Teacher Learning in the In-between: Encountering an ‘Invisible Barrier’

Abstract

Since early childhood has become the focus of national and supranational political spaces, issues around teacher learning have also gained a firm position in the debates. This has seen the literature on teacher learning largely being positioned within a managerial/alternative dichotomy, arising from a resistance to technical-rationalist discourses present in contemporary policy. This article examines data from a participatory action research project investigating the learning of three early childhood teachers working in an early childhood centre located in an independent school in Australia. It illustrates shifts in data analysis methods, which permitted teacher learning to be understood outside of this dichotomy and instead as that which is always already taking place in the in-between. Working with Deleuze and Guattari's concepts of lines and forces, the in-between became an intensive space of affect where teacher learning was produced in/through the circulation of multiple discourses that were always already leaking.