In my limited experience writing a doctoral thesis is an ambiguous undertaking: On the one hand, the thesis as a written account of a research project is expected to lay out clearly and truthfully the essential details of the research process and its results. On
the other hand, the research process is never a linear process, it never goes as planned, and it brings new knowledge in unexpected ways, which cannot always be explained with rational decisions. This ‘intermezzo’ section is a non-linear research story, in which I hope to make my ontological re-orientation transparent.
Music plays an important role in A Thousand Plateaus, and its authors used the word intermezzo to describe in-betweenness: “The fact is that the beginning always begins in-between, intermezzo.” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 329). I cannot provide a specific date or time when I consciously moved towards a Deleuzo-Guattarian research approach. It happened in-between a multiplicity of thinking-doing research
assemblages and not as a result of a single process or an unsatisfactory result from the pilot study. These multiple rhizomatic movements are denoted by the
“and…and…and…”, a linguistic construct that Deleuze & Guattari (1987) used in their book A Thousand Plateaus.
And…the pilot study went well, the data collection tools produced
complementary qualitative data (questionnaire) and quantitative data (tweets) that could be analysed in a ‘meaningful’ way by using a combination of GT and SNA.
Simultaneously, I refined core elements of the literature review, such learning as acquisition, learning as participation and learning as becoming (Chapter 2.3). The ‘findings’ produced in the pilot study included the need for FLTs’ to constantly develop professionally, which seemed to arise from external obligations (employers,
government), constant changes (technology, language, working conditions, teaching methods), and from a need for self-development, which was perceived by some FLTs. There also seemed to be tensions between self-directed and peer-led professional learning, grounded in FLTs’ diverging PD objectives. Analysing tweets from the network #mfltwitterati showed that tweets were often sent to more than one Twitter
network, and that some tweets were disseminated widely through retweets and the use of hashtags. The network actors were positioned very differently, indicating that they performed different roles in the network and possessed different levels of access to information travelling within the network. Other findings from the pilot study hinted at a potential relationship between FLTs’ tweeting practice and language teaching. Furthermore, two respondents from the online narrative frame questionnaire agreed to take part in the main study (Hanna and Heather). After this encouraging experience I decided to retain a combination of online narrative frame questionnaires and SNA in the main study and to extend the data collection to include individual tweets from FLTs and online interviews to gain deeper insight into FLTs’ Twitter-based practices.
And…alongside data analysis I started exploring A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) and read extensively about the Deleuzo-Guattarian concepts of
rhizome, assemblage and becoming, which I found intriguing but initially could not really grasp. St. Pierre (2004), Mazzei and McCoy (2010) and Clarke and Parsons (2013) helped me to ‘plug into’ (St. Pierre, 2004) Deleuzo-Guattarian thinking and to connect these concepts to life within and beyond my research. Other researchers, e.g. Masny (2013), Waterhouse (2012) and Bangou (2013), showed me how Deleuzo- Guattarian thinking-doing research was put into practice in their research in language education and language teacher education. While all of these authors were helpful in different ways, I still struggled to ‘apply’ Deleuzo-Guattarian thinking in my own research.
And….the co-author of a previous publication introduced me to a Canadian
researcher, after she had seen a presentation about his Deleuzo-Guattarian research and tweeted about it. Several e-mails and online research exchanges later this researcher invited me to contribute a book chapter to a book about Deleuzo-Guattarian
perspectives in Second Language education. During the development of my book chapter I started to think about the received view and the contextual view in human- technological relations (see Chapter 2.5). I had noticed previously that existing research on teachers’ Twitter-based PD referred to Twitter as either a tool (e.g. Carpenter & Krutka, 2014), a medium (e.g. Quan-Haase & McCay-Peet, 2015) or a space (Rehm & Notten, 2016), but now I started wondering if Twitter could not be all this, and possibly something else. Writing this book chapter was entangled with other online research exchanges on…and with…and through Twitter, some of which led to collaborations with (doctoral) researchers and new opportunities for reflection and research
dissemination (Emke, in press).
And…while I was trying to ‘find my footing’ in Deleuzo-Guattarian thinking-
doing research, I encountered two research problems. Firstly, my initial analysis of the main study data, based on the GT approach outlined previously, revealed inconsistent patterns, both thematically and in participants’ tweeting behaviour. Another challenge arose when I compared participants’ tweets with the tweets from the Twitter network they had named as most influential for their PD. Contrary to my expectations, four participants had hardly used the hashtag of the Twitter networks in their tweets during the one-month data collection period per participant, and three participants had not taken part in any of the one-hour Twitter chats that these networks offered. Instead, I discovered new and surprising connections when I started to follow the movements of individual tweet and hashtag assemblages (see Chapter 5). While these two incidents would not necessarily have prevented me for continuing with a phenomenological research approach, they provoked me to engage with Deleuzo-Guattarian philosophy (see Chapter 3.3) and their concepts of rhizome, assemblage and becoming (see Chapter 3.4) more thoroughly and to search for an alternative research approach. In the
following months I revised my research questions (see Chapter 3.6) and started to experiment with a new conceptualisation of Twitter, which is described in the next section.