Becoming-Early Childhood Teacher Educator: Applying Deleuzian Methodology

Abstract

This study aims to de-territorialize and re-territorialize a role of an “early childhood teacher educator” by breaking traditionally determined rules, habits, strategies, and regulations; and also aims to generate new agencies or becomings in a preservice education classroom. Deleuzian methodology (Coleman & Ringrose, 2013) was adopted to capture the awkward, messy, unequal, unstable, surprising and creative qualities of encounters and interconnections across differences (Stewart, 2007, p. 128). Data generation was done from the first week of September in 2017 to the second week of January in 2018, over a span of 6 months, with 14 student teacher participants including the researcher. The two big rhizomes were generated, the happening of breaking and the becoming of an early childhood teacher educator. The first rhizome was entangled by three small rhizomes: rupturing3) my own class rituals as a conductor; inviting prohibited rules and materials; and playing a role of a self-stinging stingray lecturer. These three rhizomes played a key role in continually breaking my own instructional rituals and regulations and, eventually, created the second result, i.e., new becomings of bodies of all the elements in the classroom. This research hoped to make contributions to turning a typical practice of pre-service education to beneficial opportunities for early childhood student teachers to have a power of transformation over their future practices with forces and intensities of de-territorialization and re-territorialization.