ABSTRACT. I write as a Filipina teacher educator and leader of a postgraduate teacher education programme in Aotearoa New Zealand. This article draws on a study that explored how pre-service teachers experience discrimination and inclusion during their school practicum placements. The study used poetic inquiry as its methodology, where pre-service teachers offered personal written reflections and collective poetry to explore these experiences. In this paper, I focus closely on the experience of one racialised international pre-service teacher (Theo, a Chinese woman) to reveal how the promise of teacher education as a transformative and meritocratic journey (the academic fairytale) sits in tension with the racialised realities of practicum life in Aotearoa New Zealand. This paper explores how Theo negotiates the ‘lines’ of whiteness that shape what it means to be a ‘good teacher’ in New Zealand schools. Guided by Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology and Anne Milne’s Colouring in the White Spaces, I ask what happens when a body of colour is out of line in these institutions, and what the cost is to this body as it negotiates and reorients the directions laid out for her. I foreground Theo’s story and poetry alongside my own autoethnographic reflections as her programme leader. Her poems speak to the endurance and relational negotiation required to keep teaching and striving for belonging in spaces that were not made for her. Her words, and my own witnessing of them, invite a reimagining of teacher education not as a fairytale of inclusion but as a lived, relational and ongoing act of reorientation. 

Keywords: poetic inquiry; autoethnography; racialisation; queer phenomenology; teacher education; whiteness; white spaces

How to cite: Gaerlan, E. (2026). The lines we cross: Poetic inquiry into racialised belonging in teacher education. Knowledge Cultures, 14(2), 59‒78. https://doi.org/10.22381/kc14220264

Received February 28, 2026 • Received in revised form May 6, 2026
Accepted July 15, 2026 • Available online August 1, 2026