Social and learning interactions in classrooms are open-structured and mostly unpredictable. They reflect a dynamic relation of various components, which never can be completely uncovered and differ significantly from well defined situations, which can be found, e.g., in experimental science. To address the classroom-dynamics students of teaching have to develop in their training interpretative skills as well as practical competences to act appropriately. The research project started in 2008 and is scheduled to be completed in 2012. Based on qualitative methods, we aim to capture and analyze the students’ practical knowledge when confronted with a real life classroom situation. Based on the assumption that teachers need sufficient theoretical knowledge as well as practical knowing we intend to describe the development of the tacit side of professional know-how acquired during initial teacher training. The study of students’ perceptual patterns, styles of thought and judgement is thereby based on the assumption that their expressions are embedded in commonly shared social practices. A given meaning is therefore a result of knowledge, meaning and experiences located in a cultural and historical context. Seen from this point of view there is no essential difference between “interpreting and acting, doing and thinking, or understanding and responding. All are part of the ongoing process of negotiation meaning”. (Wenger 2002, p. 54) Picture- and text-vignettes, embedded in a broader multi-method research design, have been used to show the students’ way of seeing and interpreting classroom situations. Text- as well as picture-vignettes offer structured impulses for cognitive processes. The vignettes we have applied are kept semantically open and therefore allow a range of appropriate answers. For example, students are given a photo that shows children in school. They are then asked to write down what situation the picture shows and to tell reasons for their opinion. The answers point to the way how the students interpret the situation and help us to understand how they create meaning. As there is a multitude of possible answers, their quality can’t be predetermined (for instance by formulating levels of competence). We assume that the coherence and the reaction to the ambiguity of the situations in the answers offer indications for competencies. In the presentation at the conference various methodological aspects of the picture-vignette will be discussed and its applications as well as provisional results in the research project presented.

The sample comprises 273 students who study at a Teacher University College in Austria. They all will become teachers in various types of Austria’s compulsory school system. At the very beginning of their training in 2008 they were asked to take part at the vignette study and they will be asked again shortly before the completion of their course in 2011. In addition to these two data sets, 60 experienced teachers also took part as a comparison group (expert-novice-comparison). The codifying system consists of inductive as well as deductive codes – mainly with descriptive and structural categories. In the process of analysing the material we mainly used qualitative research techniques (criteria-related text analysis). Additionally, some quantitative calculations were also done to allow a comparative analysis in order to find special types and correlations. These types were interpreted in case studies and linked with other methods in the research project.

Through the interpretation of the vignettes-responses we can identify patterns of meaning students created in the confrontation with pedagogical situations. This gives us a clue about the interpretive approach, which is an important dimension of practical know-how. When (student) teachers act in the classroom, they perform on presumptions that are mostly implicit. Their understanding of a situation (e.g., What is the child’s problem? or What is happening now and why?) does not determine their action, but it is a crucial element for it. The results of the text analysis reveal the range of interpretative perspectives of any particular situation. A comparison of the students’ answers with those of experienced teachers illustrates to a certain extent differences and indicates in which way a teacher university college could address this issue for training purposes. Interestingly the distinction between experts and students in interpreting a school-related picture (as well as problematic classroom-situation given in the text-vignette) is much smaller than it was assumed by university teachers that have been interviewed for the study. We might have to rethink our assumptions about the role that verbal reflections about teaching play in teacher training and how it can be used for enhancing the acting repertoire.