Exploring student teachers’ ‘stuck moments’: affect[ing] the theory-practice gap in social justice teacher education

ABSTRACT

This article attends to student teachers’ ‘stuck moments,’ or emotional moments of crisis, in a social justice-oriented teacher education program (SJTE). It seeks to problematise the familiar tendency of viewing student teachers’ stuck moments as symptomatic of the theory-practice gap. By troubling both the representational logic that undergirds the theory-practice gap and its reductionist explanations of stuckness, this work conceptualises stuck moments as a fluid, moving assemblage of bodies and discursive, affective, and material forces. Informed by posthumanist theories of affect and a post-qualitative methodology, this article posits that the pressure on student teachers to achieve teaching mastery, and participants’ desire to make a discernible impact on their students, partially constitute the stuck moment assemblage. These elements illuminate the infiltration of learning discourses in stuckness. I argue that learning discourses, with their neoliberal focus on mastery, control, and measurable outcomes, collide with the uncertainty and tenuousness of social justice work. This research suggests that stuck moments have the potential to both expose and oppose the conflicting discourses, affective attachments, and intensities that student teachers encounter as they navigate their SJTE program.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. For Deleuze (2013), ‘everyday banality’ is that which produces or conceals other ways of looking at a problem.

2. While not an exhaustive list, other dominant theoretical frameworks in social justice teacher education include sociocultural learning theory (e.g. Anderson and Stillman 2013), care theory (Noddings, as cited in Wiedeman 2002), experiential learning theory (e.g. Kumashiro 2004, Adams et al. 2007, Bell 2007), critical race theory (Ladson-Billings and Tate 1995, Smith-Maddox and Solorzano 2002, Wiedeman 2002), queer theory (e.g. Kumashiro 2002, Pinar 2012), and critical theory (e.g. Gay 2000, Irvine and Armento 2001, Villegas and Lucas 2002).

3. Broadly, humanism does not refer to a unified concept, but rather, a set of themes that emerged over time (Foucault 1984). These themes work from a particular set of epistemological and ontological assumptions, some of which include: language as transparent and able to reflect or ‘capture’ reality; the (human) self as rational, autonomous, unified, and stable; the existence of hierarchical binaries (e.g. where the mind or reason is seen as superior to the body); the existence of a universal ‘truths’ among others (e.g. St. Pierre 2000, Dernikos 2015).

4. Multisensory observations involve the traditional human senses (e.g. smell sight, sound, and touch), as well as the mobilisation of one’s ‘somatic resonances – hunches, tensions, burnings, oscillations’ (Airton 2014, p. 111).

5. Stuck moment entries often took numerous forms and included written narratives, bulleted notes, voice recordings, drawings, Facebook or Instagram posts, etc.

6. Botanically, a rhizome is a tuber, ‘a root that consists of a network of connections that grows unpredictably in all directions, constantly evolving’ (Strom 2014, p. 41).

7. According to Deleuze and Guattari (1987), rhizomes operate on particular principles. They include: 1) connection and heterogeneity: each part of a rhizome is connected to another; 2) multiplicities: rhizomes are made up of lines that continue in all directions and create ‘multiplicities’; 3) assignifying ruptures: rhizomes can break at any point, but new lines will always take root; and 4) principles of cartography: due to the constantly evolving nature of the root structure, rhizomes require ‘maps’ (Strom 2014).

8. Although I provide a visual graphic of the stuck moment assemblage (see Figure 3), because an assemblage is a constantly moving process, I recognise that this static re-presentation is largely reductive and problematic. Its inclusion here is for heuristic purposes only.