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In this short essay, I offer an alternative ontology and epistemology of the term "lesbian" vis-a-vis my relationship with my brown Pakistani mother. I bring into this reading a number of variables ranging from the geographic, historical, biopolitical, and economic to the embodied, affective, esthetic, and immaterial. In recounting formative moments of my childhood - Quranic pedagogy alongside classical voice, singing and dance lessons - I re-read the spaces that produce homosociality and homoerotics as sites of brown maternal knowledges and feminist transgressions. This essay uses memory to examine the different ways that lesbian, both as a term and a mode of being, is not necessarily attached to sexual identity and practices. Analyzing how desire and secrecy are mediated by global capital, postcolonial respectability, nation, and compulsory heterosexuality, brown erotics and sacred notes offers a close look into the nuanced relationality between a brown mother and brown daughter, and takes seriously questions of what constitutes living a feminist life, and being and becoming a lesbian.

This paper aims to address ‘how an auto/ethnographic muse explores informing, reforming and transforming states of teacher education and research practices.’ I critique informing and reforming states of teacher education in Pakistan for the limitations associated with these approaches rooted within the colonial system of education. Within these two approaches to education, I share the experiences of teaching, learning, research practices, and beliefs, which could not address a broader view of teacher education. To address the research problem, I applied an unconventional approach to research by using auto/ethnography as a methodological referent within a multi-paradigmatic research design space. In so doing, I used the paradigms of interpretivism, criticalism, postmodernism, and integralism as data referents, which enabled me to capture the lived experiences of my professional lifeworld at different stages. Moreover, I used critical reflections on the experiences as a teacher, teacher educator, and researcher as epistemic techniques to explore, explain and construct meaning out of the perceptions, beliefs, and practices. Perhaps, engaging autobiographically as an approach to knowing deep-seated views and practices and critically reflecting on the embodied values of practices open new ways of being and becoming a transformative learner(s). This paper invites readers to reflect critically on their own deep-seated practices by using such unconventional approaches to research that would enable them to experience a paradigm shift in their thinking, believing, viewing, and doing. I believe that in doing so, practitioners as researchers, with their own embodied values of practice in their professional lives, can transform self/others by creating their own living-educational-theories.

This article explores how childhood memories served as a rich resource in women’s formations as maternal subjects. So affectively loaded is the child figure, and so diffuse and malleable are memories, that the remembered child appeared in women’s narratives in multiple figurations and served multiple functions. These memories incited the intensive multidimensional labors of the middle-class mother while also curbing and critiquing these labors, as well as a resource to imagine being mother otherwise. Women’s childhood memories highlight the ways that neoliberalism’s heightened stakes and increased competition for middle-class reproduction lodge themselves into women’s labors and psyches. Yet they also point to perspectives and desires outside of normative neoliberal femininities associated with the middle-class. Their narratives enrich accounts of being and becoming mom as a field of dreams, desires, and memories where past, present, and future time intersect in non-linear ways.

The notion of borderlands implies a boundary demarcating a crossing to/from an unfamiliar territory. It is a productive metaphor for dual-status academics – those employed in academic roles in univ...

Research in higher music education acknowledges a persistent divide between performance studies and the realities of musicians’ work. Alongside this is global pressure for curriculum that is more supportive of students’ metacognitive engagement, experiential learning and career preparation. However, scholars assert that the provision of these curricular elements is insufficient unless students recognise their value and engage in them at a deep level; this is because career-long employability in precarious industries such as music is underpinned by strategic, lifelong and self-regulated learning. The study reported here featured a scaffolded employability intervention located within the existing curriculum and trialled with seven student musicians at a European institution. The study had three aims: to understand the students’ career-related thinking and confidence; to determine whether such an intervention might be scalable; and to gauge the intervention’s potential efficacy in helping students to become conscious of their learner identity. Results indicate that many student musicians are aware of the need to extend their essential professional capabilities but unaware of how to address these deficits. Participants realised that ‘learning how to learn’ would help them achieve personal and professional goals. The findings suggest that similar in-curricular interventions are achievable at scale. Furthermore, they have the potential to foster a more holistic vision of performance education and practice such that aspiring musicians might graduate as both skilled professionals and agentic learners.

Human geography has become deeply interested in a range of research methods that focus on researchers’ corporeal engagement with their research sites. This interest has opened up an exciting set of research horizons, energising the discipline in a whole range of ways. Welcoming this engagement, this paper presents a series of meditations on the process of using the researcher’s corporeal learning as a research tool. Exploring two research projects, as well as the work of the photographer Nikki S Lee, it examines how the process of becoming corporeally capable might productively be framed as sets of ongoing experiments. Framing such engagements as experiments is a useful heuristic through which to think rigorously about what such research can claim as knowledge. More controversially, the paper argues that the heuristic of the experiment helps us to attend to the varying durations of becoming in ways that much existing work has discounted. Developing corporeal capacities – gaining a skill, becoming capable of doing a particular activity – involves becoming attuned to a range of thresholds, the crossing of which open up novel and frequently unexpected perspectives. Attunement to these thresholds does not arise simply through the process of mixing in and participating in a research site. It requires careful attention to the parameters of transformation involved in being able to participate. The paper explores how such parameters might be decided upon and calibrated as part of an ongoing engagement with a research site or event. Our aim is not to artificially restrict or constrain how human geographers approach their research design. Rather it is to encourage human geographers to show more courage in their use of corporeal based research methodologies.

Research related to teacher education and teacher development has shown that being and becoming a language teacher goes beyond acting as a sole transmitter of linguistic knowledge. Being a language...

In this article, we explore a phenomenology of intra-play for sustainability research, integral to the processes of transforming both cultural and natural heritage landscapes. Such processes are studied as active - always underway and in flux - across space and time, and through the intra-play between the human and more-than-human world. The authors have developed the exploration of intra-play within the fields of phenomenology and heritage studies with empirical examples of the processes of becoming, especially in experiential landscapes of post-industrial heritage sites. The article presents a phenomenology of intra-play as a haptic and ontogenetic philosophy of landscape studies, inspired by the anthropologist Tim Ingold, and a process methodology, inspired in part by the art of what Rita Irwin calls “a/r/tography”. Our approach animates the different forms, both human and non-human, that co-form heritage landscapes. The article traces these playful ways and discusses possible consequences for sustainability research and change within heritage landscapes.

This article explores the meaning and function of streaming media as a potential facilitator of musicalBildung. Taking the affordances of streaming media technologies as a starting point, the article thusfocuses on the formative and cultivating dimensions a music streaming service such as Spotifymight offer. The specific aim of this article is to describe and analyse how musical Bildung may evolvewithin a Spotify context from a user perspective. To address the aim from the point of view of musiceducation, Spotify users’ activities and experiences of streaming media interactions were accessed,inspired by internet-related ethnography. Stimulated recall interviews, focusing on the participants’experiences as well as their actual use of Spotify’s streaming service, were conducted, recorded, andtranscribed. The generated material was subjected to co-operative hermeneutic content analysis.The results illuminate how Bildung evolves in users’ encounters with the service and with art mediatedvia Spotify. Relevant topics occurring in the human-art-technology relationship of Bildung from aHeideggerian perspective were Being-possible, the ability-to-be, and Spotify as the Other. In sum, itcan be stated that Bildung evolves when Spotify exceeds the thingness of the Other, becoming a workof art in itself, throwing the user into Being.

Feminist ways of being allow us to be vulnerable and willing to admit doubt and to live expanded views of early childhood education and teaching.These practices are characterized by a love ethic, attending to entanglements of heartmindbody. In this article, we rely on entangled narratives between ourselves and early childhood educators asking how valuing entangled relationships can expand creative possibilities within onlinelearning spaces. We draw from experiences within the newly established University of New Brunswick online bachelor of education in early childhood. Our research unfolds with a desire to value literate histories often silenced—sometimes lost—within standardized, institutional ways of being and becoming.

This study uses ethnographic narratives of a Santa Clara Valley community of urban gardeners gathered from 2012 to 2016 to investigate the lived realities and struggles of creating an actually existing home garden commons. Many of these gardeners are recent immigrants for rural Mexico, Central American, and South East Asia, and many descend from rural traditions of commoning. Nevertheless, the current conditions in the urban centers of developed countries are far different from their dislocations. I argue that this multi-ethnic, multi-lingual group of home gardeners makes use of their marginality as an inventive force to create an actually existing commons. A home garden commons is a place of contradiction that is both neoliberal and radical. The findings suggest that marginalized, oppressed, and displaced peoples use resistance to reconstruct the basis of their social interactions. The growing, sharing, and consuming of food together produces forms of social life that enable people to envision new ways of being and becoming in post-capitalist futures.

Este estudo objetiva compreender como o brincar pode orientar o desenvolvimento do ensino-aprendizagem de língua inglesa e promover o interesse dos alunos por essa disciplina. Para tal, parte-se das propostas de ensino-aprendizagem de língua inglesa elaboradas por alunos-professores. A pesquisa fundamenta-se no brincar em perspectiva sócio-histórica-cultural (VYGOTSKY, 1930) e na relação do brincar nas aulas de inglês com a Base Nacional Comum Curricular - BNCC - (BRASIL, 2017). A análise é desenvolvida a partir de dois excertos advindos dos relatórios dos alunos-professores ao descreverem o brincar em suas propostas de ensino-aprendizagem de língua inglesa. Os excertos são discutidos a partir de categorias argumentativas que centralizam os aspectos enunciativo-discursivo-linguísticos (LIBERALI, 2013) e interpretados mediante o aporte teórico apresentado neste trabalho. A partir das análises, compreende-se a importância do brincar tanto para o desenvolvimento dos alunos nas aulas de inglês como na possibilidade de desenvolver o interesse por essa disciplina pois, a partir do brincar, é possível experimentar situações, imaginar e planejar o que também colabora para a criação de Zonas de Desenvolvimento Proximal (ZPDs) em um processo entre ser e tornar-se. Recebido em: 24/02/2020.Aprovado em: 22/05/2020.

Exploring teaching as an upper secondary school teacher through lived experience offers pedagogical insights that have been challenged over a period of 25 years, when neoliberal educational policies gradually transformed the conditions for teaching in Swedish schools. The article is grounded in the assumption that the teaching profession is complex and there are multiple tacit dimensions inherent in being and becoming a teacher. Several of these dimensions are captured by the notion of pedagogical tact and have to be learned through practice. However, over the past few decades, the implementation of neoliberal policies in the Swedish education sector have changed the conditions for teaching, and created an area of tension between the teacher’s pedagogical alignment and the educational practices influenced by neoliberal values. The aim of the study is to describe how the author experienced these tensions, and what they meant for her becoming and being a teacher in three different pedagogical sites: a higher education preparatory program, a vocational preparatory program, and in adult education. The description is grounded in the lifeworld phenomenological approach and carried out through personal narrative.

In this article, we call for a critical reflection on the lens that we adopt when researching journalism and communication. Adopting a lens of wonder can enhance our ability to consider the rich diversity that can be found in the field. Through a variety of research projects, we show how through wonder we cannot only understand how journalism is becoming but also make space for “becoming with”: we show how we are complicit in journalism’s future. Focusing on the paradoxical nature of journalistic practices as something we learned from our work with journalists, we illuminate and open up the much-at-onceness of journalistic life.

A burgeoning body of literature discusses the process of being and becoming a doctoral scholar, suggesting that graduate students should move beyond performing the role of ‘good student’ and transf...

This ethnographic research examines the sociocultural and educational experiences of migrant youth living in liminality in urban Yangon. Their liminality exemplifies the interplay between poverty, ...

Through the process of dialogue, collaboration, and sisterhood, we attempted to demonstrate feminist values and principles in leadership and mentorship through the process of writing this a...

This is NOT an article about Alice in Wonderland. It is about the figure of Alice-the-child and an exploration of the contemporary theoretical research field of Child Studies. What if, I ask, Lewis Carroll’s Alice had been one of the sources drawn upon when forming child research theories? The idea is to explore how the fictive child character Alice in Wonderland enacts key theoretical concepts in Child Studies. Out of this exploration grows the idea of Child Studies Multiple.

Over the past decades, a body of scholarship has highlighted the possibilities of critical pedagogies in Health and Physical Education Teacher Education (HPETE) (Fitzpatrick, 2018. What hap...

‘Pedagogies in context’ are explored through a national project working with academic staff developers and new academics' induction and transitioning into higher education. Causal-layered analysis is used to explore the interplay between academic staff, institutional development, and contextual influences in shaping professional learning processes. Data generated by the project’s steering committee (SC) reflects on pedagogical encounters with the NATHEP participants and conference delegates (HELTASA, 2019). The outcomes of each intervention were compared by reflecting on who was in the room and how epistemological and ontological depth in each engagement was achieved. The study was guided by whether pedagogies are mobile and agile, irrespective of context. The SC asserts that pedagogies in context are relative to the participants, purpose and the project embedded in a specific context to achieve the epistemological, ontological, methodological, and axiological breadth and depth required. The portability of pedagogies from one context to another depends on aspects intrinsic to knowledge generation, transformation and decolonisation, engagement, being and becoming, and socio-cultural and historical conditions. This is also incumbent on the agility and flexibility of facilitators to adapt their repertoire to draw on a suite of contextually relevant pedagogical approaches.

In light of the critiques of ecotourism—several of which have exposed how Eurocentric and capitalist ideologies of nature serve as core pillars of ecotourism encounters—we explore in this chapter the notion of enchantment and its potential to spark relations of care. We contend that even within exploitive and destructive practices, seeds of care, compassion, and living and dying well together can and must be aroused and nourished. Enchantment invites us back into our sensing bodies, the expansive present, and the fundamental relationality of being and becoming in the world. It ruptures individualistic and dichotomously conceived worlds with vibrant possibilities for relating with others (human and more-than-human) in more humble and caring ways. Insofar as ecotourism can prompt such moments of enchantment, there remains hope amid its ugly and fractured nature.

Researching the experience of colonized subjects who exist on the dominated side of the colonial power difference has revealed the futility of treating Marxist and decolonial approaches as exclusive alternatives rather than complementary tools that can help to enrich our holistic understanding of social phenomena. In this chapter, I explore the potency of combining Marxism and decoloniality in unearthing a holistic picture of what it means to be a colonized subject within the power structure of modernity/coloniality. As will be seen below, Marxism and decoloniality can be treated as complementary epistemic projects to inform theory and research methodology in ways that improve rather than diminish our understanding of a social phenomenon. Thus, I deploy the example of researching the experience of being and becoming a mineworker in South Africa as an experience that cannot be fully captured by an approach that treats Marxism and decoloniality as exclusive alternatives.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to study the phenomenon of organizational change failure through an emic approach. Grounded in empirical examples, the paper unfolds why the phenomenon seems to be missing from the literature of the becoming view (e.g. Tsoukas and Chia, 2002).Design/methodology/approach: Inspired by the methodological strategy of “studying through,” organizational changes are followed through space and time within the setting of a Nordic bank, from where the empirical data have been collected via longitudinal study. The empirical data are generated through a combination of methods: shadowing, interviews, in situ observations and desk research in order to capture the ever-changing phenomenon of organizational change.Findings: The paper finds that organizational changes drift away, either by slipping into the everyday practices of the organization, or by drifting away in time when history is reinterpreted. The paper concludes that organizational change failures suffer the same fate as organizational changes more generally and drift away in space and time.Originality/value: The paper contributes to the becoming view by illustrating how methodologically an ever-changing phenomenon such as organizational change can be studied. Further, it contributes to the field of organizational change failure by unpacking the fate of organizational change failure when change is natural and slippery in nature. The paper includes reflections on what the consequences might be for praxis.

The themes of being and becoming have had a recurring presence in the pages of this journal and throughout the literature on academic development. From the beginning, scholars writing in IJAD have ...

The aim of the article is not to discuss the perspective of indolence, but to focus on using childhood potential in building adulthood. For this purpose, the author invokes the philosophical tale The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery, which perfectly illustrates the relationship between an adult and a child, a symbolic relationship between being a child and being and becoming an adult. Following this logic, the use of The Little Prince is the key to understand the category of infantilization, thereby reflecting the way and content of value applicability. The author begins her considerations with the attempt to define infantilization, entering the representations by G. Bachelard, R. Barber and C.G. Jung into the discourse. The next step is referring to the category of the novel as “the laboratory of the human soul” (Jaworska-Witkowska), and thus as rewarding material for analysis which is crucial for the pedagogical discourse. The second part of the text includes several ways of interpreting The Little Prince , with pedagogical reflection in the background.

This paper plateau describes children’s interspecies relation with a classroom canine, utilising posthumanism, post-structuralism and new materialism as its research paradigm and methodology. Once feelings are cognitised or articulated, their true essence can be lost. Therefore, elucidating moment-to-moment child–dog interactions through the lens of affect theory attempts to materialise the invisible, embodied, ‘unthought’ and non-conscious experience. Through consideration of Deleuzian concepts such as the ‘rhizome’ and ‘Body-without-Organs’ being enacted it illuminates new, ‘situated knowledge’. This is explicated and revealed using visual methods with ‘data’ produced by both, the children and their classroom dog such as photographs and video footage mounted on the dogs harness, from a GoPro micro camera. In addition, individual drawings, artefacts and paintings completed by the children are profound points in the research process, which are referred to as ‘plateaus’. These then become emergent as a children’s comic book where their relationship with ‘Dave’, their classroom dog is materialised. Through their interspecies relationship both child and dog exercise agency, co-constitute and transform one another and occupy a space of shared relations and multiple subjectivities. The affectual capacities of both child and dog also co-create an affective atmosphere and emotional spaces. Through ethnographic, participant observation and the ‘researcher’s body’ as a tool, they visually create illustrations through the sketching of ‘etudes’ (drawing exercises) to draw forth this embodied experience to reveal multiple lines and entanglements, mapping a landscape of interconnections and relations.

In contemporary Indonesia, the fragmentation of a collectively-imagined future has generated ambivalent and contradictory ways of being and becoming a man. This article investigates this tension by drawing on interviews and ethnographic data collected from young men aged 18–30 who engage in transactional sex work in the capital city Jakarta. The narratives of these young men suggest that transactional sex is a choice linked to the cultivation of an appropriate form of masculinity. This understanding, however, is complicated by mobility in two ways. First, geographical mobility tied to migration is understood to be necessary to becoming a man who is independent from family. Second, temporal mobility involves future aspirations to marry a woman and become a father, a powerful template for joining middle-class society. Young men find the intersection of geographical and temporal mobility as a source of open-ended liminality in the midst of acute economic precarity and perpetually flexible employment. Serving as narrative accounts of the plasticity of the most widely-held assumptions about the immutable nature of gender, liminal masculinity helps to illuminate the ambiguous effects of global economic forces on forms of moral self-cultivation.

Giacalone and Promislo’s essay on the menace of misinformation usefully discusses problems arising from faculty misstatements. However, it falls short of identifying a deeper malaise in management education where a lack of critical and reflexive consideration of the nature of truth and the use of empirical facts; of the role of values and ideologies; and of the nature and objectives of management education leads to an impoverished educational practice that does not empower but instead limits learners. Successful management education that unequivocally and uncompromisingly places the learner’s independence, self-responsibility, and self-formation at its heart will have little to fear from the unintended mistakes and the unavoidable misinformation that will always be part of any educational practice.

This paper focuses on how people learn to become teachers. It draws on the experiences of student-teachers and tutors at a College of Education in the south of Ghana, who engaged with an iterative data-generation process over one academic year. While increasing attention is given to the learning experiences of children in Sub-Saharan Africa, teachers’ learning experiences remain under-explored, under-documented and under-theorised. It makes an original contribution to the study of pre-service teacher education by combining a sociocultural lens on learning and becoming with an analytical framework based on the capability approach. This illustrates how student-teachers’ freedom to learn is facilitated and constrained by structured and social contexts within a pre-service programme. The paper shows how understanding different perspectives on valued ‘beings and doings’ of teaching can help re-interpret and re-imagine processes for ‘becoming’ a teacher, which has practical application at policy and institution level.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to re-conceptualise “good” qualitative research by discussing the intersection between “good” qualitative research and different identity states of “good” qualitative researcher. It uses the anthropological concept of liminality and related concept of limbo to help illustrate the implications of this intersection.Design/methodology/approachA reflexive and personal confessional account is provided of the author’s “living in” the liminal transition of the identity states from full-time PhD student to full-time early career researcher, questioning the author’s experiences in relation to others and the implications for the social construction of “good” qualitative research.Findings“Good” qualitative research is not just what to do but how to be. “PhD student” is a defined and temporary transitional liminal identity state. It has a clear point of separation (acceptance and registration of student status) and aggregation (“good” qualitative research signed of through thesis and viva). Contrasting with this is the “early career researcher” identity state, any point of aggregation towards “established researcher” is predicated on the unpredictability of publication and delivering impact indicators.Originality/valueThe paper demonstrates unsettling and in-betweenness of “good” qualitative research intersecting with the experience and composition of being a “good” qualitative researcher in the academy. It is important for debates regarding the qualities of academic development from PhD student to established researcher.

Engaging an account of a judicial decision made in the Los Angeles Mental Health Court, this article interrogates the role of anticipation in the lived negotiation of moral, social and institutional orders. As Judge Samuel Benton recounts his attempt to let himself ‘emotionally off the hook’ in the wake of a patient’s suicide, anticipation emerges as: 1) an ordered, linear sequencing of events towards logical ends; 2) unsettled, temporally disjunctive engagements with the past in order to make sense of present experience and ambiguous futures; 3) existential negotiations of one’s potential morality and social belonging; and 4) distributed organization of information between people and across objects in order to elaborate present and future experience. These manifestations of anticipation reveal the social and temporal contingency and deep intersubjectivity of our negotiations with uncertainty in the unsettling process of becoming moral.

From this year-long study, we offer new perspectives for being and becoming critical friends as co-authors. Informed by the Transactional Theory of Reading, a narrative view of experience a...

In “Gorilla, My Love,” Toni Cade Bambara’s Black girl narrator reverses the traditional adult gaze on the child to disrupt our taken-for-granted notions of childhood, adulthood, and their relations. Read through the lens of Sylvia Wynter’s poetics of being and becoming human and Avery Gordon’s utopian margins, this story serves as a counter-narrative to that of the hegemonic child and inspires new narratives as part of enacting liberation. Through Hazel’s unruly resistance against capital, white supremacy, and patriarchy, Bambara recuperates the alterity of childhood in a way that reveals the joy and revolutionary transformation lurking in the present.

The focus of this article is the construction of teacher identities in an alternative school setting. Using a sociocultural theoretical understanding of ‘identity’ development based on the notions of ‘relational agency’ (Edwards, 2007) and ‘relational equity’ (Boaler, 2008), an adaptation of Burke's (1945) dramatic ‘pentad’ is used to analyse teacher interview scripts about being and becoming a teacher. Findings suggest that teachers construct multiple identities in an alternative schooling context that are focused on their perceived role within the school – teacher, co-learner, principal. Three formats of teacher identity – replacing, blending, privileging - are offered to explore teacher identity.

In this paper, we call for an ontological and reflexive turn in first-year nursing education. An ontological turn focuses on formation, the 'being' and 'becoming' of a nurse, and emphasizes the value of nursing knowledge. First-year nursing students often possess romanticized ideals about being a nurse that devalues the knowledge and expertise of nurses. We posit a thoughtful ontological orientation within nursing education that shifts the emphasis toward becoming skillful nurses, with expertise grounded in nursing perspectives. A focus on formation includes discussions regarding ideologies, dominant perspectives, and reflexive explorations of students' views of nursing juxtaposed with the realities of nursing practice. We propose ontologic reflexivity as an approach to consider what perspectives are prioritized (or not) within the nursing classroom. Within pedagogical dialogic spaces, ontologic reflexivity calls on educators to create opportunities for students to learn the value of nursing knowledge along with other forms of knowledge. We consider ways in which an ontological and reflexive turn within the first year of nursing education may contribute to the formation of nursing students who value nursing knowledge, are open-minded to various forms of knowledge, and possess an intentional reflexive way of being.

This brief article traces the intersecting lines and stories of this special issue on Deleuze and intimacy. It offers a take how it found its way onto these pages after nearly 2 years and through two conference symposia, and outlines how the contributions—variously and differently—make a case for intimacy, through Deleuze, as an approach to, a subject of, and/or a necessary and vital affective force in, research—and beyond.

This chapter is dedicated to presenting a different narrative about language, away from the metaphoric and symbolic market. In a way, it is a protest against these dominant discourses that have occupied how individuals think of, and talk about, language in their lives. The chapter argues for the need to go beyond the dominant discourses of value and market by inviting the emotional and the human in language. The chapter highlights the importance of changing the language about language in order to nurture ethics of linguistic foster-ship and caring.

This chapter presents both the rationale of and a practical guide to using arts-based methods in research with children. We outline a number of adaptable lesson plans, including guides for activities, strategies for engagement and required materials. We discuss examples from the fieldwork of the Interfaith Childhoods project to demonstrate how applied visual and digital arts practices can activate different aspects of children’s imaginaries and enable children to communicate complex experiences, emotions and perspectives in accessible, engaging and non-confrontational ways. Drawing from new materialist theories of entanglement, we offer arts workshops as sites in which children engage in complex processes of being and becoming, and arts-based methods as a way of probing the complex interactions of children with their world.

This research extends literature on the emergence of service ecosystems by developing new theoretical insight and explanation into how service ecosystems experience change and stability over time. Empirically, our case study focuses on digital transformation in the New Zealand public sector and the enterprise services market in 2010–2017. The exploratory and illustrative study builds on 22 in-depth interviews and extensive document analysis. We reveal three key mechanisms of service ecosystem emergence: compression, ecotonal coupling, and refraction. These mechanisms contribute to overcoming conflationary theorizing and the value of emergence in service research by establishing emergent relationality and a processual intertwining of being and becoming. These become the basis of multi-levelled, multidimensional complexity and cumulative organizing. We conclude the work by discussing the paper’s contribution to service research.

This chapter aims to provide information about the situation of being female in the medical field and facing gender inequality. The medical education opportunities are put into the spotlight to see the possible factors affecting the choices and consequences. Apart from the traditional structure and the sociological analysis of the situation, the chapter also involves the results of two different types of research in the field. The data collection in general includes a close-ended questionnaire reaching 500 young females aiming to collect data in the field of education as well as face to face interviews with 30 medical field workers. The chapter is an attempt to prove that becoming an idealist person is the only solution left to the women to be and become a valued person in society.

This article reports results of an ethnographic study of how girls are positioned, and position themselves, in relation to gender regimes in three vocational programmes in Swedish upper secondary education: Restaurant Management & Food, Health & Social Care, and Vehicle & Transport. The comparison shows that there are different possible feminine positions where the girls resist and comply to varying degrees both within and between the programmes, with expectations interrelated with discourses of consumption, caring and production. However, generally the position of emphasised femininity is most prominent and becoming a female worker in the programmes’ settings involves complying with feminine ideals of a caring discourse, regardless of whether the VET is oriented towards education for masculine production work, or feminine consumption work.

Moving from oracy to a text-based world was transformational in terms of people’s thinking, belonging, being and becoming. In a similar way, the transition to living in a digital world is demanding new habits of mind and ways of engaging in the socio-cultural world: new ways of belonging, being and becoming. A number of scholars and researchers describe the evolution of a new literacy (epiliteracy). The first proposition in this chapter is that many of the observed characteristics of this new literacy align to the thinking and work practices employed by artists. The second proposition is that children’s engagement in Media Arts—one of the five subjects in the Arts Learning Area in the Australian Curriculum—facilitates their development of the digital and multimodal authorial practices needed to be active participants in their unfolding socio-cultural world. The third proposition is that the principles for integrating arts learning into the teaching programme, as outlined in the ArtsIN Framework [Hartle et al. (Early Childhood Education 43:289–298, 2015)], provide a pedagogical model for the early childhood educator to support the development of young children’s ability to actively and creatively participate in the ecology of a digitally-based world.

What special insights might Kant’s Formula of Humanity bring to bear on integrity as an aim of student being and becoming in higher education? I suggest that the ways in which the Formula elucidates the concept have the potential to inform our understanding of student formation, by probing the nature of personhood, informing criteria for thinking about and acting well towards oneself and others, clarifying the grounds for assigning value, determining the extent and use of personal freedom and assessing the centrality of a rational nature.

This chapter focuses on middle leading and how it evolved through the professional life journey of a group of teachers who had participated in action research. Leading professional learning in schools is a professional education practice that involves both teaching students in classrooms and leading school-based professional learning, often through facilitating long term action research projects. Specifically, the chapter considers how teachers journeyed into this space of middle leading, an impetus triggered by their own dispositions, commitment to developing education as a societal good, and importantly, their own professional development experiences in action research. For them, learning to lead was found in learning to learn. The chapter represents a coherent view of the experiences and practices of these educators who, by their commitment to learning, inhabited their professional space in a different way as each moved into a middle leading role. According to these teachers, their own participation experiences in action research redefined their professional trajectories. In retracing their own professional histories, becoming a middle leader seemed to flow from facilitation and mentoring practices that strengthened their own personal teaching know-how, their capacity to critically reflect on and articulate (justify and reason) professional understandings, and encouraged an individual and collective responsibility to learn and lead. Over time, such practices unearthed in these teachers, a deeper personal and interpersonal confidence that set leading in motion. Action research led them to their educational leading place, ultimately shifting their identities as educators.