The purpose of the study reported in this proposal was to develop a discursive model of the teacher practice in secondary teacher education in Finland.

The research questions in the study were

1) what kind of affordances mathematics and science teacher students recognized during the practice sessions at schools and

2) how they reacted and responded, in other words how they positioned themselves during the sessions in relation to the affordances in the discourses.

The above questions are closely related to our overall purpose to describe and understand the teacher students' emerging perspectives on the role of classroom and school discourses in shaping their identity, conceptions of science and knowledge, and their understanding of schools as educational institutions. We argue that these concepts, discourse, positioning and affordance, are fruitful in understanding better the complexity of student teaching situations.

The word "discourse" is shorthand for "discursive formation," which is what Foucault (1972) called communication that involves specialized knowledge of various kinds. Foucault's definition of discourse is “systems of thoughts composed of ideas, attitudes, courses of action, beliefs and practices that systematically construct the subjects and the worlds of which they speak". Discourse according to Foucault (1977, 1980, 2003) is related to power as it operates by rules of exclusion. Discourse is therefore controlled by objects, what can be spoken of; ritual, where and how one may speak; and the privileged, who may speak.

Classroom communication can be characterized as pedagogical and knowledge related discourse. Existing discourses determine what is right or wrong, but they also regulate the relations between the actors. E.g. knowledge is traditionally ‘owned’ by the teacher who transmits it to students. In this paper discourses are: math/physics/chemistry (MPC) as science, MPC as subject, didactic and pedagogy, curriculum, teaching and learning.

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 but it is more dynamic and varying (see Van Langenhove & Harré 1999). Positioning is not, however, possible without perception of affordances in the discursive situations.

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. It originates from J. J. Gibson (1977, 1979). It makes the concept dependent not only on the physical capabilities of the actor, but also their goals, plans, values, beliefs and past experience (Norman 1990). 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 applythis definition.

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