The question, how knowledge and competencies of future teachers develop during their study is one of the central issues in teacher education research of recent years. In the present MIPS study (Microstructures of Professionalization and Self-directed Learning Processes[1]), we explore the development of ways of professional thinking (cf. Calderhead 1996, 709). Our main research question examines future primary teachers’ understanding of ‘teaching’ and ‘learning’, their professional 'doing', their future position as well as their own professionalization processes in the three disciplinary contexts of mathematics, arts and general didactics.

In drawing on Lave & Wenger‘s work (1991), we understand professionalization as a process of growing participation in a knowledge field of professional "communities of practice" (ibid.). On these grounds, we analyse the articulated knowledge constructions as moments of professionalization arising from discursive performative practices (cf. Butler 1997). Following Foucault's (1971) and Bourdieu's (2001) conception of discourse, the educational knowledge field, however, is organized by various knowledge orders, which  offer diverse, contradictory positions within the discursive space of professional educational action (ibid.). Depending on the adopted discursive position, the objects of ‘teaching’ and ‘learning’, ‘theory’, ‘practice’, ‘professionalization’ etc. can be thought of and understood differently. In order to become a member of the professional community, discursive work in form of "positioning" (Davies & Harré 1990; Hollway 1998) is required and accomplished through the acceptance of one discursive knowledge order whilst rejecting another in an act of subjectivization.

In the analysed conversations, we observe these processes of "meaning making" (Saljö 2009) and positioning as a fundamentally relational phenomenon (cf. Winslade 2005, 353): In the interaction student’s ‘doing teacher’, i.e. their practically enacted understanding of teaching, learning and professionalization can compete and/or conflict (cf. Lyotard 1988) with the teacher educators' understanding and, which, consequently, can be accepted, rejected or revised via different governmental practices. 

Based on the analysis of 90 conversations we would like to focus on one of the topics of articulation and positioning: the difference of theory and practice. We're going to show, how this difference is processed and used to organize the thinking of the "professional world" and how it gets a stake in the addressings, interpellations and recognitions of discursive positioning (cf. Reh/Ricken 2012).

[1]     MIPS is funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF, 2011-2013).

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