Teacher education is a place of tension: political, epistemological, pedagogical, relational, and personal. Successive reforms in teacher education bring new accommodation, to these tensions, changing not only what people do in educational institutions, but also who people are (Ball, 2015).  The tensions in education are lived at an internal level: sensed in the body and felt in the heart of the teachers, influencing their practices and the meanings given to their experiences (Palmer, 2007). Mental health issues, professional dissatisfaction and turnover, erosion of democracy in schools, are ripple effects of unaddressed tensions (Lopes, 2001). Avoiding the tensions with rush, the need to get things fixed, elaborated spreadsheets, and by blaming the unnamed other, are the strategies of a performative culture. Bringing awareness and allowing time to turn toward, to go deep and to become closer is the call of a human culture. Humanization of education is not only a utopia. It is a call for agency in performative times. It is a call for silence in loud times. It is a call for collective care and freedom. Humanizing teacher education is a form of resisting education reform toward performativity and managerialism. This instrumental approach risks turning teacher education into a list of competence and knowledge achievements to be accomplished in the shortest time possible, losing sight of the depth and complexity of educational aims and purpose (Biesta, 2008) and compromising the development of professional agency (Biesta, 2015). Humanizing teacher education is about addressing the depth and complexity of becoming a teacher, including the emotional, relational, and ethical dimensions of teaching, as an explicit experiential and reflexive process that is part of the pathway of teacher education. Humanization refers to the process of awareness and reflexion toward becoming some(one) with some(body), as Esquirol (2021) suggests in his essay “Human more human”. It is an act of integrity and 'intimate resistance' (Esquirol, 2015) to the instrumental tendencies of neoliberalism, inviting the time and space to feel and find the who of teacher education. Humanization would be, in this sense, the movement of approaching, through awareness and reflection, the depth of the experience of becoming someone who is also a teacher. It recognises the need for teachers to become authors of their profession and citizens in their practices. To develop “good teachers” (Korthagen, 2004), there is a need to go beyond teacher performance and competence, addressing deeper dimensions of teacher identity and ethical purpose in a virtue-based approach to teacher education (Biesta, 2015), to develop educationally wise professionals. A mindfulness-based approach is a promising pathway to support teachers in this path. Firstly, as a strategy for social-emotional development, promoting teacher skills for emotional regulation and stress reduction (Emerson et al., 2017; Lomas et al., 2017); secondly, as means to bring teacher self as an object of education (Ergas, 2017), addressing the subjectivity and inner dispositions of the teacher as an explicit part of the curriculum; and thirdly, as an in-depth reflective process, supporting educational judgment and teacher agency (Ergas & Hadar, 2021).

This communication proposal is part of larger research project about humanizing teacher education. Exploring ways to develop a praxis for humanization in teacher education is the social and scientific contribution expected with this research. Approaching subjectivity as a place of care, struggle, and resistance in teachers’ daily life is the challenge that lies ahead.

The exploratory study that will be presented, intends to understand the contributions of a mindfulness-based reflective community of practice to teachers' training and professional development. It aims at a) recognizing contributions and tensions in the integration of a mindfulness-based approach in the context of teacher education; b) exploring teachers’ experience of mindfulness-based approach in its personal, relational, and ethical dimensions. This study is part of an emancipatory and participatory action-research (Elliot, 1991; Fals-Borda, 1991; Kemmis & McTarggart, 2005; Lopes, 2001) with in-service teachers. Fifteen teachers voluntarily enrolled in a mindfulness-based program (MBCT-L) developed by the Oxford Mindfulness Centre and delivered by a qualified teacher. This Program included 9 weekly sessions of 2 hours and an intensive session of 4 hours. The Program was delivered online via zoom. With this Program it is intended the development of mindfulness-based reflective skills that will support the development of the mindfulness-based reflective community of practice. The participants (N=12) voluntarily enrolled the community of practice after the MBCT-L Program ended. It included a weekly meditation session of 30 minutes and a monthly 2-hour session following the methodology of participatory action-research where the areas of research/reflection on professional practice in school contexts, were continuously redefined, remembered and dialogically explored in its multiplicity and depth. The data collection includes the self-narrative of the researcher, teachers’ reflexive reports (N=8), the recording of the community of practice sessions and focus group in the end of the mindfulness program (N=8) and after 5 sessions of the community of practice. A rhizomatic narrative approach, inspired by Deleuze and Guattari (2007) and Polkinghorne (1995) will support data analysis. The aim is to address the emerging cartography of teachers’ subjectivity, experienced in the process of a mindfulness-based community of practice.

Exploring the person of the teacher, his/her subjectivity and its relations is like diving into the depth of the ocean. From the ever-changing weather in the surface, the invitation is to move into the depth, into the stillness, where no light can guide us, and spacious emptiness may become the space for knowledge. The mindfulness-based approach allowed teachers to inhabit the unknown, the uncertain, the unsure and to explore resisting the temptation to rush to the surface, to the doing and fixing of a daily life. It provided a time and space to welcome the body and emotion as wisdom, finding the (he)art of the teacher in this process. The sessions of the community of practice are just in the beginning. A first narrative analysis of the reflective journal and focus group after the mindfulness program reflects the role of the mindfulness-based approach in triggering awareness, attention, presence, and self-knowledge. There is the sense of releasing unnecessary tension and regaining inner space to meet the present moment with acceptance, empathy, and tolerance. The group found a new kind of place to be among other teachers: a place of both individual and collective intimacy where there is time to stop, to share experiences in a new depth and for reflexive insights. The role of the body, emotion, and the quality of attention and acceptance that is developed throughout the 9 weeks is transformational at personal and professional level. Resources to deal with stress and reactivity are developed. Reperceiving experience from a different perspective becomes more common. This is path of struggle and resistance: with expectations, with self-judgment, with the time, with the discomfort, with habits. It requires courage, discipline, and a friendly group of peers to keep moving into the depth of being and becoming a teacher.

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