In the literature on teaching and teacher education, reflection has been broadly considered to play a key role in improving teaching and developing teachers’ knowledge (Dewey, 1933; Schön, 1983; Griffiths, 2000; Grossman, 2010; Postholm, 2010). Consequently, reflection has been seriously considered by teacher education programs as a competence which student teachers need to acquire. To this end, teacher education programs have had to address the challenge of how student teachers can be best assisted to learn to reflect. Pursuing this idea, for example, Korthagen (2001) has proposed an approach to teacher education which includes and articulates different spaces for joint reflection. To this regard, we propose in this study to articulate three main of these spaces. On the one hand, we envisage one space where a university professor jointly reflects with her students; on the other hand, another space where a school teacher jointly reflects with the student teacher; finally, another where the university professor, the teacher and the students jointly reflect. Our project proposes that these three spaces of reflection can be successfully articulated during the practicum period of teaching degrees.

These three spaces are included in our proposal because of two main reasons. First, there is a disconnection between schools and universities when they jointly face the task of preparing new teachers (Zeichner, 2010; Mtika, Robson, & Fitzpatrick, 2014). Second, research shows that there are important differences between the type of knowledge which is pervasive in university contexts and the kind of knowledge which is preponderant in school (Clarà, 2014; Korthagen, 2001; Clandinin, 1986). At the same time, it has been argued that both types of knowledge are necessary in successful teaching practice (Orland-Barak & Yinon, 2007; Pozo, Scheuer, Pérez Echeverría, et al., 2006), although the articulation of these two kinds of knowledge has proven to be highly difficult to student teachers (Davis, 2006; Gelfuso & Dennis, 2014).  Regarding these two problems, the rational of our proposal consists of providing reflective spaces aimed to develop these two kinds of knowledge, and reflective spaces aimed to articulate both types of knowledge. On the one hand, the reflective space “university professor – student” and the reflective space “school teacher- student” are aimed to the development of the pervasive kinds of knowledge of the respective contexts; on the other hand, the reflective space “university professor – student – school teacher” has a double aim: first, permitting the confluence and articulation of both kinds of knowledge, since the two contexts (university-school) will meet and interact in this space. This also may help the student to overcome the idea of the traditional separation and hierarchy between these two contexts. Second, this space also aims to foster the horizontal interaction (Engeström, 2001) between school and university, improving their coordination in the joint preparation of future teachers.

The research objective of this paper is to study how the different reflective spaces work and how the students’ participation to these spaces develop and modify their initial ideas and knowledge. Specifically, our research questions are the following:

1-     Which are the interactional dynamics generated in the different reflective spaces

2-     How the ideas and knowledge of student teachers have been developed and modified within the different reflective spaces.

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