I explore teacher becoming in a work-integrated teacher education program (WIL-program). To be more precise, I follow the becoming teacher (BT) during a workday in school assemblages, register what unfolds, and then look at 'the effects of affect' (Massumi, 2002) involving said BT. It is thus the work-facet as a conceptual side to formal education within the WIL-program that this project seeks to map with a Deleuzoguattarian framework ([1980]1987).

Teacher shortage continues to be a persistent problem in many European countries (European Commission/EACEA/Eurydice, 2021). In Sweden, the number of qualified teachers in compulsory education amounted to 70 per cent year 2019/20 (Skolverket, 2020). The Swedish National Agency for Education already in 2015 (see also Skolverket, 2017) addressed the prevailing teacher shortage and sought for alternatives by turning to the Swedish government for help. The Swedish National Agency for Education suggested that the government investigate the possibility to create “additional, faster, and more flexible routes into the teacher profession without lowering the demands on applicants” ([My translation] Skolverket, 2015, s. 14) – whilst this somewhat optimistic aspiration calls for further examination, it remains outside the scope of this text. However, as concrete solutions were scarce, and with an impending national education crisis on the horizon, employers and universities joined forces to try to find a viable solution to a shared problem.

The common denominator of the alternative designs that grew from this initiative, was that they were based on a collaboration between university and employer. With both parties at the table, partly new design structures developed that made possible combining academic studies with part-time employment as teacher. The agreement also involved that the employer was to provide the BT with additional financial support for studies; the aim was to attract new groups of applicants, preferably unqualified individuals already involved in the school context.  

The novel designs go under various labels but have in common that they seek to underline the pedagogical objective of the program - to integrate theory with practice through work-integrated learning (WIL). When the WIL-program here explored started, it was still in the making. The design lacked the rigid and uniform structure seen in regular programs, which offered room for exploration and creativity; so, as the BT then traverses between university and school assemblages, these paths can be seen as offering unique opportunities to follow unfolding events in more organic ways.

This paper delves into the challenges of exploring teacher becoming when the presentation of actualized experiences involves the use of lexical abstractions – ‘identities’ (Deleuze, [1968]2014) – such as ‘classroom’. How does language muddle the exploration of teacher becoming and what a BT does, after all, ‘events’ themselves become through the lexicon used, “[e]vents are produced in a chaos, in a chaotic multiplicity, but only under the condition that a sort of screen intervenes”, Deleuze suggests ([1988]1993, p. 76).

The relevance of highlighting the challenges of representation (MacLure, 2013), spans not only fields and national contexts, but turns into a philosophical question that concerns the core of education. Perhaps the complex relation between experience and language could be seen as an opportunity for teacher education programs across Europe and beyond, to explore teacher becoming and experiences from school contexts in terms of ‘difference and repetition’ ([1968]2014) – in other words, move beyond stale images and school ‘identities’ (Deleuze, [1968]2014).  

The tentative title of the thesis project is 'Becoming Teacher and Matters of Affect – Time to Become'. The aims of the study are twofold; firstly, to explore teacher becoming during a workday in school settings within a novel form of WIL-program. Secondly, it is an inquiry into ‘the research process’ through ‘post qualitative’-informed approaches (cf. St. Pierre, 2019; MacLure, 2013). This is thus an attempt to problematize research practice and re-presentational modes of language that sometimes work against trying to think teacher becoming anew. Yet it is this, the ever-changingness of Life, that the Deleuzoguattarian ‘ontology of immanence’ proposes as the only constant ([1980]1987). But, if the world continuously changes yet linguistic labels remain the same, then language itself becomes precarious; “All identities are only simulated, produced as an optical “effect” by the more profound game of difference and repetition” (Deleuze, ([1968]2014, p. xv) – school related ‘identities’ therefore need examination. The project involves 16 BTs enrolled during autumn of 2019 to one of Sweden’s newly formed WIL-programs. The program is a Degree of Master of Arts in Primary Education – School Years 4–6. I follow each BT during one workday during their first semester. I follow the BT everywhere and register non-/human encounters. The empirical entails 110 hours and 34 minutes of monitoring, 537 handwritten pages (150 transcribed Word-pages), and 41 sketches of school and classroom layouts. Monitoring unfolding ‘events’ from the middle, from within BT-assemblages located in ‘classrooms’, require researcher-writing-hand work rapidly upon the fieldnote page to register what in Deleuzian thinking is discussed as ‘affects’ (Deleuze, [1981]1988), or rather, ‘the effects of affect’ (Massumi, 2002). I thereby explore affect as “the change, or variation, that occurs when bodies collide” (Colman in Parr (Ed.), 2010, p. 11).

By ‘flattening binaries’ (Jackson & Mazzei, 2011) related to ‘methodology’, and treating ‘the established’ as pervasive albeit illusory ‘transcendent totalities’, “product[s] of habitual ways of thinking” (Roffe, in Parr (Ed.), 2010, p. 305), alternative approaches to investigate BT-assemblage turn possible. By following a BT’s actions during two consecutive arts lessons through the notion of ‘simulacrum’, states of affairs can be problematized: "The simulacrum is not a degraded copy. It harbors a positive power which denies 'the original and the copy, the model and the reproduction'. […] The same and the similar no longer have an essence except as 'simulated', that is as expressing the functioning of the simulacrum". ([Italics in original] Deleuze, [1969]1990, p. 262) In rejecting a lesson as a rerun, ‘a degraded copy’, and by troubling the lexical entry, the notion of the ‘classroom’ can be challenged. Events surface as complex and flux processes where the outside of the ‘classroom’ becomes its inside – ‘a space wherein learning activities are facilitated’. It is thus by following bodies co-construct a lesson through multiple spaces where transient affects become part of ongoing ethical deliberations and enactments of what a shared space-time 'can do', rather than what it 'is'. The ‘infinitive’ becomes important as it “indicates that an event is not bound to a particular space and time, but may be experienced whenever and wherever it is actualized anew” (Fraser, 2006, p. 130). So, what then happens to the becoming of the ‘classroom’ - “a room in a school or college where groups of students are taught” (Cambridge, n.d.); “a place where classes meet” (Merriam-Webster, n.d)?

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