Teacher education in Europe is experiencing a re-awakening of performance-based approaches in developing teachers’ skills, knowledge and attitudes and in informing their assessment through listed standards of competence (Sultana, 2009). The fact that teacher education discourses today are couched within the notion of lifelong education taking ground in the preparation of professionals in Europe, does not free teachers from the language of competency and performativity. (EU Commission 2005). Such approaches that unproblematically establish fixed ways of being a teacher, generated by performative attempts seeking to control uncertainties in education contexts ( Blake et al 1998), contrast with the teacher that escapes definition; one whose critical freedom continually metamorphosises her into differentiated becomings. Acknowledging the difficulties of teacher educators in cutting loose of responsibilities in directing teachers into established educational paths, the paper argues that teacher education based on templated teacher competences leave little room for transformative educational possibilities. The paper draws on Braidotti’s reading of the notion of becoming woman (Braidotti 2002, 2006) to reconceptualise teachers as nomadically venturing into open, radically indeterminate spaces of teaching and learning. Rosi Braidotti‘s feminist philosophical call for a reinvention of the subjectivities as multiple, changing (Braidotti 1994) is an important theoretical space for overcoming strict definitions of the teacher. Her feminist reading of notion of becoming woman (Deleuze & Guattari 1987) in establishing oneself as subject in relation to phallogocentric systems that lay infinitesimal details of how one can become one, resonates the position of teachers in being made through logocentric frames of teacher education. In this paper, ‘becoming woman’ is conceived as the threshold for differently exploring teacher becomings. Woman’s relation to normalized, standard phallologocentric forms of being, may be creatively used to reconceive the teacher beyond the reproductive educational discourses. Questions like “What is a good teacher?” and “What is a woman?’ clearly do not allow for becomings other than those that are dictated by the systems in which they are located. Braidotti’s notions of becoming woman suggest political and ontological alternative processes in different becomings of teachers. In exploring the implications of a philosophy of becoming woman to becoming a teacher the paper will i) critique the competences based approach that constrains the teacher into fixed ways of being ii) explore how the notion of becoming woman can be strategically used by teachers to venture into different, continuous processes of becoming.

This paper philosophically inquires into ways through which women and teachers are constituted as molar, sedentary and reproductive subjects. It uses feminist critiques of phallogocentrism to inform an analysis of the limitations of competences based approaches in teacher education. This method of analyses which Braidotti (2002) describes as a gradual unlayering of logocentric sedimentations, is an important step in overcoming the dangers of being immobilized by logocentric frames of thought. Drawing on philosophical underpinnings of the idea of becoming woman the paper explores ways through which teacher becomings can become more openly flexible in constantly changing educational contexts. The research method used reflects Braidotti’s nomadic politics (Braidotti 1994, 2002, 2006) in that it explores processes of becoming that desire an active use of existing territories and competences through which one can become different.

The paper will conclude that existing teacher competences that are recently being revived in teacher education approaches are limiting to a concept of education that calls for subjective flexibilities of teachers. Following a feminist politics of location, however it considers these competences as socially inscribed positions to which teachers are complexly related. Just as processes of becoming woman as conceived by feminist philosopher Braidotti, cannot disregard the phallogocentric discourses which construct them as such, teachers cannot but acknowledge the qualities that identify them as teachers. The conclusions will address these complex and contradictory positions of teachers to suggest alternative conceptions of becoming teachers through philosophies of becoming woman.