Fragile Mosaics of Teacher Becoming: Kaleidoscoping Futures of Difference

Abstract in English

This is a thesis about becoming-teacher in a Work-Integrated Teacher Education-program (WITE-program), where working as an employed teacher in a school becomes part of formal education. In the 2010s, society and (higher) education faced several challenges connected to the problem of an accumulating teacher shortage. Universities and school organizers therefore joined forces to try to find a solution to shared problems. The solution introduced was Work-Integrated Teacher Education-programs that combined education with work.

However, this is not an inquiry about what the WITE-program ‘is’, but an inquiry about becoming-teacher in a WITE-program. The thesis examines what happens during a workday in the first semester of a WITE-program in 16 different school settings. The school visits that lay the foundation for this inquiry were carried out in 2019.

This is an examination of how a becoming-teacher is affected by contingency, organization, and change in school assemblages that are always in a state of becoming. The subject is here not understood as an entity, but rather as a relational nexus affected by space, time and relational intensities. Reality, from this perspective, is not pre-given, but always in a state of flux, always productive. The multi-sensory observations of unfolding encounters in school-setting assemblages actualized by an ‘inquiry-machine’, thereby rely on an ontology of difference, primarily as set out by the philosopher Gilles Deleuze.

‘Affect’ in this thesis does not refer to a personal feeling or emotion, but to a pre-personal intensity and the ways in which a body affects and becomes affected in encounters. In other words, the changes in a becoming-teacher’s power to act ensuing an encounter with a child’s question, a pencil, or a teacher colleague. Instead of asking what a non/human body is, ask what it can do. In the wake of the undone subject, this inquiry offers becoming-teacher as the relational and open process under investigation, and the school assemblage as the smallest unit of analysis.

The thesis does not depart from aims and research questions, but from problems. The first of the problems explored is thus ‘how the contingency of the present affects teacher becoming – and how becoming-teacher unfolds in capricious and inexorable presents’. A post qualitative inquiry (PQI) presented as a non-linear composition on a digital platform, invites visitors to engage with school events through visits to experimental maps called ‘mosaics’. The second problem this thesis explores is thus ‘how maps (mosaics) contribute to the power of posing new problems related to teacher becoming’, which is explored through a conceptual process offered as ‘kaleidoscoping’.

The thesis proposes that teacher becoming, as an actualization of a WITE-program, is a complex process conditioned by singular circumstances within a particular organization and the affective resources available. The unfolding present turns into a kind of teacher’s storage cabinet that becoming-teachers rummage through. Becoming-teachers thus actualize the capacity to make alliances with available resources through ‘relational architecting’. Whilst rummaging, moreover, becoming-teachers modulate temporalities through a kind of time-forming offered as ‘chronomorphing’, where they speed things up or slow things down to better match unfolding needs. These relational and temporal modulations are fragile and courageous processes that require imagination and experimentation. Lastly, the thesis proposes that becoming-teachers, the inquiry(-machine), and the WITE-program, in their respective ways, challenge linguistic categorization through an experimental practice referred to as ‘naming enigmas’. Education as a teleological project and the traditional model of pedagogy are thus challenged.