This post first appeared on aud.life

Here's Dave Cormier's prompt for #rhizo15, week 5:

Rhizomatic plants are chaotic, aggressive and resilient. It models some of the qualities that can make a good learner. The rhizome, however, can also be an invasive species. It can choke other plants out of your garden such that only the rhizomatic plant remains. We’ve just heard from Aras that “the number of active participants [on twitter] are decreasing while density (interaction in the rhizo community) is increasing”. How do we make sure there is always room for new and contrarian voices? Do we need to create a them to have a we? How do we cultivate a community learning ecosystem so that it continues to grow outward rather than inward? What does that mean for learning?

Must rhizomatic learning be an invasive species?

I feel like we're mixing metaphors now, and in the process likely getting the philosophy and the biology and the politics wrong.

"Invasive species" is a such loaded phrase here -- intentionally so, no doubt. It's one that describes plant life that is, when introduced, quite destructive. Planting bamboo can indeed overwhelm the other plants in one's garden; but growth via underground roots and rhizomes are not the only way biologically invasive species spread. And a focus on the biology -- on the rhizome -- might obscure the other factors that lead to the species' presence in the first place. Why is bamboo a threat to the Portland garden? How did bamboo move from Asia to Europe and the US? It wasn't through rhizomatic growth and the amazing reproduction of the bamboo system; it was through imperialism.

Is that how rhizomatic learning envisions itself? As an invasive species, a biological consequence of imperialism? Why focus on the invasion? Rhizomes are, after all, natural -- a rapid and expansive growth from and through the roots. We only place a value judgment on this when it occurs in another ecosystem.

Why frame those involved in #rhizo15 as an invasive, destructive force? What sort of reflection does this prompt?

(Does it prompt any? Because I do feel as though the notion of choking out other ideas and organisms is an important one. #Rhizo15 is not necessarily a garden where I would plant new things...)