This paper presents a dialogic inquiry design in teacher education for in-service part-time student teachers working in early childhood, primary, and special/inclusive education. The workshops are an integral part of a Teacher Studies module. Students first produce semi-structured interviews or self-interviews, and then, in groups, we work with selected anonymised fragments.

The starting point is a recurring tension visible in participants’ “experience texts”: institutional demands (curriculum, routines, accountability, and multi-actor coordination) meet lived dilemmas and burdens (uncertainty, boundary work, responsibility for others, and relationship tensions including collaboration with parents). Rather than treating interviews primarily as “data about teachers,” the paper analyses how student teachers work with interviews and self-interviews as experience texts, and how this workshop work supports professional agency and professional identity-in-the-making.

The conceptual framing draws on dialogic perspectives in which dialogicity is more than “talk”: dialogue is a way of organising meaning, learning, and social relations across multiple perspectives (Alexander, 2020; Wegerif, 2019). While research on classroom dialogue often focuses on interactional features of classroom talk (Howe & Abedin, 2013), this paper treats dialogicity not as a technique of speaking but as a structure of pedagogical action in which meaning, knowledge, and identity emerge in the tension of institutional norms, relational responsibility, situated experience, emotions, values, and competing obligations. Teachers continuously mediate between their own perspective and that of the learner; neither is sufficient for pedagogical decisions. Instead, decisions emerge through mediation that opens a potential “next step” in learning and participation, akin to a zone of proximal development (Vygotsky, 1978). In this approach, the inquiry object shifts from classroom talk to experience texts, which is especially useful in in-service part-time cohorts because it surfaces institutional constraints and lived tensions without requiring classroom video.

The central, author-designed practical tool is the Dialogic Analysis Board (a three-column workshop board/table) used to animate teachers’ work with anonymised interview fragments and to document the analysis's axial outcomes. The left column captures the institutional framing of the narrated situation; the right column captures the personal/experiential dimension (including emotional load and boundary work). The middle column supports dialogic analysis that goes beyond the interview’s explicit statements: it is a discussion of new and potential meanings that can be initiated or proposed. It negotiates between the ‘state of affairs’ (left and right columns), the tensions and contradictions between them, and new perspectives that participants bring in by referencing their own experiences and additional possibilities for involvement and action (Dewe et al., 1992; Bohnsack, 2020). Importantly, dialogic analysis already begins when participants negotiate what belongs in the left and right columns: multiple interpretations emerge and are often compared with participants’ own cases. The middle column then intensifies dialogicity by shifting from description to the projection of possible actions: participants generate hypotheses, identify contradictions, and propose mediations that expand the field of action by bringing “Others” (students, parents, colleagues, specialists, institutions) into shared sense-making and responsibility. This supports a trajectory from individual agency (“I must manage”) toward extended, relational agency (“we reorganise meanings, conditions and responsibilities with others”), consistent with ecological understandings of teacher agency (Priestley, Biesta, & Robinson, 2015) and dialogic accounts of the agency–control contradiction (Rajala et al., 2016).

The paper contributes to NW10 debates by offering an empirically grounded and scalable design for linking professional knowledge, identity, and agency through dialogic inquiry with experience texts—particularly relevant for inclusive education and multi-actor professional contexts.

The paper draws on one course cycle in a teacher education module for in-service part-time student teachers. In a typical cycle, around ten experience texts are produced. For this paper, four texts from the same cycle are used: three situated in educational contexts (including special/inclusive education) and one contrastive text from social work, included to illuminate differences between institution-centred and community-oriented professional logics. Experience texts are generated using semi-structured interview guidelines. Participants conduct either an interview with an educator or a self-interview. Interviews are transcribed and anonymised. The paper uses an excerpt from one interview with explicit student consent. Workshops last 90 minutes and typically focus on one case. The group analyses one or two “dense moments” (emotionally saturated episodes, detailed event descriptions, or reported dialogues). For contrast, the analysis may also include brief descriptions of routine actions. The analytic process follows a simplified documentary-method sequence: (1) formulating analysis (segmenting the text and identifying dense moments), (2) reflective analysis (reconstructing how meaning develops across narrative sequences: “what follows what”), and (3) documenting the discussion in the Dialogic Analysis Board (three columns: left—institutional perspective; middle—dialogic perspective; right—personal perspective). In this approach, students are not expected to master a complete research procedure. The facilitator contributes the methodological perspective as one voice in the dialogue: proposing segmentations, highlighting relations between sequences, offering ways of understanding “dense moments,” and introducing the distinction between formulating and reflective analysis—always in dialogue with students. Students contribute their own perspectives (professional experience and their own interview cases as comparison points). The paper presents one workshop inquiry episode around a selected fragment. Sources include anonymised excerpts and captures of the Board (board/table records). The analytic strategy is process-oriented: it traces how interpretations are negotiated (already during the agreement on entries for the left and right columns) and how mediational proposals emerge in the middle column (reframings, contradictions, inclusion of additional actors, projected shifts in practice). In workshops, participants typically start with left/right (what belongs to institutional framing; what belongs to experience and burden), and a turning point occurs when the group ‘opens’ the middle: tension becomes material for mediation and for building professional identity as the capacity to hold multiple rationalities and design bridges.

The method offers a transferable and scalable design for inquiry-based teacher education. The workshop process reliably surfaces a core professional tension that participants experience in everyday work. The Dialogic Analysis Board supports a distinctive form of agency development. Negotiating the institutional framing (left column) and the personal/experiential dimension (right column) already generates multiple interpretations and comparisons to participants’ own cases. This supports a trajectory from individual agency toward extended, relational agency (Priestley et al., 2015; Rajala et al., 2016).

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