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Exploring student teachers’ ‘stuck moments’: affect[ing] the theory-practice gap in social justice teacher education

ABSTRACT This article attends to student teachers’ ‘stuck moments,’ or emotional moments of crisis, in a social justice-oriented teacher education program (SJTE). It seeks to problematise the familiar tendency of viewing student teachers’ stuck moments as symptomatic of the theory-practice gap. By troubling both the representational logic that undergirds the theory-practice gap and its reductionist explanations of stuckness, this work conceptualises stuck moments as a fluid, moving assemblage of bodies and discursive, affective, and material forces. Informed by posthumanist theories of affect and a post-qualitative methodology, this article posits that the pressure on student teachers to achieve teaching mastery, and participants’ desire to make a discernible impact on their students, partially constitute the stuck moment assemblage. These elements illuminate the infiltration of learning discourses in stuckness. I argue that learning discourses, with their neoliberal focus on mastery, control, and measurable outcomes, collide with the uncertainty and tenuousness of social justice work. This research suggests that stuck moments have the potential to both expose and oppose the conflicting discourses, affective attachments, and intensities that student teachers encounter as they navigate their SJTE program.