Transience and Teaching

Place and the new Psychoanalytic Sociologies of Teaching

Abstract

Ask any teacher about their life as a teacher and they will begin with their experience of place. 'First I taught there and then I moved there', the matter of time often hazy or more peripheral to the story of place. As Deleuze and Guattari ( 1987) argue, becomings are matters of geography more than history, our lives punctuated by entries and exits and the challenges of territorialisation and displacement. Becoming is a dynamic of space and place. Swept up by or leaping in to the flow, we move across the folds of the map rather than occupying its fixed points. Teacher-becoming, in a Deleuzian sense, is a series of lines of flight, journeys through both exterior and interior spaces. The rural sociologist Urry (2000) suggests that the rate of flow, the volume of movements - of people, things and ideas - is more a feature of the current century than previous. Tied up with the commodification of things, space produces and consumes objects, including teachers. Hence through Deleuze 's social geography and Urry 's mobility sociology it is possible to reframe the notion of teacher movements in new ways, not as a problem for education, but an increasing phenomenon linked with teacherliness in the contemporary era.