Teacher Education Becoming Elsewhere : An Affirmative Critique of Student Experiences through Intersectional Corpomaterial Perspectives

Sammanfattning: In this thesis, teacher education is examined with the aim to develop knowledge on teacher education and how it affects student teachers that are regularly marginalised in society by intersectional power structures. The aim is also to develop knowledge on how these student teachers affect teacher education. This is examined through reflexive interviews with student teachers, who either self-identified as having experiences of breaking norms related to an intersectional power dynamic, or had an interest in talking about such norms. The aims of the thesis are pursued through examining student teachers’ narrations of their experiences of how discomfort, comfort, exclusion, welcoming, and violations related to societal power structures in their teacher education programmes are produced. This is done by utilising an approach of affirmative critique, drawing on intersectional corpomaterial theoretical frameworks. The study shows how student teachers are becoming bodily archives of societal power dynamics; how they become angry through racialised and gendered assemblages; how they become students through materialities like notebooks; and how they, through the assemblages of emergency-remote education, become directed closer to or further away from their teacher programmes. Becoming a student teacher might also be connected to assemblages containing certain ideas of teachers as role models. Moreover, student teachers become carving-bodies, a concept created in the thesis to capture the complexities of how educational assemblages push participants to inform, educate, and speak up during their education. The concept furthermore captures how these processes lead to internal negotiations, energy loss, adjustments, and potentially fewer possibilities to engage with their education. The study shows how teacher education is becoming multiple through assemblages where student teachers’ bodily archives are active actors, and how the education, at the same time, is becoming less, for example when participants’ voices are drowned out. Teacher education is also becoming through student teachers’ longings and desires, in the sense of how their expressed dissatisfaction with teacher education might be affirmative in producing another kind of education. Another kind of education is also produced through student teachers becoming carving-bodies. Teacher education is, in this sense, becoming different through student teacher bodies, and in momentary junctures of particular elements connecting and coming together. Finally, the present thesis shows student-bodies’ potentiality to produce teacher education elsewhere and as elsewheres through for example anger and transformative care.