The longing to just be – a belonging body in teacher education

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This paper examines teacher education, with a focus on student experiences of comfort, discomfort, and sense of belonging or not belonging in the educational setting. The analysis is conducted with an intersectional corpomaterial perspective and based on 12 individual and two group interviews with student teachers, who identify as breaching norms within an intersectional power dynamic, or as interested in discussing such norms. The participants describe situations where they felt excluded and where they adjusted to try to fit their educational spaces. In contrast, some talk about a desirable, but rare, state of comfort, belonging or ‘just being’. This state is intertwined with the spatiality and embodiment of class, racialisation, dis/ability and gender. The analysis challenges a dualistic understanding of comfort and discomfort in education, and shows how the participants’ critique of teacher education could be formulated as a longing for, and a simultaneous production of, another kind of education.