Becoming teachers otherwise: speculative, situated, and creative trajectories for teacher education - Keynote presented at Jamia International Conference on Education (JICE-2025) New Delhi, India on 22-24 April 2025. The theme of the conference was “NEP 2020 and Transformative Teacher Education Trajectories”

In an era marked by climate crisis, digital acceleration, post-truth politics, and deepening global inequities, teacher education must go beyond the transmission of knowledge to become a site of transformation. This keynote invites participants to reimagine teacher preparation as a creative, relational, and speculative process; one that centres complexity, resists standardisation, and honours the lived and local. Drawing on five research-informed innovations in my practice: arts-based and a/r/tographic inquiry, digital portfolios and ePedagogies, studio-based and relational pedagogies, situated and place-responsive learning, and multimodal supervision this presentation argues for a profound shift: from compliance to curiosity, from output to inquiry, from performativity to possibility. Through visual and conceptual provocations, it considers what it means to ‘become teachers otherwise’- teachers who dwell in uncertainty, create with care, and teach as an ethical, embodied act. These speculative trajectories offer not a pipeline, but a playground for becoming where teaching is world-making, curriculum is lived, and research is a space of collective becoming. Informed by practice-related research and grounded in imaginative pedagogies, this talk invites educators, researchers, and policymakers to courageously co-create the future of teacher education marked by justice, creativity, and hope.