This study seeks to explore in what ways an interdisciplinary intensive programme can help student teachers’ draw on notions of insideness and outsideness to better understand the experiences of pupils in schools today. This study is part of a bigger project that seeks to develop a pedagogic repertoire sensitive to the diversity of educational communities. The notion of pedagogic repertoires combines pedagogical tact (van Manen, 1991) - sensitivity to the being and becoming of another, with reflex action that anticipates as well as responds (Dewey, 1933). As such, a pedagogic repertoire should create the possibility for action that is ethically and educationally appropriate within a particular time and place (Alasuutari & Jokikokko, 2010). We use notions of insideness and outsideness as a starting point for this pedagogical development.

This research recognises that student teachers need to be better prepared to work in educational communities with increasingly wide ranges of cultural and linguistic heritages and competences, as well as different life experiences and possibilities to belong. As Garmston and Wellman (2013) argue ’demographic shifts in student and staff populations, social and political upheavals, advances in learning theory, the revolution in cognitive psychology, and the pulse of technological innovation all shape the environment around and within schools and school systems… personal and organizational maps for this new world are in many ways incomplete’ (ibid., 2013: 1). Arguably conventional ’pedagogic repertoires’ are also often incomplete as educational systems fail to stem the tide of early school leavers and struggle to help new arrivals to succeed even within the ’successful’ educational systems (e.g. Reinikainen, 2011). Teachers, however, are often expected to be responsible for combating ’social inequalities in the wider society’ (Piattoeva, 2010:8) which includes helping those outside the existing system to participate within education. To fit in, however,‘involves complex negotiations between bodies, places and mobilities’ ( Molz, 2006 cited Sidhu & Dall’Alba, 2012: 419).

Notions of insideness and outsideness can help student teachers to begin to better understand how different participants locate themselves within educational communities. As Relph (e.g. 1976) suggests, the division between who people are [i.e. identity] and where they are located [i.e. sense of place] is of profound significance: ’If a person feels inside a place, he or she is here rather than there, safe rather than threatened, enclosed rather than exposed, at ease rather than stressed’ (Seamon & Sowers, 2008: 45). From a pedagogic perspective it is of vital importance for teachers to understand how the identities of pupils are being formed in the educationnal spaces and places where they find (or lose) themselves. Furthermore, the same educational context can create experiences of insideness and/or outsideness for different individuals. An extreme sense of insideness is as though one is at home; an extreme sense of outsideness is the feeling of alienation and isolation. This isolation can mean that a place that is personally significant for an insider is merely a ’space’ for an outsider. The pedagogical conundrum teachers face is how to transform spaces into meaningful places for outsiders: ‘Through particular encounters and experiences perceptual space is richly differentiated into places, or centres of special personal significance’ (Relph, 1976: 11) in turn creating a sense of attachment or rootedness (Relph, 1976: 37). If teachers can transform educational spaces into meaningful places, pupils that initially experience alienation should start to feel as though they belong and are valued within the community. This in turn, should help to foster ‘a real responsibility and respect for that place both for itself and for what it is to yourself and to others’ (Relph (1976) p. 38 as cited in Burnapp, 2006: 83).

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