Practising Otherwise: Pre-Service Teachers and the Emergence of Desire Lines in Constrained Educational Contexts.

• In Event: Thirty years later: Education in a (still) Divided South Africa

Proposal

Pre-service teachers (PSTs), especially in under-resourced contexts like South Africa, are often framed as recipients of training, judged by how well they implement the curriculum and perform during practicum. These framings tend to overlook how PSTs actually learn to teach: through situated, relational, and often improvised engagements with people, places, and materials. This paper asks: How do PSTs navigate the relational, material, and institutional constraints of the teaching practicum as they learn to teach with digital technologies?

Rather than focusing on policy uptake or training compliance, I trace how PSTs practice otherwise - improvising, resisting, and reimagining teaching within the uneven terrain of their professional becoming. The study draws on a 10-month multi-sited, multimodal ethnography, including observations, interviews, reflective conversations, and student-produced multimodal journals.

Two recurring practices are explored. First, PSTs demonstrate digital resourcefulness by repurposing smartphones, blending analogue and digital tools, and sharing devices. These improvised responses are not just reactive, but inventive, driven by a commitment to make learning possible under constraint. Second, quiet resistance emerges in how PSTs navigate high-stakes assessment. While some conform visibly, others subtly stretch the boundaries by modifying tone, pacing, or content to hold onto relational and pedagogical intentions, even under the gaze of an assessor.

These everyday negotiations give rise to an appropriated concept from urban geography, desire lines (Malone, 2019; Myhill, 2002): unprescribed, self-directed pathways carved through spaces where formal routes do not quite fit. Desire-lines mark how PSTs move sideways, toward something that feels more aligned with their emerging teaching selves.

Framed through sociomaterial and post-qualitative sensibilities, and drawing on assemblage theory (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987), this paper maps how people, technologies, affects, and institutional logics come together to shape teaching as an unfolding, relational event. In doing so, it offers a more nuanced account of digital pedagogical agency, not as tool mastery, but as something that emerges within constraint.

By attending to the small, situated ways in which PSTs navigate, stretch, and reconfigure the spaces of their training, this paper contributes to a deeper understanding of how teaching is learned in real, unequally resourced schools. It challenges linear, competency-based narratives of teacher development and points to the importance of recognising practice as something provisional, entangled, and quietly transformative. This approach holds critical implications for teacher education, digital equity, and how we imagine improvement in constrained yet possibility-rich contexts.

Author

• Delecia Davids, Stellenbosch University