This roundtable brings together researchers who work closely with teachers and carers to develop their work to change some of the problems in the current educational practices to an anti-deficit lens. In situations where there is a need for doing otherwise, educational/care interventions often look to the future with the idea of moving beyond the (unsatisfying, unpleasant) present. However, this hurrying onwards, the need to resolve instead of staying with and tolerating (the impossibility) of the present may also miss opportunities for change, opportunities which trying to stay with and sustain current dilemmas may already entail. The question we examine together is the potential of this ‘(im)possibility’ of the present as a source of change. The studies in this roundtable all focus on circumstances in which the participants develop novel practices in their work while at the same conceive the present as difficult if not ’impossible’ to change.