The "Face" of Induction: Deleuzian Perspectives on Becoming the Novice Teacher

• In Event: Multiplicities of Multiplicities: Exploring Deleuze and Guattari Across Educational Contexts

Abstract

This paper deconstructs the prevailing conception of teacher induction and novice teacher becoming. I examine the ways in which novice teacher induction is a condition of signification that begins long before one earns the formal title of “teacher”. By intentionally extending the traditional three to five year phase (Bartell, 2005) in which novice teachers are assumed to “develop”, I expose how research on teacher induction can begin thinking with theory (Youngblood-Jackson & Mazzei, 2012) to open up new ways of understanding being and becoming a novice teacher.

Over the past thirty years, research on teacher induction has been categorized into three themes: 1) induction as a phase; 2) induction as a process of enculturation in schools; and 3) induction as a program of support (Feiman-Nemser, 2010). Yet, within each of these three themes researchers and practitioners only a gain glimpse into the surficial features of induction. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) notion of geology of morals and faciality, I expose a more holistic perspective of understanding the subjective formation and experiences of becoming-novice teachers. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) describe,

Facialization operates not by resemblance but by an order of reasons. It is much more unconscious and machinic operation that draws the entire body across the holey surface, and in which the role of the face is not as a model or image, but as an overcoding of all the decoded parts. … The question then becomes what circumstances trigger the machine that produces the face and facialization. (p. 170, original emphasis)

The process of facialization depicts how assumptions about becoming a teacher exist within the tense in-between spaces constrained by the abstract machine. However, more importantly Deleuze and Guattari prompt us to think deeply about the ways in which the abstract machine works as a process of facialization. Similarly, facialization acts as a process of signification, creating the “face” of the becoming-novice teacher.

Current approaches to scholarly work on teacher induction perpetuate the abstract machine by which a certain “face” of the novice teacher is produced. For example, Wang, Odell, and Clift’s (2010) book on Past, Present, and Future Research on Teacher Induction and Wang, Odell, and Schwille (2008) emphasize understanding induction through what can be done to novice teachers and the spaces in which they make meaning. Through a poststructural deconstruction (St. Pierre, 2000) of the dominant discourse shaping the nature in which teachers become facialized, I explore the question of how a Deleuzian lens allows for a more holistic, authentic, and ethical space of becoming-novice teacher?

This paper challenges scholars of teacher induction to imagine new possibilities for understanding the inductive experience of becoming-novice teachers. By drawing on examples from research on teaching, this paper advances and deterritorializes the normative ways in which scholars, teacher educators, pre-service and in-service teachers become exposed to the onto-epistemologies (Barad, 2008) employed in their practice.

Author

• Maria Ferris Greene Wallace, Louisiana State University