Purpose of the research project in which the proposal belongs is to develop secondary teacher education and teacher practice in particular. In this paper we report results to the question what kind of affordances teacher students recognized during the practice sessions at schools. We wanted also to study how students positioned themselves during the sessions in relation to the affordances. Positioning is understood in this paper as a discursive concept. It refers to communication strategies a student applies towards a partner of a discourse. It is sometimes described as a role that the student takes in a specific situation, however, being more dynamic (see van Langenhove & Harré 1999). In the teaching situation the teacher student is in a role of a teacher, but s/he can change his/her positioning during the discourses of the class. The word "discourse" is shorthand for "discursive formation," which is what Foucault (1969) called communication that involves specialized knowledge of various kinds. Affordance is the other main concept of the study. James J. Gibson (1977, 1979) defined affordances as all ‘action possibilities’ latent in the environment, objectively measurable and independent of the individual's ability to recognize them, but always in relation to the actor and therefore dependent on their capabilities. Norman (1990, 1998) appropriated the term affordance in the context of human–machine interaction to refer to just those action possibilities that are readily perceivable by an actor. It makes the concept dependent not only on the physical capabilities of the actor, but also their goals, plans, values, beliefs and past experience. Tanner and Jones (2002) defined an affordance as “a potential for action, the capacity of an environment or object to enable the intentions of the student within a particular problem situation”. We use this definition in the study. Affordance is a potential for action in the teaching situation related to, for instance, physical characteristics of the environment, facilities or materials, or people and their interaction present in the situation. In addition to factual knowledge teaching requires procedural knowledge, skills to act. However, student teachers’ recognition of affordances and positioning options can be assumed to be limited. Although we emphasize the affordances and positioning, it is evident that the lessons in the actual school situations depend on several contextual, situational and autobiographical factors (Ropo 2004, Connelly & al. 1997; Meijer & al. 1999, Sotto 1994, Grossman, 1995).

The informants of the study were math and sciences teacher students (n=15, in 2005-2006, 2006-2007 and 2007-2008) in the secondary teacher education program. Data were collected by observations of lessons. The data of the selected students were collected during the authentic teaching situations at the practice schools. The students’ practice lessons were videotaped. The analysis was based on narrative approach and we used also discourse analysis (Bruner, 1996). The methodology of analyses was qualitative and we may describe it also as bricolage, namely, using tools at hand or many different tools in analyzing the gathered data (Berry 2006, Kincheloe 2002, 2004).

From the point of this study, skills can be categorized into two classes. First, it is necessary for the teacher to recognize the affordances existing and emerging in the situation. Second, it is important to position oneself in a relevant way to the affordances recognized in the class. The more the student has different positioning options the easier s/he is able to react to the affordances and the more efficient s/he can be supposed to be in the situation. The results showed that the situation contained two different networks of affordances that students recognized. First network related to teaching the school pupils and the second to the teacher student’s own development as a teacher. Results showed also that students position themselves towards several affordances originated from two different networks, namely, pupil learning processes and the mentoring process present in the practice environment.