Abstract:
The notion of ‘classroom-ready’ teachers has been cast as the fundamental priority of teacher education in Australia. Reports into initial teacher education frequently name school-university partnerships as the most important way of achieving this classroom readiness. ‘Classroom ready’ alludes to a professional who can meet certain performance standards that are fixed in time and space; however, working in school-university partnerships frequently requires the teacher educator to live their work in education in ways that are not linear; less a progression from A to B and more of temporal plunge that links past and future into the challenges of ‘Now’, where being and becoming unfold. This presentation considers vignettes that show how these temporalities of personal and professional lives are entwined in the case of Nerrida, a teacher educator. These vignettes have been selected from a case report that employed a historicising methodology, analysing ‘uneven space-times of education’(McLeod, Sobe, Seddon, 2019) through Heidegger’s understanding of temporality. Nerrida’s stories of ‘becoming’ trouble the static idea defined by the endpoint of preparing ‘classroom ready teachers’ and the linear logic of ‘onwards and upwards’ learning, which produces professionals, according to the logic of policy makers. In this presentation, we also rethink the traditional mode of conference presentation through an interactive format that blurs the line between audience and presenter, creating a novel space for expert dialogue to unfold.