This article presents an author's struggle to develop a 'living' theory of values in teacher education. The article argues that these values will manifest especially those situations where there are contradictions and tensions in the ever-changing context of pre-service teacher education. These contradictions are sometimes between discourses of values and the reality of everyday talk and interaction of everyday practice. This paper is an account of one teacher educator's reflective action enquiry in which he attempted to find ways of developing morally reflective communities of practice in which all participants may offer an account of their dynamic (and tension-rich) learning and how values of education feature in this learning. In philosophising about his curricular and instructional practice he gradually composed what he would like to term 'the becoming' (in a DeLeuzian sense) of 'a living theory'. The theoretical lens used to frame the developing living theory is a combination of 'routinised practice' as propounded by Erving Goffman (1981) and the set of theories about the 'logic of practice' as argued by Reckwitz (2002).