Product reviews for Becoming Mobius

In this compelling, conceptually-rich and moving book, Debra Kidd creates a unique engagement with the UK educational environment. Taking inspiration from the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, she uses insightful analyses of ethnographic data taken from her own classrooms to explore how experiences of uncertainty constitute the living material of educational practice. She shows how the fetishization of certainty, of a fixed stock of knowledge and -˜values', constrains educational practice now more than ever before in the UK, thanks to increasingly centralized political control. Yet uncertainty, Kidd maintains, is not to be feared. It must instead be seen as a positive contribution to order, as the source of novelty, surprise and transformation. Through eight chapters presented as -˜plateaus', extended engagements with awkwardness, difficulty and antagonism in the classroom, she extracts from her experiences moments and encounters which exemplify learning in the sense articulated by Deleuze and Guattari, the -˜making of sense from sensation'. Kidd shows with clarity, humour and verve how the classroom can become a site of small resistances that hold open the promise of different futures, multiple lines of flight shot through a deadening crust of compliance and conformity.