“Thing Power”: Art, Assemblage, and Entanglement as Practitioner Action Research

Abstract

This paper explores an arts-based practitioner action research study that explores the artworks made by students from a Grade 11 History of Canada course in response to teaching and learning about the First World War. The practitioner considers the art-things (Bennett, 2015) of his students and the associated thing-power (Bennett, 2004) affordances. The work was informed by a rhizomatic methodology (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/2000) that illuminated insights arising from interpretation and analysis of the educative assemblage and its concrete and abstract constituents and forces. The practitioner’s action research was informed by newness, unexpectedness, and difference (Deleuze & Guattari, 1968/1994) drawn from engagements with the students’ art-things and artist statements, which in turn enriched the personal and professional knowledge and educative practices of the author as well as his students’ learning because of knowledge drawn from this inquiry.