Session Information
10 SES 06 C, Research on Professional Knowledge and Identity in Teacher Education
Paper Session
Contribution
The paper is based on a doctoral dissertation written by the first author. The dissertation study had four research topics: teacher students’ conceptions of learning and teaching, their school memories of learning and teaching, their conceptions of their own practice teaching, and their actual teaching behavior during the lessons. The purpose of the study reported in this paper was to understand the student teachers positioning and actions during practice teaching and to develop a model of the teacher student school practice in secondary teacher education in Finland. The empirical research question in this paper was to find out what affordance teacher students recognize and how they position themselves, react, and respond during the practice sessions to the classroom affordances.
General description
The student teachers’ educational decision-making skills are a challenge for teacher education. Decision-making in teaching requires factual knowledge, but also procedural knowledge, skills to act. It is evident that teaching in the actual school situations depends on several contextual, situational and autobiographical factors (Ropo 2004, Connelly & al. 1997; Meijer & al. 1999, Sotto 1994, Grossman, 1995).
In this paper the concept of positioning is applied to understand student behavior and actions in discursive situations such as school lessons. Discourse enters into and influences all social practices. Positioning is understood as a discursive concept (see Van Langenhove & Harré 1999). Anyone deploying a discourse must position oneself as if she or he were the subject of the discourse (Hall 1999). Positioning is not, however, possible without perception of affordances in the discursive situations.
Factors introducing changes in the discursive positionings of the participants in interactional situations can be described as affordances (Gibson 1977, 1979). Affordance does not only depend on the physical capabilities of the actor, but also on 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. In the school lessons affordances can be perceived or recognized in three different levels: what should be possible, what is possible, and what is seen as possible. (see also Kirlik 2004, Stoffregen 2003 and 2004.) The two concepts: affordance and positioning are applied in the study to analyze and understand the empirical data. In this we apply the above concepts to understand student teacher differences in interpreting the requirements of actual teaching situations and their positioning and instructional behavior.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
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