Minor pedagogy: Education as continuous variation

Abstract

In this paper, the authors consider the intersections of philosophy and education. Extending the concept of a minor pedagogy first presented by Mazzei and Smithers (2020), the authors reorient thinking toward more equitable and just pedagogy as a cultivation of difference. This paper has three major sections. In the first two, the authors review Deleuze and Guattari’s (1986, 1987) concept of the minor, and then connect this to the concept of a minor pedagogy. The final section explores the work of a minor pedagogy as continuous variation with the potential to engender difference. Given that racialized neoliberal efficiency and accountability movements have perpetuated injustice across generations, the work of educational practice that contests this must be practice that slips from these major grips to produce new, more just, worlds. Minor pedagogy produces educational justice through everyday shifts in the conditions of our collective possibility, shifts that manifest difference in ways that reject re-form in the pursuit of the not yet.