The paper describes results from a research of a teacher education programme in a process of change. When initial teacher education was first offererd in a distance programme in Iceland University of Education in  1993 the object of the faculty changed from teaching conventional campus students to distance students attending courses online with a few face-to-face sessions. During the early years of the programme the distance student teachers were as a rule school-based and working as teachers while enrolled. Ten years after the programme‘s inception school-based student teachers represented a substantial part of the student group although rules on admission had been changed to open up for attendance of a wider group. The school-based students were the focus of this study with special attention given to their situation in their local schools, both their learning processes and their possible impact on the development of the programme.

In the paper I describe how the emergence of a new model that developed within the distance teacher education programme (i.e. blended mode of online and campus based) in Iceland may be explained as an example of expansive learning. The expansive learning cycle developed by Engeström (1999a, 1999b) will be used for directing analysis of the learning trajectories of distance student teachers as interacting with development of the distance teacher education programme. The analysis with the expansive learning cycle is meant to reveal the zone of proximal development for the programme on a system level through the interaction of student teachers and university lecturers as actors contributing to the development of the programme by their actions of teaching and learning.

The aim of the analysis is to make sense of the situation in terms of ‘learning actions’ taken by the student teachers when dealing with problems and challenging situations as participants in the distance programme (Engeström & Sannino, 2010, p. 11). The trajectories of the student teachers were followed through the expansive cycle in order to trace how they learnt to participate and function in the programme. The aim was to develop an understanding of the kinds of challenges that student teachers were faced with and what kind of support they were able to use when taking actions for developing their practice and learning to function as distance students.

Engeström, Y. (1999a). Activity theory and individual and social transformations. In Y. Engeström, R. Miettinen & R.-L. Punamäki (Eds.), Perspectives on activity theory (pp. 19-38). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Engeström, Y. (1999b). Innovative learning in work teams: Analyzing cycles of knowledge creation in practice. In Y. Engeström, R. Miettinen & R.-L. Punamäki (Eds.), Perspectives on activity theory (pp. 377-404). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Engeström, Y., & Sannino, A. (2010). Studies of expansive learning: Foundations, findings and future challenges. Educational Research Review, 5(1), 1-24.