Place and Becoming: a study of graduate teachers in rural schools

Abstract

Rethinking graduate teachers in rural schools as becomings in place allows different explorations of the issues surrounding teachers in rural schools. In the past studies of rural teaching have often focussed on the short length of stay of teachers in rural schools and have presented this mobility of rural teachers as problematic. The rural has often been depicted as both other and uncomfortable, and teachers appointed to rural schools have been viewed as temporary visitors. Phenomenologies of place enable us to conceive of teachers in rural places as part of those places; as sensing, corporeal bodies, who experience place and all it contains (human and non-human, animate and inanimate), and whose sense of place is influenced by the experience of both other individuals and the collective practices in place. The perspective of Deleuzo-Guattarian rhizomatics enables a shift from the individuated subject of self (a teacher) and place (rurality) to imagining a becoming-teacher—a multiplicity which is part of a teacherplace assemblage. While rhizomatics has a tendency to ignore the physical body, representing it in abstractions, phenomenology insists on the corporeal. This thesis juxtaposes these competing yet complementary notions of the body in place to explore the nature of the relation between place and becoming through conceptions of graduate teachers as both (i) sensing, corporeal bodies which are a part of place, and (ii) becomings which are a part of teacher-place assemblages. Using an arts-based methodology in the collection, analysis and representation of graduate teachers’ descriptions of their lived experiences, this research aims to produce different knowledges of rural teaching.