a
world where technology, artificial intelligence, society and culture create a brand new
technosocial space, a unique generative combination of elements (Brailas & Tsekeris,
2014). Nevertheless, “through the prism of complex systems epistemology, life is not a
mechanical automaton, and the future is not a given. Artificial intelligence and humans

12
form a bio-techno-social system, and the evolution of the participating actors in this
complex super-organism depends upon their individual action, as well as upon each
actor being a coevolving part of a self-organized whole.” (Brailas, 2019, p. 75) Ivan Illich
(1970) suggests that “technology is available to develop either independence and
learning or bureaucracy and teaching.” (p. 77) As Aldous Huxley points out, Teilhard “is
able to envisage the whole of knowable reality not as a static mechanism but as a
process.”(Teilhard de Chardin, 1960, p. 11) In the terms of the present work, we try to
envisage education not as an attempt to convey a static body of knowledge, but as
catalyzing the process of developing learning rhizomes, anotropic islands in an entropic
sea, performative wholes that are always in the becoming and evolving. This is about
facilitating the development of learning webs in the words of Ivan Illich, learning
rhizomes that allow the generation of new forms, constantly reaching out for creativity
and novelty (Capra & Luisi, 2014). We build generative, meaningful processes of relating
and co-creating by improvising from within the enabling relational space of a learning
community (Bava, 2020).

The call for a new pedagogy for the 21st century

John Dewey (1938), in his work Experience & Education, contrast traditional to
progressive education. In traditional education Dewey argues, “The subject- matter of
education consists of bodies of information and of skills that have been worked out in
the past; therefore, the chief business of the school is to transmit them to the new
generation.” (p. 17) As Ivan Illich (1970/2022) points out in Deschooling Society
“Everywhere the hidden curriculum of schooling initiates the citizen to the myth that
bureaucracies guided by scientific knowledge are efficient and benevolent. Everywhere
this same curriculum instills in the pupil the myth that increased production will provide
a better life.” (p. 74). This more is better, faster is better, and me first mentality (Capra,
2003) lies behind the ecological and cultural crises of the modern world: “we are faced
with an unprecedented set of challenges that cannot be addressed by any of us
individually. Climate change, the overexploitation of environmental resources, financial
crises, war, violence, poverty, and affronts to basic human rights and needs raise calls to
action.” (Brailas, Koskinas, et al., 2017, p. 1). Today we are faced with the so-called
wicked problems which are any social, cultural, ecological or other complex challenges
that are difficult to cope with and find a sustainable solutions by linear, symptoms-
oriented, thinking (Brailas, 2021).

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Despite the ineffectiveness of linear interventions and ad-hoc solutions that address
only the symptoms avoiding to cope with the complicity of the modern challenges,
“schools are designed on the assumption that there is a secret to everything in life; that
the quality of life depends on knowing that secret; that secrets can be known only in
orderly successions; and that only teachers can properly reveal these secrets.” (Illich,
1970/2002, p. 76). This is about an utopic wishful thinking that “technology and science
alone, like a new Deus ex machina, would ultimately save us from any problematic
situation we would ever face, and from any possible catastrophe we would ever
confront, proved to be unrealistic.” (Brailas, 2021, p. 1) Unfortunately, traditional
educational systems promote a ‘thinking inside the box’ mentality: students are
expected to know and provide the right answers for already known problems. As von
Foerster (1972) explains, “Tests are devices to establish a measure of trivialization. A
perfect score in a test is indicative of perfect trivialization: the student is completely
predictable and thus can be admitted into society. He will cause neither any surprises
nor any trouble.” (von Foerster, 1972, p. 41)

(a) Rhizomatic pedagogy (b) hierarchical pedagogy

Figure 4. Rhizomatic vs Hierarchical Pedagogy. The potential number of relations nurtured is

n(n-1)/2 vs n-1 in a hierarchical learning approach. For example, in a peer learning community
with 10 members (where all participants are treated as active actors able to contribute in the
knowledge production), all the horizontal possible connections are 45 (vs 9 if one of the
members assume the absolute authority to deliver knowledge production and the rest nine
assume a passive/consumer role).

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How to prepare them to cope with unprecedented challenges? How to prepare students
to address wicked problems? How to educate for sustainability and well-being? Nothing
can be done for the students without the students (Hoskins, 2020). In a rhizomatic
learning approach, resilience, sustainability and innovation are not qualities of
individuals but emerge through their synergies and emerge as qualities of an entire
learning community: “We are social beings. We live and learn in the company of others.
Outside schools, the ability to work with others is critical to the strength of communities
and to meeting the challenges we collectively face. Yet, in many schools, young people
largely work on their own; they learn in groups but not as groups.” (Robinson, 2011, p.
138)

Despite today’s technological advances in communication technologies and the

increased technological literacy of people, especially during the pandemic years, “we
confront a world in which the world’s peoples are both closer together and further apart
than ever before.” (Gergen, 2020, p. 12) Education can be a starting point for initiating a
change. Schools should be relational communities that create optimal conditions for
learning, by supporting facilitating, and encouraging participants in their inquiry toward
personal and collective flourishing and well-being (Lewis, 2020). In an appreciative
relational community, participants develop a rich set of social-emotional skills, learn to
recognize diverse perspectives, and experience how different, and often competing,
ideas may be turned into a process of co-creation (Brailas, 2020b). To design thriving
learning communities, we first need to understand how nature sustains and promotes
life. Studying the long history of human evolution, we realize that sustainability is not an
individual attribute but an element of a whole web of relationships, as it always includes
an entire community. This is the deepest lesson we are called to receive from nature.
The way to sustain life is to build and support communities (Capra, 2003). The principles
for designing our future educational institutions must be in line with the organizational
principles that nature evolved in order to develop and maintain the fabric of life.

Social constructionism argues that knowledge cannot exist outside of a web of

relationships and, therefore, knowledge production in a classroom is a community
achievement: “learning no longer takes place in the mind of the individual learner; it is
the result of relationships between teachers and learners, between learners themselves
and between the classroom and its community” (Dragonas, 2020, p. 314). Consequently,
education's primary goal should be to facilitate the development of learning

15
communities where students can engage in meaningful relational activities with their
peers and the world outside (Brailas et al., 2015). Education is the process of creating
opportunity webs (Illich, 1970/2002), networks and rhizomes. Ivan Illich proposed back
in 1974 a kind of rhizomatic learning pedagogy “where networks replace hierarchies,
where interaction displaces centralized control, where the agency of learners is balanced
with the expertise teachers, where complementary knowledge of peers is brought to
bear, and where knowledge emerges from differentiated and distributed sources.” (Cope
& Kalantzis, 2022, p. 25) In such a view, the goal of a learning community should be to
facilitate collaborative learning processes where gradually the students themselves, as
learning nomads, lead their learning and co-create knowledge within their networks
(Brailas, Avani, et al., 2017; Dole, 2020).

Figure 5. The Rhizome as a multicolor Dialogue. Collective in-class drawing of a rhizome by

students participating in the course Systems Theory, Psychology and Social Media, Panteion
University, 2021-22 cohort (Image used with permission). If we observe carefully, we can identify
living forms as they emerge from this colorful rhizome. Nevertheless, there is an underline
rhizome that give “life” and interconnect those forms.

16
As regarding the role of the teacher in such rhizomatic learning ecology, we can
illuminate it through the gardener metaphor. A gardener has to take care of a living
ecosystem. A gardener cannot secure the flourishing of their garden, but careful
gardening is usually followed by a flourishing garden. We can’t control the process, but
we can attempt to create the optimal conditions for something beautiful to emerge.
And this is a helpful metaphor for the teacher’s role in an anotropic pedagogy
“knowledge democracies require continuous and ongoing effort to bring about what is
possible in the present moment while maintaining what is vibrant and desired.” (Lewis,
2020, p. 322) Nevertheless, this is about a mutual development process, a coevolution of
both the gardener and their plants. The teacher and their student form the learning
rhizome of the class. Education has the potential to transform the world, to create a
future that is different and better than the one we were given. When educators begin
teaching for the first time, they quickly realize that themselves change and evolve along
with their students.

In an era of increased screen time, immersion in virtual reality, and a sedentary way of
living and being (Kohorst et al., 2018), nomadic pedagogy should be an embodied
pedagogy of moving and relating, an experiential learning process that locate the
students and their teachers in a web of enabling relationships with each other in the
context of a networked reality. We can learn things only by being embodied nomads
developing and traversing our own and unique learning rhizomes (Brailas, 2020a), “we
can understand things only by handling them, by moving them, by moving our own
body” (Clarke & Hansen, 2009, p. 31), and equilibrium exists only in action, according to
Simone Weil (Sharp, 1984). At the end, is there any form of learning that is not actually
rhizomatic? Life, from the very beginning, did not take this planet by compact but by
synergies (Capra, 2010), and the other is necessary for the survival of me, and for
sustaining everyone (Lugo, 2020). Learning is always rhizomatic, life in any form is an
ongoing rhizomatic dialogue (Figure 5). However, there is something you can see,
understand, and take advantage of, only if you look at it as a rhizome, and this is
something educators should take advantage of.

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