Welcome to Fragile Mosaics of Teacher Becoming – Kaleidoscoping Futures of Difference

This thesis is a non-linear work where visitors are encouraged to become rebel explorers in an aquarelle landscape. Although, in some sense, reading per se could be proposed as an insurrection where the reader turns into the dictator of pace, selection, and interpretation – you pick up a text, put it down, browse a few pages, jump between sections, scan headings, make judgements, bring your own thoughts and knowing to the paths taken – and in so doing create a novel reading. The act of reading is thus not at all an activity that matches the linear fashion most texts are composed. And perhaps this is true of academic texts in particular where reading rarely – if ever – begins on page one and continues to the last page. This thesis acknowledges and encourages such experimental reading practices.

Visitors are thus expected to move between different geotags where something attracts your attention, makes you curious, pulls you in, makes you deviate from plans. Perhaps a sentence or an illustration makes you forget time and space. If only for a moment. This urge for readers to engage in revolt and experimentation must not be confused with proposing hasty exploration or negligence. Not only was this thesis composed painfully slowly, but it is also best explored slowly. 

Now to its non-linear composition. Perhaps you’ve heard about One Thousand and One Nights (also known as Arabian Nights), or Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales? These are examples of literary texts that have multiple stories within a frame story. The frame story is what sets the context for the storytelling in One Thousand and One Nights. The frame story of the many tales told in the (un)finished composition of The Canterbury Tales, similarly, encompasses a story-telling contest where pilgrims are asked to tell four tales each during a pilgrimage to Canterbury. The frame story of this thesis comprises the ontology, an orientation on the (higher) education context and policy, and a section about the concepts that go into doing an inquiry that explores how the contingency of the present affects teacher becoming in schools. And and Aim...ish.

The frame story of this thesis offers multiple entries where a safe journey would be to simply travel from west to east - or why not begin in the north-east? Or perhaps someone wants to read about the Problems faced during the period leading up to this inquiry. Someone else may be curious about The Solution, in other words, the Work-Integrated Teacher Education-program (WITE-program) all becoming-teachers in this inquiry are enrolled to while simultaneously working as teachers in a school. Then there’s the visitor that wants to see what happens with notions like ‘individual’, ‘teacher’, ‘education’, 'work', and ‘learning’ when discussed through a Deleuzian framework, so they go directly to Deleuzian Ontology in Education. Or why not read about an Aim..ish. And then you have the visitor intrigued by the (non-)methodology of doing a post qualitative inquiry (PQI) that jump straight into The Inquiry-Machine. But it is best to forget all about one section, just Ignore This.  

Instead of ‘stories’ and ‘tales’, like in One Thousand and One Nights and The Canterbury Tales, this thesis offers mosaics. Each mosaic offers an event played out in a school setting involving one of sixteen becoming-teachers enrolled into a WITE-program. Hopefully you’ll explore all mosaics, if not, explore the ones that draw you in. But before you leave, make sure to join the experimentation enabled through Kaleidoscoping where visitors can join producing futures of difference. 

Before I forget, the navigation meny in the header where you found this text (About) also provides a Tutorial that helps make sense of the different elements in the landscape. Under Materials you'll find various documents, whereas Meanwhile takes you back to the opening text of this digital world.

Enjoy!   

Mona Tynkkinen

Trollhättan, October 2024