Body as Transformer: ‘Teaching Without Teaching’ in a Teacher Education Course

Abstract

A rapidly increasing number of books and articles are written about posthuman pedagogies in schooling, but practical pedagogical guidance for preparing student teachers in higher education for such a dramatic ontoepistemic shift is slow coming forward. Inspired by Rosi Braidotti’s (Metamorphoses: Towards a materialist theory of becoming. Blackwell Publishers, Oxford, 2002) idea of the body as a transformer, a relay point for the flow of energies, Karin Murris has designed a provocation in her university classroom that opens up possibilities for radically critiquing power and reconfiguring teaching and learning without slipping into symbolic, representational ways of thinking and doing. The intra-vention is part of Karin’s ‘teaching without teaching’ approach, creating conditions whereby student teachers learn without being taught and thereby unlearn what teaching and learning is. Cara, a student on Karin’s course, is initially deeply disturbed by Karin’s posthuman approach. Their writing shows how Cara’s affirmative resistance provoked a posthuman shift, materialised through moving images as part of Cara’s final installation and accessed through a QR code. Her moving assemblage of image(-ening)s disrupts in particular, the ‘inner/outer’ binary that makes human-centred notions of agency, causality and intentionality possible—notions at the heart of the dominant psychological, sociological and social constructionist conceptions of childhood and pedagogy as we know it.