ABSTRACT
Beginning teachers are frequently positioned by politicians and media as a key problem impeding the quality of education in Australia. Approaching Grazia as a narrator of her own stories of beginning teaching is somewhat at odds with a Deleuzian non-identitarian politics. It risks valorising the speaking, self-knowing subject, the wilful stable subject who has been invited to speak from that identity position of 'a teacher', and has recognised herself as such by responding to the research invitation. Grazia's micro-narratives of fear, care and learning demonstrate how she gradually mobilises an ethics of encounter and responsibility as she grapples with what went wrong (and right) in her classes in high-poverty schools. Vignettes of classroom life suggested that classrooms are sites of unpredictable 'pedagogical encounters' where bodies, plans, desires, emotions, documents, furniture and other elements come together or collide. The study within which Grazia was interviewed focused on trajectories into the profession of high-performing secondary English teachers.
