Background:

Internationally, research has confirmed the crucial importance of the practicum and experience in schools in the formation of teachers and its potential, when informed by ongoing theorization and reflection, to contribute to the development of an agentive teacher identity (Fuller & Brown, 1975; Joseph & Heading, 2010; Korthagen, 2001; Le Cornu & Ewing, 2008; Loughran & Russell, 2002). Research has also emphasized the powerful role of emotion and affect in pre-service teaching (Bloomfield, 2010; Hastings, 2004) and the influence of affect on mentor-mentee communication in the practicum (Margolis, 2007). This paper draws on research on the practicum carried out as part of university-school system partnership between the Association of Independent Schools and the University of New South Wales, Australia. The aims of the research included documenting pre-service teacher and mentor teacher experiences on the practicum, identifying pre-service teacher and school mentor needs, and locating examples of successful practice, in order to develop more sophisticated ‘tools’ (Engestrom, 2002; Vygotsky, 1978; Wertsch & Rupert, 1993) to mediate mentoring practices and to scaffold effective mentoring during the teaching practicum more widely. The paper is situated in the context of literature

The current paper focuses on findings from qualitative data generated during the research, derived from interviews and open-ended survey questions, which highlighted the overwhelming significance of the mentor in shaping and determining the pre-service teachers’ experience. In particular, the paper explores the tendency found among the pre-service teachers to either valorize or demonize their mentor teachers. The paper draws on psychoanalytic theory in order gain insights into this process, viewing the pre-service teachers’ accounts of their mentors as instance of ‘beatific’ and/or ‘horrific’ fantasies (Glynos, 2008; Glynos & Howarth, 2007; Stavrakakis, 1999) that serve a (de)stabilizing function in order to (mis)manage the intense emotional demands of schools and classrooms and survive oxymoronic experience of being a student-teacher (Britzman, 2003). The paper concludes with considerations of strategies universities and schools might employ to ameliorate the emotionality of the practicum experience.

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