Risks and pleasures: a Deleuzo‐Guattarian pedagogy of desire in education

Abstract

This article provides an analysis of a pedagogy of desire from a Deleuzo‐Guattarian perspective. A pedagogy of desire can be theorised in ways that mobilise creative, transgressive and pleasurable forces within teaching and learning environments. It also enables a new view on affect in education as a landscape of becoming in which forces, surfaces and flows of teachers/students are caught up in a desiring ontology. This marks an attempt to reclaim the notion of desire away from a purely negative, repressive or libidinal framework. The claim of pedagogy of desire is that through the mobilisation and release of desiring production, teachers and students make available to themselves the powerful flows of desire, thereby turning themselves into subjects who subvert normalised representations and significations and find access to a radical self. Some strategies and practical implications are offered to suggest how this approach to pedagogy may function in educational contexts.