The Art of Becoming a Visual Arts Teacher – the Wildebeest, the Feeling-Beast and the Cat

Abstract

In this article, I ask what becoming a sustainable visual arts teacher might look like, and how a sustainable teaching practice might be created. The problem for education, and teachers’ becoming, is that formal schooling presumes how life should be lived there, how the assemblage of learning should be composed and the prescribed identities of humans and objects. This article aims to explore visual arts teachers’ becoming as a relational and entangled process. A Deleuze and Guttarian framework for thinking about the becoming(-teacher) involves relational and differentiated co-becoming that fold, unfold and refold in the process of becoming. The research questions of this article explore the potentials of the concept of becoming animal to activate and facilitate thinking differently about visual arts teachers’becoming. By mapping the academic degree project of one visual arts teacher student, this research investigates how multiple lines of becoming a visual arts teacher change and intermingle through the degree project. The results shows that animal becoming creates new sensitivities, dilating one's perception as a teacher. Sustainable teacher becoming involves the balancing (cat-)act of not only following molar lines of the curriculum, or the idols of pedagogy, but also making the curriculum come alive through molecular cat-becoming. Becoming cat means opposing administrative burdens and showing one's claws, as well as developing agility to find new ways of thinking, acting, resting, and finding space for playful inventiveness as a teacher.