Introduction:

Practicum is a basic part in a teacher education system. It is based on interaction between the Academy and School Education as well as Policymaking and often regarded as a matter of tensions between these parts (e.g. Zeichner, 2009) to be dealt with when designing and working in teacher education. Given this, the purpose of this paper is to map and analyse the research field dealing with practicum in teacher education. How is this research field organising itself in nets and nodes? Which different subfields are at work in teacher education research in terms of research fronts and intellectual traditions? How does networking turn out in different European contexts? This interest of research networking – of links between publications  - is complementing reviews mapping individual research contributions (such as Cochran-Smith et al, 2008) and is expected to be significant for stabilizing research communities without homogenizing them, increasing research cooperation, and to identify research gaps and innovative challenges.

Theoretical notions

In this paper practicum in teacher education is conceived of as an assemblage – as a system of different and heterogeneous parts (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988, deLanda, 2016) out of whose interaction practicum emerges. An assemblage is not regarded as an autonomous conflict free  machinery but as a matter of parts that might contradicting each other and interacting also with different contexts. Given this, we ask what parts and what relations are represented in research on practicum in teacher education?

Research is organising itself by research communication and publishing. This is possible to capture by means of referencing practices – for instance how referencing are working in research narratives (Czarniawska, 2022) and how such practices are linking publications in the making of research network. Such links can be identified by bibliometric analysis (Garfield, 1971) in the making of research fronts working with what problems (Bacchi, 2009) based in different intellectual traditions (e.g. Gross et al, 2024). Thus, it is of significant interest to analyse research networking with a focus on how links between publications are organising the field of research and how these are situated in different European welfare states (Esping Andersen, 2019).

Research problem and questions:

How is research on practicum in teacher education organising itself in different nets an nodes? Which intellectual traditions are at work in different research networks and what research fronts have emerged dealing with what problems? Which parts and their interaction in  are analysed in this research? How are different European regions participating in this networking?

The current study is based on information in Web of Science. Research was identified by using variations of teacher education AND practicum as search terms. By means of this 1272 items – published between 1968-2024 – were identified. The collected data was analysed by means of Vosviewer cluster analyses (Van Eck and Waltman, 2010) to identify links between research publications that constitute the making of nodes and nets in this research field by means of bibliographic coupling and co-citation.

Preliminary results: Research on teacher education practicum has expanded the last decade very much. It was to a very large extent affiliated to North American and Australian contexts. In Europe research affiliated to Spain, Turkey, Norway and Finland was most frequent. Five clusters of country affiliatio were identified – to a large extent linking to each other in different welfare state regions in Europe. Links between clusters were indicating different networks. Here they are presented very short: Four networks organising different intellectual traditions were identified. The largest are dealing with relations between universities and shools. This was quite distant from a network where self-efficacy was in focus, but closer to networks with publications on reflective practice and reflection in action. Considering research fronts six partly overlapping clusters were identified dealing with different parts of practicum such as teach student stress, professional learning, or technical devices in teacher education. These results present a heterogeneous field of research presenting different aspects of teacher education as an assemblage. This is interest as such but show also potentials in cooperation between different networks in order to understand the complexity in the making of practicum in teacher education in different contexts.

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